Interactional competence in online text chat

Abstract This study explores the development of L2 learners’ interactional competence (IC) in online text chat involving request scenarios. Against the background of research on L2 IC development in spoken interaction, which had shown increased use of prefatory moves with increasing IC, we investigate how learners establish shared background knowledge in text chat through preliminary moves and whether the medium facilitates more prefatory moves at lower IC levels. We also explored how learners orient to entitlement and contingency associated with a possible grant through the selection of syntactic forms. 72 learners of English at three different proficiency levels and 16 English L1 speakers engaged in two dyadic role plays on WeChat. Online interactional data demonstrated L2 learners’ following a similar trajectory in the deployment of prefatory moves as in spoken interaction, using more prefatory moves and designing them more tightly to the interlocutor’s epistemic status as their proficiency and IC increase. Lower-level learners overwhelmingly produced I want/need or can/could structures, whereas higher-level learners also used I wonder if constructions to accommodate potential contingencies related to their requests, though not as systematically as native speakers. We discuss methodological and developmental implications from these findings for L2 pragmatics teaching and testing.