Helping Learners Develop Interactional Competence Through Project Work in the Language Classroom

Abstract

The acquisition of interaction itself, rather than language in its formal properties (or talk, in a monological sense) is captured by the term interactional competence (IC). This has a bedrock status in human sociality in general, but is often ironically difficult to achieve in foreign language classrooms. This paper proposes that elements of project work involving interactive and collaborative activity, where goals must be negotiated in small groups, are effective in developing learners’ IC. A central concept here is procedural negotiation, where learners need to agree on how to proceed on an ongoing basis. Strong versions of this approach, where it is a key component of the curriculum, may not always be feasible or even appropriate, especially in traditional Asian contexts, but can be adopted to lesser or greater degrees. Suggestions are made about how to structure this kind of learning, and one unit of work is discussed. This paper proposes a set of teaching practices and also guidelines for a sample unit of work, for the purpose of developing a basic interactional competence (IC) in English as a foreign language for students of high school or college level. This is especially applicable in situations, as in much of Asia, where learners are often not exposed to naturally-occurring contexts of interaction in English outside of classrooms. Making such generalizations may seem at first glance to be overly simplistic since the term Asia encompasses the bulk of the world’s population and the tremendous diversity between nation states as well as great internal variation within national boundaries. However, if classroom learning is modeled as a set of institutional practices (Young, 2009) with a focus on the conventions of learner and teacher roles and the ways that these shape the possibilities of both learner and teacher talk, there can be remarkable similarities across cultures (Bernstein, 1996). Thus, in this way, general observations do have considerable validity.