This presentation outlines a course taught to Japanese EFL students that sought to develop interactional competence. Video data of student interactions revealed commonalities in such areas as discourse marker usage, repair, backchanneling and the like. Focused instruction addressed these issues and post-instruction videos revealed changed interactional practices in learner talk.
This presentation details a conversation course taught to university students at a university in Japan. Students were video recorded engaging in spontaneous conversations in English with each other at the beginning of the academic year. The conversations were transcribed and analyzed. The analysis revealed several common practices across conversations which deviated from the practices of naturalistic conversation carried out by native or highly proficient L2 English speakers. Participants constructed interactions in a question and answer format more akin to the interview genre than conversation. Participants constructed minimal turns in response to questions. There were frequent lapses into L1 for propositional content and self-initiated self-repair. Discourse marking and backchanneling were also often carried out in L1. There was a total lack of L2 discourse marking, general extenders, upgrade adjective usage for assessments and reported speech episodes. There were frequent abrupt topic changes and poorly realized strategic competence to deal with trouble sources. In light of these findings, subsequent lesson content was devoted to these issues and in addition, students were given extensive opportunity every class to engage in spontaneous, spoken interactions that were set up as phatic rather than transactional. At the end of the academic year, the students were again recorded and the transcripts of these recordings were analyzed. The conversations now unfolded in a turn by turn, not Q+A format. The students made extensive use of discourse markers, vague category markers, upgrade adjectives and backchannels. L1 usage was minimized. Topics proceeded in a stepwise fashion and signs of interactional competence were emergent. The presentation will include before and after videos of the learners to illustrate the points made. Attendees should come away with a heightened awareness of the issues involved in teaching conversational language to L2 learners.
