Initiating and Developing Conversation with Questions: An Analysis of Interactional Competence of Japanese Learners of English

While interactional competence in a native language is acquired effortlessly, developing interactional competence in a foreign language may require explicit teaching and learning. Indeed, many Japanese learners of English find it challenging to participate in and contribute to spontaneous conversation. This paper is aimed at exploring the possibility of applying conversation analytic insights into the development of interactional competence of Japanese learners of English. The focus is on the use of questions as a resource to initiate and develop talk in interaction, i.e., topic proffers, news receipts or newsmarks and topic pursuits. The paper first documents how questions are formulated and employed to achieve these actions in conversation between native speakers of English. It then illustrates how Japanese learners of English manage the same interactional tasks by analyzing conversational data. It is reported that while Japanese learners of English in the corpus are able to proffer topics with questions, they appear to experience more difficulty in receipting an interlocutor's answers and developing the exchange on the topic while building cohesion across turns. The findings are discussed to explore possible benefits of explicit instructions of interactional strategies based on conversation analytic studies on naturally-occurring conversation