Pedagogical Approaches for Encouraging Interaction Awareness and Interactional Competence in University-Level Second Language Learners

Abstract

With my dissertation, I show how learning about interactional patterns and organizational features of spoken language can be achieved for undergraduate second and foreign language (L2) learners, supported by empirical data and arguments drawn from previous research in L2 pedagogy and Conversation Analysis-Second Language Acquisition (CA-SLA) for integrating interactional learning materials and tasks into undergraduate L2 classroom curricula. Through my study, I examine and evaluate the implementation of learning tasks and activities involving recordings and written transcripts of naturally occurring interactions in the L2 for undergraduate learners to learn about interaction and language. This examination is conducted using Interaction Analysis as a methodological framework of investigation, specifically using a reworked version of Schermuly and Scholl’s (2012) Discussion Coding System (DSC) for Group Interaction Analysis. In order to theoretically ground my research, I propose the understanding of interaction awareness (IA) as a prerequisite for the development of interactional competence (IC), where IA can be understood as learners’ capacity to become aware of aspects that are at the core of IC, such as organizational features and reoccurring interactional patterns, pragmatic and social implications of interactional and linguistic features, as well as non-verbal and prosodic features that are observable in spoken interaction. The focus of my study then concentrates on interactional tasks and learning materials comprising recordings and written transcripts of naturally occurring interactions in the L2 for undergraduate learners of German as a means of encouraging IA and language awareness (LA) by way of processes involving discovery learning (DL) and social learning. With my analyses and discussions, I examine the ways that the learners’ observations and discoveries about features of interaction and language, posited during the recorded learning sessions comprising the dataset of my study, can be conceptualized as IA. The collaborative discovery and meaning construction work enacted by the learners during the recorded language sessions comprising my study allow for a close, empirical investigation of the learners’ processes and methods of conduct for invoking reflection and negotiating understanding about interactional and linguistic features of the L2 encountered in the learning materials, thereby leading to an awareness of interaction and language that can be inferred through the recorded learner interactions. The conclusions drawn from my study findings indicate that the learners demonstrated LA through their discussions about individual lexical items and grammatical concepts, for example, with considerations about observed variations in verbal production of specific lexical items, as well as systematicities in spoken language production of verb conjugations in the L2. The concept of IA pushes this understanding of LA further by borrowing and incorporating elements from Conversation Analysis (CA), as shown when the learners demonstrated their capacity to consider, reflect, and formulate hypotheses about these discoveries within the specific, socially situated contexts of each of the observed interactions. Adding to this, IA can constitute further considerations about interaction and language, for example, cultural, regional, or pragmatic implications comprising specific instances or variations of language use in spoken interaction, or specific processes relating to certain points in the interaction, for example, becoming aware of linguistic and interactional processes and re-occurring patterns to do with positional features of interaction, such as goodbyes and conversational closing sequences.