In this paper, I present a semester-length quasi-experimental study of a first-semester JFL class (3 hours/week) in which an instructional approach designed to promote interactional competence (Young and He 1998) was employed. The instructional approach consisted of three critical components: a) a metalinguistic component to raise learner awareness of the conversational sequences and strategies that structure the organization of and enable the accomplishment of a target communicative activity; b) an explicit instruction component to provide learners with access to an extensive repertoire of conversational resources conversational routines, formulaic phrases, stance markers, linguistic strategies for marking register variation, etc., for negotiating their participation in the target communicative activity; and c) an interactional component to provide learners with opportunities to learn to handle the contingencies of spoken communication as they arise, with an eye towards developing the ability to collaborate with others (i.e., classmates and the instructor) in managing the non-scripted construction of culturally meaningful reality (Jacoby & Ochs 1995).
The success of the instructional approach is assessed through three measurements of learner performances on pre- and post-test spoken and written (DCT-style) assessments: a) range of resources (i.e., lexis, syntactic structures, formulaic phrases, conversational routines), b) range of repertoire (i.e., strategies for organizing and managing interaction, including, but not limited to topic initiation, maintenance, and shift; activity initiation jokes, requests, invitations/offers; turns indicating alignment or assessment, and listener responses), and c) a composite measure of variability in the use of resources for the performance of repertoire. I show that, in comparison to the control group, the experimental group displays considerably greater range of use of both resources and repertoire. Moreover, consistent with the emphasis on interactional competence, there is also considerable individual variation among class members.