Development Of Interactional Competence Research Articles

Interactional Competence Instruction for Beginner KFL Learners

ABSTRACT Interactional competence (IC) refers to the ability to use interactional resources, such as turn-taking, sequencing, overall structuring, and repair during actual interaction (Wong & Waring, 2021). Language learners must develop IC to engage in conversation using the target language (TL) in culturally appropriate and interactive ways. However, teaching IC is often overlooked, especially for beginner learners. In response to this need, this article presents an interaction-oriented project called the “Conversation Project” recently implemented in a first semester Korean as a foreign language (KFL) college course. In this project, KFL learners are explicitly taught a set of interactional features of Korean through authentic learning material and then given opportunities to apply them in a social and immersive learning environment with Korean speakers. The project aims to foster IC development and enhance learners’ conversational skills in real-life intercultural situations.

From doing work on your own talk to doing work on others’ talk

Abstract Research on L2 interactional competence (IC) has become increasingly focused on how L2 speakers develop and recalibrate linguistic resources to do interactional work, i.e., how L2 speakers develop a grammar-for-interaction (Pekarek Doehler 2018). In this paper, I use interactional linguistics to track one L2 German speaker’s IC development over 11 months by analyzing her use of German also (English ‘so’) in formulations (see Deppermann 2011; Heritage & Watson 1979, 1980). In initial months, the L2 speaker uses also exclusively to do work on her own prior talk, e.g., in upshots, consequences, and unpackings. The L2 speaker’s initial also uses contribute to moves that maintain intersubjectivity by ensuring her co-interactant’s understanding of her own talk. In later months, the L2 speaker diversifies her uses of also, including uses oriented to co-interactants’ prior talk that address manifest problems of intersubjectivity: to preface an other-correction of an incorrect candidate understanding, and to preface turns addressing a co-interactant’s problem of understanding. The L2 speaker’s changing also uses demonstrate her ability to contribute to interactional organization in increasingly diverse ways, evidencing a developing grammar-for-interaction. I end by calling for more research on the L2 development of linguistic resources that primarily serve interactional functions, such as particles.

Child-initiated informings and conversational participation in a bilingual preschool

This paper explores children's interactional competence in the context of bilingual early childhood education, looking specifically at how very young children initiate conversations with teachers by informing them about something interesting and new. Video recordings collected from ethnographic fieldwork in a Swedish–English preschool are investigated from the conversation analytic perspective, paying particular attention to multimodal aspects of naturally-occurring interactions. The analysis reveals that in initiating informings aimed at teachers in a multiparty institutional setting, children practice their bilingual skills in turn-taking and recipient design, and present their topic as relevant and coherent within the local material and conversational context. In so doing, children navigate institutional constraints on participation, secure teachers' recipiency, and establish themselves as knowledgeable speakers. Child-initiated participation in multiparty institutional settings provides a co-operative, transformative social process that constitutes an essential affordance for children's development of interactional competence in a bilingual educational context.

English learning and use in Hong Kong's bilingual education: Implications for L2 learners’ development of interactional competence

AbstractThe use of English in international communication has focused scholarly attention on L2 learners’ development of interactional competence (IC), that is, the ability to co‐construct interactions purposefully and meaningfully in specific contexts. Under Hong Kong's bilingual education policy, students mainly learn and speak English in two classroom contexts: (1) English language and (2) English‐medium‐instruction (EMI) content‐area subject lessons, which may contribute to their IC development. This study compared the English‐speaking/learning experiences of students in these two classroom settings in three Hong Kong secondary schools. Task‐based language teaching (TBLT) was the recommended teaching approach in the English language subject in all these schools, but they adopted different medium‐of‐instruction arrangements in content‐area subjects. Their students also had different academic attainments. The investigation adopted a case study approach consisting of a questionnaire and semi‐structured focus group interviews (N = 160). Our findings suggest that students generally lacked opportunities to speak English, regardless of the specific school‐based policies. The higher‐proficiency students were given more opportunities to speak English in group/pair activities both in English language and EMI content‐area subjects. In contrast, the lower‐proficiency students received more explicit teaching of the linguistic forms/structures required in English examinations. The paper concludes by highlighting several critical issues concerning students’ IC development in bilingual education, namely, the effects of English‐medium education on students’ speaking ability, implementation of TBLT, the influence of examinations on teaching practices, and teachers’ role in promoting students’ interactional competence through classroom interactions.

On the development of interactional competence in L2 French: Changes over time in responsive turn beginnings in peer interactions

This paper contributes to the field of the development of L2 Interactional Competence (L2 IC) as researched from a Conversation Analysis perspective. The study investigates L2 speakers in dyadic peer interactions in a foreign language classroom, zooming in on one learner's development of linguistic resources and interactional practices for beginning a responsive turn at talk. The analysis is based on a data set of 15 videorecorded peer interactions spread across four years. The results show that early stages of development are characterised by broken starts and a heavy reliance on sequential or linguistic affordances. Later, the focal learner starts using routinized expressions to deal with turn beginnings in increasingly less predictable sequential environments. Over time, they develop more flexibility and mobilize a greater variety of resources in managing uptake and projections in their responsive turns, in sequential environments that provide progressively fewer affordances on a sequential and/or linguistic level.

Requesting on WhatsApp: The interplay of interactional competence and deontics in English as an additional language

This exploratory study focuses on changes in the accomplishment of requests by an adult English as an additional language speaker/learner interacting on WhatsApp for nine months. The analysis follows a microanalytic approach to digital interaction informed by recent developments within longitudinal conversation analysis. It unpacks the array of semiotic and interactional resources that the focal learner employs to make class-related requests to the teacher. Longitudinal comparison of four request sequences over time suggests that the differences in how the requesting posts are designed and responded to index both increased interactional competence to accomplish requests in English on WhatsApp - through more contextually-sensitive and conventional semiotic resources - as well as evolving socio-interactional ties and related deontic concerns between the learner and the teacher. Despite the popularity of text chats, only a handful of studies have investigated the practices employed by additional language learners to engage in text chat interaction change over time and this work has not focused on naturally occurring interactions or on requesting. The present study thereby contributes new understandings to text chat interaction with additional language speakers and to longitudinal research on interactional competence development in online settings.

Exploring Searching as Evidence of Development in Interactional Competence

In order to identify the critical features of interactional competence (IC) constructs and discuss IC development, this paper describes and analyzes how L2 speakers at different proficiency levels perform searching during talk-in- interactions. Although all L2 participants, regardless of their proficiency, successfully manage problems to keep talk progressing, they display different features in the way they initiate and complete searching. More proficient L2 participants explicitly deploy substantial linguistic and interactional resources such as L1 or a direct request for help, clearly displaying that the searching action is underway. They also engage in searching not only to locate what is unavailable at the moment, but also to search for what is better suited to the context in order to proactively avert possible misinterpretations before they occur. This study suggests that one of the important features of IC is projecting ahead and dealing with potential problems so that speakers can tailor their talk to their recipients, and co-participants can share more interactionally and sequentially common ground as the interaction expands.

Emergence of Proactive Self-Initiated Self-Repair as an Indicator of L2 IC Development

AbstractThis article finds empirical evidence of second language (L2) interactional competence (IC) and its development by focusing on one of the interactional practices: self-repairing. Compared to prior repair IC studies which mainly have explored how L2 speakers deal with evident L2-related troubles in conversation, this study focuses on cases in which they deploy self-repair when there are no such linguistic problems in previous talk, taking Mauranen’s (2006) dichotomy between retroactive and proactive self-repairs. After analyzing the conversation by L2 speakers with different oral proficiency, this study discovers whereas novice and intermediate speakers self-repair for correcting what is lexically or grammatically problematic, advanced speakers deploy self-repair mostly for pre-empting possible misunderstandings. Advanced speakers replace the previous items into words that are specific in the meaning range by fine-tuning the level of ‘granularity’ (Schegloff 2000) to avoid ambiguity and further other-initiated repair. The findings suggest that the development of L2 IC involves speakers’ ability to detect potential problems in the eyes of the recipients and replace them in advance.

Beginning Learners' Development of Interactional Competence: Alignment Activity

AbstractThis study examined the development of interactional competence (Hall, 1993; He & Young, 1998) by beginning learners of Spanish as indexed by their use of alignment moves. Discourse analysis techniques and quantitative data analysis were used to explore how 52 learners expressed alignment and changes in participation patterns in two sets of instructional peer‐to‐peer conversations. The results of the analyses show that, although subject to great individual variability and not always following native‐like standards, English native speakers in the early stages of learning Spanish are able to express varying degrees of alignment in conversations with a peer of a similar proficiency level. As they strive to create a sphere of mutual understanding, they test different options from their linguistic repertoire and learn not only from their own attempts but also from those of their interlocutor. These results suggest that repeated engagement in interactional practice does provide the linguistic, social, and pedagogical affordances learners need to develop the interactional skills that will serve them well not only to build confidence and competence in the classroom learning context, but also hopefully in the world outside the classroom.

相互行為能力の発達を解き明かす：縦断的会話分析の方法と意義

相互行為能力の発達を解き明かす：縦断的会話分析の方法と意義

Collaborative L2 Interactivity in Diverse ZPD-Based Proximal Contexts and Interactional Competence Development

Central to Vygotsky-inspired sociocultural theory (SCT) is the notion of ZPD seen by SLA researchers as a useful framework within which L2 teaching and learning can take place. Van Lier (2004) argues that the ZPD could be activated in diverse proximal contexts (PCs) and is not limited to the expert-novice scenario. . This study probed whether Iranian EFL learners' collaborative task performance within different ZPD-based PCs results in their development of interactional competence (IC). Young's (2011) IC model was used for developing an IC test (ICT) employed at the pretest and posttest times. Three intact EFL listening-speaking classes at a university at southwest of Iran were randomly assigned to the expert-novice, equal-peers, and control (non-ZPD) conditions. The co-constructed interactions of the groups in (a)symmetrical ZPD-based conditions were audio-recorded for further analysis of participants' L2 IC development. A triangulation (quantitative and microgenetic) data-analysis approach was adopted. The results showed that whereas both ZPD groups (equal-peers and expert-novice) outperformed the non-ZPD group on IC posttests, no statistically significant difference was found between participants' IC development in symmetrical and asymmetrical PCs. Further, microgenetic analysis of the ZPD groups' interactions demonstrated how participation and activity in different PCs can effectively trigger awareness of mechanisms and norms of L2 spoken interaction and, in turn, result in IC development. The findings point to the applicability of diverse ZPD-adjusted PCs, composed of equal or unequal participants, in EFL classrooms and also the efficacy of ZPD-based interactive scenarios for students' development of L2 IC.

Development of Interactional Competence in Japanese as a Second Language: Use of Incomplete Sentences as Interactional Resources

Development of Interactional Competence in Japanese as a Second Language: Use of Incomplete Sentences as Interactional Resources

‘How was your weekend?’: developing the interactional competence in managing routine inquiries

Given the cross-cultural differences underlying interactional routines such as ‘How are you?’ or ‘How was your weekend?’, managing such routine inquiries can be problematic for second language learners. Based on data from an adult ESL (English as a second language) class, this conversation analytic study shows how learners develop their competence in mastering the sociopragmatic and pragmalinguistic aspects of certain interactional routines in English over the span of nine weeks. Through detailed analyses of teacher–learner interactions, I show what is being ‘taught’, how it is done, and what evidence of development may be garnered. Findings of this study contribute to the growing interest in the development of interactional competence and, in particular, the application of conversation analysis (CA) to the study of such development.

Development of interactional competence

This study explores the development of the interactional competence of an 8-year-old, Japanese learner of English over three cooking sessions with native speakers of English at her home during her period of residence in Australia. The study draws upon Vygotsky’s (1978) zone of proximal development in order to elucidate the L2 child’s process of acquiring interactional competence in this unfamiliar social practice (i.e., cooking-relevant talk). The analysis reveals marked changes in the child’s participation pattern over time, moving from making relevant minimal responses to more initiated, and autonomous participation. The child recycled some of the interlocutors’ utterances from the previous sessions, showing that the earlier cooking sessions provided her with a linguistic challenge and became a resource of language learning for her. She also made use of a textual resource (i.e., the recipe) as a scaffold to move toward more autonomous participation. In addition, the role of the recipe became less central as her participation became increasingly more independent.

Innovation and Identity in Distance Language Learning and Teaching

Innovation in distance language learning and teaching has largely focused on developments in technology and the increased opportunities they provide for negotiation and control of learning experiences, for participating in collaborative learning environments and the development of interactive competence in the target language. Much less attention has been paid to pedagogical innovation and still less to how congruence develops between particular pedagogical approaches, various technologies and the skills, practices, actions and identities of language learners and teachers. In this paper I explore the process of innovation in distance language teaching from the point of view of key participants in the process, the teachers, and the ways in which their identities are disrupted and challenged as they enter new distance teaching environments. Innovative approaches to distance language teaching are analysed for the insights they provide into the sites of conflict and struggle experienced by teachers, experiences that have a major impact on their selves as distance teachers and on the course of innovation. To conclude I argue that attention to issues of identity can deepen our understanding of innovation, of the tensions that are played out in the experiences and responses of teachers, and of the ways they accept or resist the identity shifts required of them.

A Child's Development of Interactional Competence in a Swedish L2 Classroom

This study explores a child's emergent second language (L2) interactional competence during her first year in a Swedish immersion classroom. Within the theoretical framework of situated learning, it focuses on how she acquires expertise in a specific classroom practice: multiparty classroom talk. The data cover three periods (the early, middle, and late phases) of her first school year. The methods adopted combine a microanalytic approach with ethnographic fieldwork analyses of L2 socialization within a classroom community. The analyses revealed systematic changes in the novice's interactional engagements. An interplay of language skills and turn‐taking skills influenced her participation in multiparty talk during the three periods, casting her as (a) a silent child, (b) a noisy and loud child, and (c) a skillful student. These changes indicate that learning cannot be seen as the unilinear development of a single learner identity. It is argued that a detailed longitudinal analysis may provide important insights into the relationship between participation and L2 learning. Instead of unilinear development of a single learner identity, we may find different participation patterns linked to distinct language learning affordances over time.

Constructing 'expertness': A novice pharmacist's development of interactional competence in patient consultations

It has been argued that being able to utilize expertise in discourse is as important as having expertise (C. Candlin and S. Candlin 2002). From a constructivist perspective, knowledgeability does not exist outside of social interaction: being expert involves performing knowledge and skills effectively in social practices (cf. Butler 1990; Lave and Wenger 1991). It is, then, crucial that novice professionals develop the interactional competence to construct themselves as experts in interaction. This study brings together perspectives from research on expert-lay communication, social interaction, and situated learning to examine how a pharmacy intern performed his professional knowledge in the practice of patient consultation over time. Using conversation analysis complemented by the interactional competence framework (Hall 1995; Young 2002), I demonstrate that as the novice pharmacist gained more experience over the course of one internship, he was able to employ professional knowledge in ways that were sensitive to the sequential organization of talk, and to share the patients' lifeworld perspectives (Mishler 1984) more effectively, thus successfully managing the transactional and interpersonal functions of the consultations. This study contributes to research on expert-lay interaction, particularly in pharmacy, and to the under-studied area of interactional competence development in the professions.

Second language acquisition processes in the classroom: Learning Japanese. Amy Snyder Ohta. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2001. Pp. 316.

In traditional foreign-language classrooms, students are explicitly taught grammar and vocabulary. Language learners' difficulties in conveying their messages in the target language, however, may relate to the development of interactional competence, which is achieved through interactions with peers and teachers within the classroom setting. Unfortunately, the importance of such pragmatic development is not always emphasized in traditional classrooms. To address this inadequacy, Amy Synder Ohta's new book provides an introduction to the complex process of learning a second or foreign language (L2) in a classroom setting.

Impact of the Proficiency Movement on Florida

Considering that the proficiency movement is less than nine years old and that the ACTFL/ETS Provisional Proficiency Guidelines first came out in 1985, the impact of the proficiency movement on foreign language teaching in the United States has been significant. Its effects are visible in the increased emphasis on oral testing, and the adoption of proficiency-based goals for curriculum and proficiency-oriented methods and materials. Yet in spite of the widespread trend to follow the tenets of the proficiency movement and develop the language skills and cultural knowledge of foreign language students, very little has been written about the impact of the ACTFLguidelines on the classroom (Hiple 1987) or the effect of proficiency-based programs on foreign language instruction (Freed 1987). Working in foreign language teacher education, we were curious to examine the extent of the proficiency movement's influence on foreign language education in Florida. So between March, 1988 and May, 1989, we informally surveyed seventy-seven foreign language educators in Florida about the effects of the proficiency movement on their teaching and programs. Our sample of foreign language teachers and administrators consisted of fifty K-university teachers, ten district and state supervisors, five teacher trainers at state universities, and twelve chairs from community colleges and universities. The results provide an interesting picture of the areas in which the proficiency movement is having greater and lesser impact. Several studies have described important developments in the proficiency movement nationwide. For example, oral proficiency interviews (OPI's) are currently required for the certification of bilingual education teachers in Arizona, California, Florida, Illinois, and New Jersey (Valdes 394). In addition, the academic senates for California Community Colleges, the California State University and the University of California systems prepared a paper that sets competency levels as guidelines for curriculum development and criteria for rating functional language proficiency (Valdes 401). Also of interest is the ACTFL/Texas Project which developed a model for a state-mandated oral proficiency requirement for the certification of new foreign language teachers (Freed 153). At the University of Minnesota, the ACTFL/ETS Oral Proficiency Interview is used as part of the entry requirement (Magnan 266), while the University of Pennsylvania has also instituted a proficiency-based language requirement (Freed). In spite of ACTFL's active role in promoting its guidelines and the proficiency movement, and the recent proliferation of instructional materials with the proficiency approach, a controversy seethes within the profession over certain aspects of the proficiency movement. An understanding of the controversy is central to a discussion of the impact of the movement in Florida. Some of the issues that have been raised are summarized below: 1) The definition of proficiency-based instruction: Schulz (1986) points out that the participants at a 1981 conference on Language Proficiency Assessment could not agree on a common definitionofproficiency. Morerecently, Walz evaluated the communicative content of twenty-five first and second year French texts and found that very few had substantial communicative (proficiency-based) content, in spite of claims to the contrary. Most of the activities were mechanical or contextualized rather than communicative. Other studies he cited found that teachers who thought they were involved in teaching language communicatively actually were spending most of their time on mechanical or contextualized drills. In other words, the definition of what constitutes a proficiency-based (communicative) approach to teaching foreign languages is widely misinterpreted. 2) The goals of proficiency: General goals of proficiency-based instruction include the understanding of other cultures and the development of interactional competence in foreign language