L2 Interactional Competence as Increased Ability for Context-sensitive Conduct: A Longitudinal Study of Story-openings

摘要

This article sets out to investigate second language (L2) interactional competence and its development over time by zooming into a conversational activity that is pervasive in our social lives: storytelling. We present a longitudinal case study of a German L1 speaking au-pair's conversational storytellings during her nine-month stay with a French-speaking host family. We document how her practices and resources for opening a story change over time: She increasingly uses techniques allowing her to secure recipiency, to project features of the nature of the incipient story, and to display its relation to preceding talk; and she shows increased use of grammatical constructions that are fitted for the task of getting these interactional jobs accomplished. The findings suggest that the development of L2 interactional competence centrally hinges on speakers' increased ability to design talk in a way for it to be attended to and understood by others, and to deploy context-sensitive conduct based on both sequential and linguistic resources. While the study enhances our understanding of the nature and the development of L2 interactional competence, it also critically relates to current discussions regarding longitudinal comparative analysis of social practices.