Hinkel Chapter 7

Hinkel Chapter 7

·         Competence required to interact with others in another language

o   Goals of interactive practice, roles of participants, topics/themes considered pertinent

o   Optional linguistic action patterns along which the practice may unfold, conventional meanings, expected participation structures

o   Amount of flexibility one has in rearranging expected uses of practice’s linguistic resources when exercising these options and likely consequences engendered by various uses

o   Skill to mindfully and efficiently recognize situations where patterns apply and know when to use them when participating in new experiences to help make sense of unknown

·         Elsewhere, it has been argued that competence development involves

o   Guided practice in significant practices considered significant by learners

o   Systematic study of L2 interactive practices (conventional resources and typical meanings, varied uses by participants, consequences ensued)

·         Interactional competence is a prosaic of interaction; engaging learners in another language helps develop L2 in ways that decrease chances of negative social reactions

·         We interact based on common knowledge of our practices

·         Predictable uses of resources provide us with the tools necessary for structuring and interacting with others in ways that are both socially and cognitively meaningful to us and to those around us… what about those who don’t share this knowledge? How is this knowledge developed?

·         Two general spheres of practices

o   Primary: acquired during childhood, important practices to families and significant social groups

o   Secondary: schooled, begin work, involved in communities in adulthood/adolescence

·         As we gain more experience in various practices, we become more interactively competent (build habits of uses and responses to uses of linguistic resource within those practices)

·         The more competent we become, the more we use our knowledge to better interpret and respond to ensuing talk, become creative in the ways we choose to participate, and become adept at realizing our individual goals within the larger practice-related goals

·         Engaging in social interaction with people who are more expert is important “cultural amplifier” necessary to development of cognitive processes

·         Consciousness needed to learn language and pragmatics/interactional competence

·         Guiding students to detect patterns used in interaction through the systematic study of interactive practices (development of prosaic of interaction) will facilitate the development of interactional competence in the second language.

o   Included in this competence are skills needed to:

§  Notice a particular linguistic resource and its function

§  Reflect on its interactional meaning (particular placement in sequence of speech, ex.)

§  Formulate and test hypothesis about conventional uses, etc.

§  Develop knowledge that is both domains (practice-specific and domain-general)

§  Develop alternative uses of resources that may lead to realization of learners’ individual goals within larger practice

·         Mikhail Bakhtin, developing prosaics of interaction       

o   Dialogue, transgredience, prosaics of the novel

o   Our individual participation is constrained by degree of sociocultural authority embedded in conventionality of practices’ linguistic resource; in some cases, room for our individual voices and in other cases our participation is restricted b social and other factors. (ex. Talking in social group vs in class)

o   IRE: teacher-initiated question, student response, teacher-produced evaluation of response

o   To develop an understanding to develop consciousness, we need to step outside practices and engage in analysis and reflection of our actions (transgredience, the ability to see an interaction as a dialogic event between resources and utterances from vantage point outside of event and not member of it)

·         Model for classroom practice   

o   Texts- pertinent by being recurring interactions, goal-directed talk among members on regular basis

o   Framework for Analysis: Extralinguistic elements and linguistic resources

§  Extralinguistic elements:

·         Setting: physical space conditions, time and duration, geographical consideration

·         Participants: Social identities (age, ethnicity, gender, origin, one plays role of teacher and others are students)

·         Expected goals or outcomes: expectations ( to solidify social bonds, to make a purchase, to tell a story), to know appropriateness of moves

§  Linguistic Resources

·         Topic: the recurring stories or themes with which the social actors concern themselves

·         Constitutive Speech acts and sequential development: pragmatic meaning each utterance plays (invitation, compliment, etc.)

o   1. What is considered to be a conventional linguistic display of certain act

o   2. Its placement in sequence of utterances

o   3. Intent of interactants (typical patterned arrangement of utterances included, too)

§  The more conventionalized the practice, the less flexible the arrangement is likely to be

·         Participation structures

o   Turn-taking patterns among participants

·         Formulaic openings, transitions, and closings: utterances used to open, move through, and close a practice

·         “ok” can signal movement from one activity to the next

·         “once  upon a time” is a story

o   Pedagogical considerations for study of practices

§  Choosing object of study, concerned with student interests and needs and accessibility of practice and feasibility of collecting data

§  Methods of data collection (video taping, audiotaping, interviews, etc.)

§  Help them with words, phrases and linguistic cues that will help them in target language

§  Prosaics of interaction isn’t focused on production of report that correctly describes a practice, but rather development of L2 interactional competence, the facilitation of which includes providing students with opportunities to take notice of significant interactional features and their situated meanings (make predictions, seek patterns, etc)

§  In learning about the various ways of meaning making within L2 groups, the students develop a critical awareness of language use, and thus, to a certain degree, are empowered to make choices about whether to participate in practices and how to use resources in ways that will enhance fulfilling their individual goals

§  Classroom provides safe environment for learning as students explore various use and consequences of talk in L2 in ways that are likely to have fewer negative social and other consequences for the learners

§  The skills needed to competently participate in face-to-face interactive practices are both practice-generic and practice-specific; how we learn to become a competent participant in a practice depends on opportunities we have to participate in and develop a familiarity with the practice

§  We are more confident and perform more competently in practices we have prior experience in

§  Whose texts from which cultures do we bring in our classrooms?