One of the important goals of learning a foreign language is to develop and maintain a relationship with the native speakers of that language. For this purpose, small talk plays an important role by offering an opportunity for learners and native speakers to get to know each other. During small talk, the interactional meaning of involvement or enjoyment is co-constructed not only through the content of the information, but also through how the information is exchanged. Therefore, in order to engage in successful small talk in Japanese, learners must master various conversational resources for doing the interactional work of a) showing interest in the interlocutor, b) maintaining a comfortable conversational tone appropriate for small talk, c) moving the conversation forward, d) staying on the topic without ending it abruptly, e) introducing a new topic when one is exhausted, f) managing communication problems, and g) showing that the speaker is making a good-faith effort to engage in the talk.
In this study of L2 Japanese learners, these dimensions of interactional competence are termed "Conversational Competence", which also includes such pragmatic features as the discourse marker n desu, aizuchi (backchannels), and conversational moves such as evaluative comments, return questions, new topic initiation, follow-up questions, expansions, and repair. This study investigates whether inclusion of these conversational resources in the curriculum improves learners' Conversational Competence using a pretest/posttest design. The above target items are taught over the course of a semester with handouts, in-class explicit explanations, awareness-raising activities, communicative practice and feedback. The analysis of the conversational data between a learner and a native speaker before and after the instruction shows significant gains in the appropriate use of some or all of the target items. The qualitative analysis of the data shows that these gains resulted in more involved conversations in which more information was exchanged and more interactional meanings were co-constructed.