ABSTRACT
This chapter traces the intellectual roots and developments of the notion of competence in second language teaching and research. As second language teaching and research invariably concern competence of some sort, there have been countless attempts to define competence from diverse theoretical perspectives, resulting in a plethora of definitions as well as debates, confusions, and tensions. As global mobility and technological advancements give rise to novel patterns of communication and learning, it is high time to critically reflect upon and clarify what we understand by competence from diverse perspectives such as ethnography of communication, conversation analysis, and interactional sociolinguistics. With a particular focus on interactional discourse, this chapter aims to achieve three interrelated objectives: (a) to offer an overview of theoretical and methodological approaches to understanding competence; (b) to reveal areas of divergence and convergence in theorizing competence; and (c) to serve as a platform for exploring how competence can be researched and fostered in the context of modern-day complexities. The chapter concludes with a discussion of future directions for research and pedagogy in view of the ever-diversifying life trajectories of language users/learners and configurations of communicative encounters. Emergentist theoretical orientations such as complexity theory and translingualism are also considered.
