Teaching Second Languages through Dialogue and Interaction: Action, Turns, and Sequences advances an interaction-focused approach to second language teaching by placing social actions, turns, and sequences as central objects of instruction. Drawing on interactional linguistics, conversation analysis, and second language acquisition research, the book demonstrates how dialogue and social interaction can be taught systematically rather than left to incidental exposure or communicative practice alone.
While learning to say “what’s next” in interaction is a critical competence for language learners, such interactional abilities are rarely addressed explicitly or coherently in instructional materials. This book shows how teachers can design and integrate materials that target the organization of talk itself, linking words, grammar, and multimodal resources to the social actions they accomplish. Presenting foundational research alongside empirically grounded teaching units across several languages, Huth illustrates how learners can be guided to recognize, produce, and respond to actions such as openings and closings, requests, complaints, stance-taking through so-called “little words,” and other recurrent interactional practices. Additional teaching resources freely available to download complement this volume, encouraging practical applications and flexible personalization.
Research-based and classroom-tested, this book offers practical resources for designing lessons, developing assessments, and supporting curricular change. It will be of interest to current and future language teachers, as well as to students and researchers in second language teaching, second language acquisition, applied linguistics, and related fields focusing on language use as social action.
Table of Contents:
1. Introduction: Teaching Actions, Turns, and Sequences Part I. Understanding Interaction: Foundations 2. How Interaction Works 3. Interaction and Language Learning 4. Designing Instruction for Actions, Turns, and Sequences Part II. Teaching Units, Tasks, and Assessment 5. English: Teaching Opening and Closing Sequences 6. French: Teaching Complaints and Responses 7. German: Teaching Requests and Responses 8. Mexican Spanish: Teaching “Little Words” for Stance Taking 9. Assessing Actions, Turns, and Sequences Part III. Resources and Future Directions 10. Resources for Research and Materials Design 11. Conclusion, Discussion, and Outlook
About the Author :
Thorsten Huth is an Associate Professor at The University of Tennessee, Knoxville. He is the author of Interaction, Language Use, and Second Language Teaching (Routledge, 2020) and has published widely in leading international journals on pragmatics and interaction, language learning, and language teaching, including Journal of Pragmatics, Language Teaching Research, and The Modern Language Journal.
Review :
"In this groundbreaking book, Thorsten Huth masterfully shows that actions, turns, and sequences are both the engine of language learning and a concrete, teachable target from the very beginning of instruction. Grounded in robust empirical research and rich classroom examples, the volume skillfully provides clear pedagogical principles, ready-to-use instructional units across several languages, and assessment tools for integrating pragmatics and interaction into curricula. Essential for second and foreign language teachers, teacher educators, and researchers, this book offers a much-needed approach to prepare learners to engage fully in the social practices that constitute real-world communication."
Alicia Martínez-Flor, Professor of Applied Linguistics and Pragmatics, Universitat Jaume I, Spain
"Proceeding from the core premise that language use is inherently recipient-designed, this book brings interactional research directly into the foreign language classroom. By moving beyond language as a system of words and grammar, it presents ready-made teaching units on social actions for English, French, German and Spanish, thereby also providing much-needed instructional materials on Languages Other Than English (LOTEs). Combining the empirical rigor of Conversation Analysis with the practical requirements of language teaching, the book is a timely resource for all practioners and language teacher educators who seek to equip language learners with authentic, real-life communicative competence."
Karen Glaser, Professor of TEFL for Primary School, Brandenburgische Technische Universität, Cottbus-Senftenberg, Germany
