Emotional stances and interactional competence

This chapter describes a 7-year-old child’s development of interactional competence in Swedish as a second language over a course of 1,5 years. The study documents L2 novices’ methods employed for doing disagreements and refusals by tracking lexico-grammatical and embodied features and the emotional stances displayed thereby. It is argued that emotional stances constitute a significant feature of disagreeing responses by indexing the interlocutors’ emotionally valorized evaluation and alignment towards a specific focus of concern (Dubois 2007). The study combines a CA microanalytic approach with ethnographic analyses of socialization within a classroom community, contributing to a broader understanding of interactional competence as comprising both language-­mediated, and embodied affective stances, assembled, configured and deployed to accomplish social actions in interaction.

• Affiliations: 1: Linköping University