Agreeing, Accounting, and Affiliating: L2 Interactional Competence in High-Scoring L2 English Learners’ Agreement Sequences

Abstract

Research on what should count as evidence of foreign/second language interactional competence (L2 IC) has grown exponentially, particularly drawing on work in Conversation Analysis (CA) (Hall, Hellerman, and Pekarek Doehler 2011). Recurrent participation in L2 conversation is viewed as key to IC development, and learners gradually master an increasing range of L2-appropriate social actions (Salaberry and Kunitz 2019). We address L2 IC in two educational contexts—Norway and Flanders—where learners’ exposure to English is high but where the starting age of formal instruction differs. We focus on one facet of L2 IC: the interactional management of agreement sequences. Previous research has focused on speakers’ practices for doing disagreement (e.g., Čekaitė 2007), showing that learners deploy more advanced methods for disagreement as their proficiency and L2 participation increases. In this study, which is based on generated speaking test data using pre-set test topics that learners are to discuss, relatively few disagreements were found. However, for high-scoring learners, extended and collaborative agreement sequences revealed various practices for jointly agreeing on a stance on the pre-set topics. From a collection of 24 speaking tests collected in grade 10, a subsample of the four highest-scoring learners in each context (N = 8) and their co-participants was analyzed further with a CA approach. Findings show the learners’ awareness of a preference for agreeing with first assessments (cf. Pomerantz 1984; Sacks 1987), and of the conditional relevance of accounts following expressions of agreement with a test prompt. Participants also show affiliation with each other’s contributions, and for the most part align with prior action in their responses (cf. Steensig 2019). Participants also display competence in drawing on vocal, verbal, and embodied resources in displaying agreement and affiliation.