Pragmatics and Society 1/2012 [antikvár]

Development of interactional competence Changes in participation over cooking sessions Machiko Achiba This study explores the development of the interactional competence of an 8-year-old, Japanese learner of English over three cooking sessions with native speakers of English at her home during her period of residence in Australia. The study draws upon Vygotskys (1978) zone of proximal development in order to elucidate the L2 child s process of acquiring interactional competence in this unfamiliar social practice (i.e., cooking-relevant talk). The analysis reveals marked changes in the child s participation pattern over time, moving from making relevant minimai responses to more initiated, and autonomous participation. The child recycled somé of the interlocutors' utterances from the previous sessions, showing that the earlier cooking sessions provided her with a linguistic challenge and became a resource of language learning for her. She alsó made use of a textual resource (i.e., the recipe) as a scaífold to move toward more autonomous participation. In addition, the role of the recipe became less central as her participation became increasingly more independent. Keywords: interactional competence, co-construction, development, participation, zone of proximal development 1. Introduction There has been the growing body of research on the development of interactional competence over time (e.g., Brouwer & Wagner 2004; Cekaite 2007; Hall 1995; Hellermann 2006, 2007,2008; Hellermann & Colé 2009; Ishida 2006,2009, 2011; Mondada & Pekarek Doehler 2004; Nguyen 2006, 2008, 2011; Ohta 2001; Pallotti 2001, 2002; Wootton 1997, 2006; Young & Miller 2004). Much of the literature, however, investigates interactions involving L2 speakers (except for Wootton's study with an Ll child) in educational environments, mostly in L2 classrooms (See alsó Kasper 2006 and Wagner 2010). Studies examining the development of L2 learners interactional competence outside of educational settings are rare, regardless of whether