From L2 interactional competence to L2 interactional repertoires: reconceptualising the objects of L2 learning

Abstract

In this paper, I offer a reconsideration of interactional competence as an object of L2 learning. I argue that the field’s uptake of the concept displays a misunderstanding of, or at least a lack of attention to, its related but distinct intellectual roots in linguistic anthropology and conversation analysis. This has resulted in conceptual confusion in studies that draw mainly on conversation analysis to examine L2 learning. I offer interactional repertoires as a more empirically useful concept to capture the objects of L2 learning. Its usefulness is twofold. First, it more aptly captures the variable nature of the multilingual, multimodal resources that learners draw on and develop in their diverse contexts of use. Second, it suggests a more empirically valid understanding of learning, not as a linear, single, one-path-fits-all process, but rather as multidimensional trajectories occurring over L2 learners’ lifespans.

Keywords:

• SLA
• interactional competence
• interactional repertoires
• conversation analysis

Acknowledgements

This is a slightly revised version of the keynote address I presented in January 2017 at the L2-ICOP conference, held at the University of Neuchatel. I am grateful to the conference organisers for inviting me and to the audience members for their feedback.

Notes

1. Apparently, Sacks became acquainted with Chomsky’s work by attending some of his lectures at MIT, where Chomsky was a faculty member (Maynard 2012; Schegloff 1992).

2. Outside of SLA, its use appears earlier, in a 1979 paper by Hugh Mehan, in which he lays out a conceptual framework for what students need to know and do in order to be competent members of a classroom community. As background to this framework he references the work of both Dell Hymes and Harold Garfinkel.

3. This is reflected in the appreciable increase in the number of articles published in peer-reviewed journals in which the terms L2 or second language and interactional competence appear in the title, abstract or as keywords since 2001. A search of the LLBA (Linguistics & Language Behaviour Abstracts) database, which summarises and indexes the international literature in linguistics and related disciplines in the language sciences, undertaken in November, 2016 by the author, revealed that over a twenty-year period, from 1980 to 2000, only five papers were published in peer-reviewed journals in which the terms appeared. The number increased to 31 between the years of 2001–2016.

4. I should note that the term is used several times by Numa Markee in his 2008 paper in which he proposes a learning tracking methodology for CA studies of SLA. Repertoire is not proposed as an alternative to IC, but, instead as a component of it. Developing IC, Markee notes, involves learners ‘orienting to different semiotic systems – the turn taking, repair, and sequence organisations that underlie all talk-in-interaction… – and deploying these intersubjective resources to co-construct with their interlocutors locally enacted, progressively more accurate, fluent, and complex interactional repertoires’ (3), which are defined as ‘extended sequences of actions’ (ibid).