TITLE:
Trends in Interactional Competence: Targeting Engagement and Explicit Utterances
AUTHORS:
Yumei Li
KEYWORDS:
Interactional Competence, Meaningful Output, Engagement, Explicit Utterances, Contingent Responses, Contextual Factors
JOURNAL NAME:
Creative Education,
Vol.11 No.12,
December
15,
2020
ABSTRACT: This paper aims to examine how an
IELTS candidate keeps himself engaged in
communication and conveys his ideas clearly to the examiner in the speaking section. Despite very occasional errors, the candidate shows fluency
and a good mastery of vocabulary and
grammatical knowledge. His performance demonstrates his abilities in
interactional competence, a construct of speaking pedagogy that highlights
dynamics of interaction between participants of a conversation. The nature of
interactional competence requires the speaker to make utterance explicit to the
listener and actively respond to the conversation
partner. Influencing factors of interactional competence include speaking skills, communication abilities, cognitive skills and contextual
factors. Issues might arise from
unmanageable factors in some occasions, which requires the test taker to
adapt to changes and adjust utterances as an engaged listener. Thus, contingent
responses reflect comprehension and engagement in interactions. In this case, the speaker responds to the
examiner by expanding information with a flexible use of vocabulary,
grammatical structures and pronunciation skills. Examples show that major contributors to errors might be inattentiveness
and lack of context awareness. If he fixes the problems in his speech, he can
improve his rating on the marking rubric in future tests.