The papers in this panel envision a new pedagogical approach that tackles the challenge of promoting interactional competence (Kramsch 1986; Young & He 1998; Young & Miller 2004) in the JFL classroom. As a pedagogical concept, interactional competence highlights the collaborative nature of communication, recognizing that all 'culturally meaningful reality' (Jacoby & Ochs 1995), from casual chatting to formal interviewing, is a joint accomplishment of the participants involved. Working within this framework, these four classroom studies demonstrate the extraordinary gains that learners, both beginning and advanced, can make in their oral communication skills when interactional competence becomes the focus of classroom instruction.
The opening paper presents an overview of the mandatory components of an effective instructional approach for promoting interactional competence, and sample instructional practices for implementing the approach. Findings from the semester-length implementation of this approach (first-semester Japanese) highlight the extensive individual variation in spoken and written learner production; the findings are contrasted with results from a control group.
The second paper presents a semester-length study of an experimental curriculum and innovative feedback methods used in a second-semester JFL class. Findings highlight the teachability of a wide range of linguistic resources for managing the demands of casual conversation; the findings are contrasted with results from a control group.
The third paper reports on an instructional unit designed to provide advanced JFL learners with conversational resources for conducting interviews. Learner performances reveal the effectiveness of the instruction in providing learners with resources for a) personalizing their roles as interviewers and b) managing the conversational floor (i.e., turn allocation).
The final paper uncovers a strong relationship between instructional approach and patterns of learner underproduction of ne and yo in a semester-length study of a third-semester JFL class. Highlighting the contingent nature of particle use, the author discusses the importance of instruction that foregrounds interactive practices (Hall 1999) rather than the linguistic resources that underlie these practices.