%0 Journal Article
%T Learning to talk the talk and walk the walk: Interactional competence in academic spoken English
%A Richard F. Young
%J Ib¨¦rica
%D 2013
%I AELFE (Asociaci¨®n Europea de Lenguas para Fines Espec¨ªficos)
%X 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-specific, 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.
%K interactional competence
%K discursive practice
%K face-to-face interaction
%K Mathematics
%K Italian as a foreign language
%U http://www.aelfe.org/documents/02_25_Young.pdf