Trends in Interactional Competence: Targeting Engagement and Explicit Utterances

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 participan ts 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.