ABSTRACT
Learning to communicate appropriately and effectively in a second language (L2) is part of learners’ pragmatic competence, that is, the ability to comprehend and produce a variety of communicative acts in context (e.g., greeting, complimenting, and expressing agreement). From an interactional perspective, pragmatic competence concerns the dynamic and dialogic aspects of communication, with a focus on language use in social interaction (Taguchi, 2017). Pragmatic competence also involves the ability to co-construct a social action with interlocutors during interaction. This ability is part of learners’ interactional competence, which involves the skillful use of linguistic and non-linguistic resources to enact a variety of social actions (for an overview of interactional competence, see Hall, Hellerman, & Pekarek Doehler, 2011; see also Chapter 7 in this volume). Drawing on the discursive pragmatics perspective (Kasper, 2006), this chapter presents key concepts of joint actions (Clark, 1996) and Conversation Analysis (Sacks, Schegloff, & Jefferson, 1974), which can reveal the learners’ ability to co-construct a social action with their interlocutors.
