Learning to talk the talk and walk the walk: Interactional competence in academic spoken English

Abstract

In this article I present the theory of interactional competence and contrast it\nwith alternative ways of describing a learner´s knowledge of language. The focus\nof interactional competence is the structure of recurring episodes of face-toface\ninteraction, episodes that are of social and cultural significance to a\ncommunity of speakers. Such episodes I call discursive practices, and I argue that\nparticipants co-construct a discursive practice through an architecture of\ninteractional resources that is specific to the practice. The resources include\nrhetorical script, the register of the practice, the turn-taking system, management\nof topics, the participation framework, and means for signalling boundaries and\ntransitions. I exemplify the theory of interactional competence and the\narchitecture of discursive practice by examining two instances of the same\npractice: office hours between teaching assistants and undergraduate students at\nan American university, one in Mathematics, one in Italian as a foreign language.\nBy a close comparison of the interactional resources that participants bring to\nthe two instances, I argue that knowledge and interactional skill are local and\npractice-specific, and that the joint construction of discursive practice involves\nparticipants making use of the resources that they have acquired in previous\ninstances of the same practice.

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