Exploring interactional competence of English-medium-instruction students: A multimodal conversation and interpretative phenomenological analysis

Abstract

The co-construction of intersubjectivity during disciplinary knowledge exchange among multilingual students in English-medium-instruction (EMI) programmes is intricate, expanding beyond language use to involve a range of multimodal resources employed during interactions. Such practice underpins the concept of interactional competence (IC). Despite the proliferation of IC studies advanced by conversation analysis (CA), the crystallisation of what constitutes this dynamic construct remains, necessitating methodological triangulation and a need for data-driven inquiries into its components. Central to this study was the exploration of EMI students' IC mediated through their use of resources-at-talk to co-construct intersubjectivity for knowledge acquisition during learning at a Thai university. A multimodal conversation analysis (MCA) was employed to analyse five video-recorded interactions across three months, complemented by an interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) of four subsequent stimulated recall interviews. Using purposive sampling, six EMI students (M = 4, F = 2) agreed to participate in this project. The inductive analyses revealed that EMI students' IC were mediated through eight interactional resources used – social actions, interactional mechanisms, linguistic knowledge, non-linguistic resources, pragmalinguistics, sociopragmatics, content knowledge, and psychological components. The analyses highlight a meaningful finding that IC appears to be psychology-driven, as evident in its influence on interlocutors' engagement, participation, and subsequent deployment of other resources. Understanding the knowledge co-construction process in EMI-student interaction brings pedagogical benefits to pre-EMI programmes, assisting them with EMI learning and real-world interactional success.