A Study Of Alignment Activities In Peer Interaction Of EFL College Students

This study examines EFL college students' interactional competence as indexed by their performance of alignment activities in peer interaction.The study adopts mainly turn-by-turn qualitative analysis combined with quantitative computation and one-way ANOVA to examine students' performance of alignment activities in peer interaction conducted in the classroom and how their expression of alignment alters from two sets of conversations.Alignment activities refer to the ways the interlocutors use to demonstrate their intersubjectivity,namely,to express their shared understanding.The alignment activities observed in the current study derive from Ohta's(2001)development sequence of interactional competence which was developed by Dings(2014)and Tecedor(2016).In this article,the alignment activities include: acknowledgement,assessment,collaborative contribution and collaborative completion.Through the analysis,the researcher finds that although their decent performance of acknowledgement has been presented,other complex alignment activities along the development sequence of interactional competence are not mastered very well,especially,assessment and collaborative contribution.What's more,fluency and spontaneity of the students' interaction are also in need of improvement.According to the development sequence of interactional competence,generally speaking,these students' interactional competence is in approximately medium level.The study also finds that despite the great individual variability,these EFL college students are capable of improving their interactional competence by simply participating in the interactive practices with their peers.This result corroborates Tecedor's(2016)finding that peer interactional practices in the classroom can provide chance for students to build confidence and improve interactional competence.The findings in the research reveal the weak links of EFL college students' performance of alignment activities.It has been proved by a former research(Xu & Kou,2011)that interactional competence can be promoted by IC strategy training.So this study provides significant pedagogical implications on the training content.How to develop pertinent training methods to improve various weak aspects of students' interactional competence is what the future study can embark on.