L2 Interactional Competence and Development

J.K. HALL and S. PEKAREK DOEHLER

Introduction

Socially grounded investigations of L2 interactions have been a growing focus of research over the last 15 years or so. These studies have documented the variety of interactional resources L2 speakers draw on for sense-making in their social worlds. This expanding body of research has made evident the effectiveness of conversation analysis (CA) as both a theory and method for describing the myriad resources comprising L2 users' interactional competence (IC). However, still lingering is the question of its effectiveness for understanding how L2 users develop such competence. Contributors to this volume explore answers to this question. Drawing on data from a range of interactional contexts, including classrooms, pharmacy consultations, tutoring sessions and video-game playing, and a range of languages including English, German, French, Danish and Icelandic, the studies use conversation analytic methods to investigate the use and development of the many resources comprising L2 users' IC.

Interactional Competence

The studies in this volume take as axiomatic that interaction is fundamental to social life. In our interactions with others, we set goals and negotiate the procedures used to reach them. At the same time, we constitute and manage our individual identities, our social role relationships, and memberships in our social groups and communities. Central to competent engagement in our interactions is our ability to accomplish meaningful social actions, to respond to c-participants' previous actions and to make recognizable for others what our actions are and how these relate to their own actions. IC, that is the context-specific constellations of expectations and dispositions about our social worlds that we draw on to navigate our way through our interactions with others, implies the ability to mutually coordinate our actions. It includes knowledge of social-context-specific communicative events or activity types, their typical goals and trajectories of actions by which the goals are realized and the conventional behaviors by which participant roles and role relationships are accomplished. Also included is the ability to deploy and to recognize context-specific patterns by which turns are taken, actions are organized and practices are ordered. And it includes the prosodic, linguistic, sequential and nonverbal resources conventionally used for producing and interpreting turns and actions, to construct them so that they are recognizable for others, and to repair problems in maintaining shared understanding of the interactional work we and our interlocutors are accomplishing together (Heritage, 2004; Hymes, 1964, 1972; Sacks et al, 1974; Schegloff, 2007; Schegloff et al., 1977).

We approach our interactional activities – from everyday practices of talk such as greetings, leave-takings and joking, to more institutional situations, such as doctor-patient interactions, business meetings and instructional lectures – with these context-specific collections of knowledge, expectations, dispositions, orientations and resources, and we draw on them as we monitor ours and each other's moment-to-moment involvement in the interactions. At each interactional moment we attend to each other's actions, build interpretations as to what these actions are about and where they are heading, and formulate our own contributions based on our interpretations that move the interaction along, either toward or away from the anticipated outcomes of each preceding move. When we approach a service encounter for example, we have certain expectations about goals and purposes of the encounter, and anticipate the various roles and role relationships we are likely to find. We also have expectations about the sequence of interactional actions that are likely to unfold, and the linguistic and other means for accomplishing them. The utterance 'Who's next?,' for example, calls to mind a set of goals and purposes and of roles and role relationships, which, in this case would be sales clerks and customers. It also calls to mind a certain way of taking turns, and expectations about the actions that likely preceded and will follow this utterance, and how these actions are preferably, expectably organized. At these moments, we use our understandings of and experience in a range of interactional activities to make sense of what is occurring. As the interaction unfolds, we continually reflect upon and revise our understandings of preceding contributions, assess the likely consequences engendered by such moves, and make decisions about how to signal our understandings to the others and to construct appropriate contributions (Goodwin & Goodwin, 1992; Sanders, 1987, 1995).

In sum, when we participate in interactions, we draw on an 'immense stock of sedimented social knowledge' (Hanks, 1996: 238) and on a set of routinized yet context-sensitive procedures with which we reason our way through the moment-to-moment unfoldings of our interactions. This competence is socially grounded in that its components are constructed in interaction and shared with social group members in specific communicative contexts. It is cognitive in that it is part of people's context-specific structures of expectations. Yet, these structures are not static, mental representations. Rather, their shapes and meanings are dynamic and malleable, tied to their locally situated uses in culturally framed communicative activities.

Disciplinary Foundations

Current conceptualizations of IC owe much to two fields for theoretical and empirical inspiration. A first source is American linguistic anthropology, and in particular, the work of Dell Hymes (1962, 1964, 1972). Hymes considered social function to be the source of linguistic form and so conceptualized language...