The Story of Competence

The word competence was first used in linguistics by Chomsky (1965) to distinguish between knowledge of language in the abstract (competence) and the way in which knowledge is realized in the production and interpretation of actual utterances (performance). Chomsky’s idea of competence as knowledge of language apart from its use was criticized by Hymes (1972), who countered that not only does competence refer to the individual’s knowledge of the forms and structures of language, but it also extends to how the individual uses language in actual social situations. Hymes described four kinds of knowledge that speakers use in social situations: what is possible to do with language, what is feasible, what is appropriate, and what is actually done. This combination of knowledge and use Hymes called communicative competence, which many people contrasted with Chomsky’s theory, and the latter came to be known as linguistic competence.

Hymes’s ideas were the basis for an applied linguistic theory of communicative competence put forward by Canale and Swain (1980), who related linguistic acts in social situations to underlying knowledge. In applied linguistics, language testing, and language teaching, communicative competence was thought of as a characteristic of a single individual, a complex construct composed of several component parts that differentiated one individual from others.

Interactional competence (IC) builds on the theories of competence that preceded it, but it is a very different notion from communicative competence. Kramsch (1986) wrote that IC presupposes “a shared internal context or ‘sphere of inter-subjectivity” (pg. 367) and this is what clearly distinguishes IC from previous theories of competence.

Young (2011) listed the following component parts of IC:

• Identity resources
  
  • Participation framework: the identities of all participants in an interaction, present or not, official or unofficial, ratified or unratified, and their footing or identities in the interaction

• Linguistic resources
• Register: the features of pronunciation, vocabulary, and grammar that typify a practice
• Modes of meaning: the ways in which participants construct interpersonal, experiential, and textual meanings in a practice

• Interactional resources
• Speech acts: the selection of acts in a practice and their sequential organization:
  
• Turn-taking: how participants select the next speaker and how participants know when to end one turn and when to begin the next
• Repair: the ways in which participants respond to interactional trouble in a practice
• Boundaries: the opening and closing acts of a practice that serve to distinguish a given practice from adjacent talk

IC involves knowledge and employment of these resources in social contexts. However, the fundamental difference between IC and communicative competence is that an individual’s knowledge and employment of these resources is contingent on what other participants do; that is, IC is distributed across participants and varies across different interactional practices. And the most fundamental difference between interactional and communicative competence is that IC is not what a person knows, it is what a person does together with others in specific contexts.

Teaching Interactional Competence

Teaching IC might involve two moments. In the first, learners are guided through conscious, systematic study of the practice, in which they mindfully abstract, reflect on, and speculate about the sociocultural context of the practice and the identity, linguistic, and interactional resources that participants employ in the practice. In the second moment, learners are guided through participation in the practice by more experienced participants. There is considerable support for a pedagogy of conscious and systematic study of interaction in the work of the Soviet psychologist Gal’perin and his theory of concept-based instruction. The new practice to be learned is first brought to the learner’s attention, not in small stages but as a meaningful whole from the very beginning of instruction.

Concept-Based Instruction

One example of concept-based instruction is the curriculum designed by Thorne, Reinhardt, and Golombek (2008) to help international teaching assistants (ITAs) at a U.S. university develop interactional skills in office hours. The practice they taught was office-hour interaction between an ITA and an undergraduate student, and they focused on how ITAs give directions to students. For the first part of their program, ITAs in training engaged in discussion and activities that centered on the relation between context and the resources participants employ in order to construct, reproduce, or resist a particular practice. They were then exposed to transcriptions of (a) expert office-hour interactions and (b) office-hour interactions led by ITAs. They were asked to reflect on the configuration of identity, verbal, nonverbal, and interactional resources that are employed by TAs in giving directions to students by discussing four questions about the transcriptions.

1. Who are the participants? What do you think their relationship is?
2. Where do you think the session could be taking place?
3. What is the teacher trying to get the student to do?
4. What language does the teacher use to accomplish this?

In the next step, Thorne et al. (2008) followed Gal’perin’s suggestion to provide a materialization that represents connections between the contextual features of the practice and the verbal resources that participants employ to construct it. The schema for complete orienting basis of action (SCOBA) that Thorne et al. developed is represented in Figure 1 to show visually the relationship between context in office hours and an ITA’s choice of pronoun to direct a student’s action.

Figure 1. SCOBA of Pronoun Choice in ITA Office-Hour Directives (click to enlarge)

Source: Thorne et al. (2008).

The ITAs used this materialization individually to mediate cognitive connections between context and language form, which they then discussed verbally among themselves. The final phase of the concept-based curriculum was an explicit comparison, which the trainers provide, of pronoun use in directives in the expert corpus and the ITA learner corpus (see Table 1). ITA trainees were then asked to discuss the differences between directives in the expert corpus and directives in the ITA corpus and offer their explanations for the differences.

Table 1. Comparison of Pronoun Use in Directives in the Expert Corpus and the ITA Learner Corpus

The advantage that I see of a concept-based approach to instruction is that a conceptual analysis of a specific practice encourages portability of the same concepts to other practices in the domain of academic discourse, whereas in bottom-up or inductive learning, learners are required to infer general principles from multiple examples and they must identify a new exemplar as similar to ones that they have already met. In contrast, a top-down concept-based approach encourages learners to develop a concept, or theory, of the domain of instruction. This concept can then mediate their understanding of other practices in the same domain. In other words, the ITAs experiencing Thorne et al.’s (2008) concept-based curriculum not only learn directives in university office hours but can also apply their theoretical knowledge to other practices in other interactional practices at U.S. universities.

Conclusion

Interactional competence can be seen as a set of identity, linguistic, and interactional resources that are distributed among participants in a specific situation or discursive practice. The resources include knowledge of the relationships between the forms of talk chosen by participants and the social contexts in which they are used. But more than individual knowledge, IC is the construction of a shared mental context through the collaboration of all interactional partners. And through concept-based instruction, learners come to understand that the context of an interaction includes the social, institutional, political, and historical circumstances that extend beyond the horizon of a single interaction.

Learners’ development in IC has been reported in longitudinal studies in which learners’ contributions to discursive practices have been compared over time. Systematic study by learners of the details of interaction in specific discursive practices may benefit development of interactional competence, but we await empirical studies to test that claim.

In the assessment of interactional competence, several authors have claimed that a close analysis needs to be made of the identity, linguistic, and interactional resources employed by participants in an assessment practice. This interactional architecture of the test may then be compared with discursive practices outside the testing room in which the learner wishes to participate. If the configuration of resources in the two practices is similar, then an argument can be made to support the generalization of an individual’s test result because the testee can redeploy resources from one practice to another. Assessing interactional competence is challenging, however, because IC is locally contingent and situationally specific, while assessment often requires comparing language practices across contexts. Future work in the learning, teaching, and assessment of interactional competence may resolve this tension.

References

Canale, M., & Swain, M. (1980). Theoretical bases of communicative approaches to second language teaching and testing. Applied Linguistics, 1(1), 1–47.

Chomsky, N. (1965). Aspects of the theory of syntax. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Hymes, D. (1972). On communicative competence. In J. B. Pride & J. Holmes (Eds.), Sociolinguistics: Selected readings (pp. 269–293). Harmondsworth, England: Penguin.

Kramsch, C. (1986). From language proficiency to interactional competence. Modern Language Journal, 70, 366–372.

Thorne, S. L., Reinhardt, J., & Golombek, P. (2008). Mediation as objectification in the development of professional academic discourse: A corpus-informed curricular innovation. In J. P. Lantolf & M. E. Poehner (Eds.), Sociocultural theory and the teaching of second languages (pp. 256–284). London, England: Equinox.

Young, R. F. (2011). Interactional competence in language learning, teaching, and testing. In E. Hinkel (Ed.), Handbook of research in second language teaching and learning (Vol. 2, pp. 426–443). New York, NY: Routledge.