Drawing on CA, this study examines roleplay interaction video-recorded between expert and novice speakers of English at an experience-oriented English-education facility. It focus on instances in which the expert orients to competence by "feigning" a next-turn display of misunderstanding to implicitly signal trouble located in the learner's prior talk."
In mundane conversation beyond the classroom, recipients interactionally assess their interlocutor's competence on an ongoing, turn-by-turn basis by displaying (non)understanding and at times resorting to the mechanics of repair. In other words, to varying degrees interactional competence is an ominirelevant issue in unscripted talk. Likewise in the foreign language classroom, recipient repair from the teacher can focus learners' attention on their own interactional competence. As an activity that aims to approximate real-world talk within the sanctuary of the classroom, roleplay can be viewed as bridging both these interactional domains and thus offers learners opportunities to reflect on their language use without real-world repercussions. An expert speaker, for example, may design their next-turn uptake as non-understanding in order to coax the learner to self-repair a just-prior formulation. Drawing on Conversation Analysis, this study will examine a corpus of roleplay interaction video-recorded between expert speakers of English and novice English users from a Japanese junior high school at an experience-oriented English-education facility. The analysis demonstrates how a next-turn display of misunderstanding can be "feigned" by the expert to signal trouble located in some aspect of the learner's prior turn. By inspecting the expert's reaction, the learner is able to reflect on possible pragmatic, syntactic and lexical inadequacies of their contribution, leading to language learning that mirrors that which takes place "in the wild". For her part, the expert speaker straddles both the role of teacher and that of her roleplay persona, injecting humor into the talk to put the learner at ease and offering praise at points where the feigned misunderstanding is resolved. Her correction is not explicit, but instead adheres to the way routinely happens in interaction outside the classroom. The presentation offers insight into how unscripted roleplay can contribute to the development of interactional competence.
