In this article, we first provide an introduction to interactional linguistics and then revisit from an interactional perspective a structure widely attested in grammar books: right-dislocation (RD). Drawing on video data (hairdressing and dinner conversations), we examine several cases of assessments accomplished through RDs and distinguish between a) closing-implicative RDs with which speakers assess a narration, and b) RDs with which participants asses an object present in the immediate physical environment, thereby initiating a new course of action. A fine-grained multimodal analysis allows us to conclude that participants mobilize grammatical resources and exploit them in talk-in-interaction in a way that is sensitive to the kind of activities in which they are engaged.

This article deals with the mutual understanding phenomenon and its explicit marks in talk-in-interaction. Drawing on conversation literature, we attempt to enhance knowledge about understanding by linking it to the alignment concept. This allows us to shed light on the different levels of understanding required for the accomplishment of successful interaction. Feedback responses provided by recipients are one of the explicit marks for achieving understanding. However, we focus here on dispreferred responses that can be considered a cue of disalignment, i.e. a break in the activity in progress and a potential indicator of trouble in understanding. Using the Conversational Analysis framework, we show how and why recipients can disalign and to what extent the mutual understanding is impacted by this disalignment.

This article explores storytelling practices in French ordinary conversations. While storytelling has been a prolific object of investigation across human and social sciences, our focus here is on the contribution of Conversation Analysis. This line of work has shown how storytellings are interactionnally produced through the speakers and recipients turn-by-turn adjustments. After an overview of the main findings of CA research on storytelling, we present a study of story-openings. The study examines the use of informings as a resource for projecting a storytelling to various extents. The study shows that the tellworthiness of a story-to-be is interactionally established through the design features of the informing and the recipient’s verbal and non-verbal displays of alignment and affiliation.

In this paper we investigate L2 interactional competence and its development over time. We first provide a historical overview of the advancements in L2 acquisition research that originated from a concern with communicative competence and led to the current concern with interactional competence, and discuss the results of existing conversation analytic work on interactional competence. We then present two empirical studies, one focusing on directives and the other on humor in L2 interactions. Based on our findings, we argue that the development of interactional competence implies a diversification of speakers'‘methods’ for accomplishing social actions in the L2, allowing them to increasingly tailor their interactional conduct to their interlocutors and to situational contingencies.