Demonstrating active listenership through collaborative turn completion to display epistemic access in multi-party interactions

Abstract

Recent research on the construct of Interactional Competence (IC) has heightened awareness of the importance of considering language use as a dialogic enterprise. While communicative competence has been conventionally heralded as a predictor of appropriate language use, it has been narrowly concerned with individual speakers’ appropriate and contextually sensitive use of language. IC, however, foregrounds the fact that human interactions are co-constructed and therefore takes as its unit of analysis the way novice and expert language users explore new ways of co-participation by expanding their interactional repertoire. This article builds upon such an understanding of IC and explores how active listenership as a subtle act of co-participation is demonstrated by speakers through collaborative turn completion. Employing conversation analysis as its methodological framework, it reports on a single-case analysis of a multi-party intercultural interaction among L1 and L2 speakers of English and Japanese in an online linguistics course. The findings indicate that participants use active demonstrations of listenership through turn completion to display and defend their epistemic access to the emerging topics in their interactions. The findings are discussed in light of the current understanding of the construct of IC in L1 and L2 interactions.