Teaching Second Languages through Dialogue and Interaction: Actions, Turns, and Sequences

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.

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.