The Effect of CA-oriented Interaction-Focused Pedagogy on Iranian EFL learners’ Interactional Competence in Paired-Speaking Tasks

Interaction is fundamental not only in human’s language learning process but also in his social life. Due to the significance of L2 interactions which are socially oriented, the current study attempts to investigate the effect of interaction-focused pedagogy based on conversation analysis on interactional competence of Iranian EFL learners. 124 Iranian intermediate EFL learners were placed in treatment and control groups based on their TOEFL iBT scores. The selected dialogues of the book ‘Beyond Talk’ were taught to the treatment group according to the principles of conversation analysis using the pedagogy wheel by Filipi and Barraja-Rohan (2015) while the control group were only taught by their main materials. Their interactional competence were assessed by Wang’s (2015) rating scale in pretest and posttest. After running MANCOVA, the results revealed the outperformance of the treatment group. Therefore, it is suggested that interaction-focused pedagogy can provide opportunities for co-construction of meaning in conversation and meaningful interaction. This interaction can lead to an awareness in speaking and authenticity in conversation.