This paper illustrates pedagogical materials targeting the development of L2 interactional competence. The teachers who designed these materials were exposed to conversation-analytic concepts and findings to help them identify teachables/learnables. The study has implications for syllabus and curriculum design, teacher education, and the diffusion of curricular innovation.
This paper illustrates pedagogical materials targeting the development of interactional competence (IC) in first year classes of L2 Chinese, German and Spanish. Such materials were developed at a language center which adopted IC as the institutional goal of instruction and a research-based approach to language education. Specifically, the center relied on a conversation analytic (CA) definition of IC as the ability to produce recognizable social actions in sequentially fitting positions; it thus offered a series of professional development workshops aimed to familiarize teachers with CA concepts and findings in order to help them identify teachables/learnables. Overall, especially in the absence of CA findings concerning their language, the teachers targeted general conversational abilities such as opening and closing a conversation, doing active listenership, initiating repair, and expanding topics. When research findings were available, the instructors focused on specific actions, such as issuing and responding to invitations and requests. The IC-based tasks generally followed a similar pedagogical cycle, inspired by the one described by Barraja-Rohan (2011) and later developed by Betz and Huth (2014). The tasks thus engaged students in: (a) analyzing naturally occurring interactions (versus text-book dialogues when available); (b) practicing the targeted interactional skills; and (c) reflecting on their interactional abilities. The paper will illustrate concrete examples of teaching and testing materials, will report on the teachers’ reflections over their curricular innovation experience, and will discuss the feasibility of CA-inspired IC instruction and its effectiveness. Overall, the study complements current CA research on instructed IC (Huth & Taleghani-Nikazm, 2006; Salaberry & Kunitz, 2019) and shows what can be gained by exposing teachers to CA research (Carroll, 2010; Kunitz, Sert, & Markee, forthcoming; Sert, 2015; Wong & Waring, 2010). This line of research has implications for syllabus and curriculum design, teacher education, and the diffusion of curricular innovation (Markee, 1997).
