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Learning to talk the talk and walk the walk: Interactional competence in academic spoken English
Citation
Young, R. (2013). Learning to talk the talk and walk the walk: Interactional competence in academic spoken English. Ibérica, 25(2013), 15-38.
Author
Young, Richard
Abstract
In this article I present the theory of interactional competence and contrast it with alternative ways of describing a learner's knowledge of language. The focus of interactional competence is the structure of recurring episodes of face-to-face interaction, episodes that are of social and cultural significance to a community of speakers. Such episodes I call discursive practices, and I argue that participants co-construct a discursive practice through an architecture of interactional resources that is specific to the practice. The resources include rhetorical script, the register of the practice, the turn-taking system, management of topics, the participation framework, and means for signalling boundaries and transitions. I exemplify the theory of interactional competence and the architecture of discursive practice by examining two instances of the same practice: office hours between teaching assistants and undergraduate students at an American university, one in Mathematics, one in Italian as a foreign language. By a close comparison of the interactional resources that participants bring to the two instances, I argue that knowledge and interactional skill are local and practice- pecific, and that the joint construction of discursive practice involves participants making use of the resources that they have acquired in previous instances of the same practice.
Publisher
Asociación Europea de Lenguas para Fines Específicos (AELFE)
Journal
Ibérica