Situated Identities and Interaction Learning
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Date
2008
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Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego
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Abstract
In the paper, I address the problem of how interaction participants construe tbeir situated identities in dialogues in English as a lingua franca and how those identities influence the course of an interaction and the possibilities o f evaluating learners’ interactional
competence. The dialogue analyzed in the paper is an interview performed by advanced
learners of English as a foreign language with an American native speaker who is also
their teacher. The analysis shows that role construction in a dialogue is a mutual process
of interaction participants and it is not always the teacher who determines the role construction and controls topics and turns in an interaction. The results also indicate that
the roles learners construe in dialogue influence their performance, thus they need to be
taken into account while assessing their competence in a foreign language.
The paper discusses the possibilities of assessing the development of the interactional
competence of advanced learners of English as a foreign language. Using an exemplary
case study of a student participating in a two year research, I aim to present the potential of
using both conversational analysis and language socialization framework for developing
interactional competence as a situated practice. The focus on microactions and identities
situated in an interactional context enables a researcher to observe the process of learning
in different types of interactions as they are construed by interaction participants themselves.
Tentative results point to the significance of individual factors in developing
interactional competence, as respective learners shape their participation, that is their
situated identities in a given interactive event, in different ways, thus co-construing distinctive
contexts of learning in interaction. Analyzing the above mentioned case, I aim
to show how such constructions of interactive events influence individual possibilities of
learning, and to what type of interactional competence they point.
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Keywords
ethnomethodological conversation analysis, English as a lingua franca, situated identity, learning in interaction
Citation
Situated Identities and Interaction Learning, In: Monika Kusiak. (ed.). Dialogue in Foreign Language Education. Kraków: Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego, 2008, 71-83.