Introduction

A critical question that foreign language teachers have to confront is how to provide students with opportunities to develop pragmatic abilities in a second language (L2). In order to be academically successful, students have to become competent members of their classroom community, and such membership critically involves classroom-specific ways of participation. An increasing number of studies investigate how students of all ages, from pre-schoolers to graduate students, come to master, with varying success, the pragmatic and discourse practices of educational institutions (Duff, 1995; He, 2000, 2003; Kanagy, 1999; Lo, 2004; Morita, 2000; Willet, 1995). But to the extent that foreign language curricula aim to enable students to participate in a range of activities outside of classrooms, language educators must also create the conditions for achieving that goal. This is a difficult call because the speech exchange system predominant in instructional discourse, the initiation-response-feedback (IRF) sequence (Mehan, 1979; Sinclair & Coulthard, 1975), rather limits the discursive options for students and teachers (Ellis, 1994; Kasper, 1997).

As a measure to overcome the discourse-structural limitations of the IRF and the asymmetrical power relations between teacher and students that the IRF (re)produces, peer activities have become a regular instructional practice. Peer interactions among foreign language students in task-structured activities (e.g. Long et al. , 1976; Ohta, 2001; Tateyama, 2001; Yoshimi, 1999) and roleplays (Ohta, 1995, 1997) have been shown to offer productive environments for developing L2 pragmatic and interactional competence. In peer interaction, students assist each other to jointly work through an activity, achieving together what they would not be able to accomplish individually. By virtue of being participant-managed, peer interactions empower students to transform the task or roleplay set by the teacher, take advantage of learning opportunities and create such opportunities for themselves and each other (Mori, 2004).