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Abstract Drawing upon the perspective of L2 pragmatics and using data from online voice-based con¬tent knowledge interactions and student reflective journals, this study examines development fea¬tures and influential factors of topic management competence of English learners, with a focus on three dimensions, i. e., topic initiation, topic development and topic closure. Results show a general shift in learners from self-attentiveness to achieving intersubjectivity during the six-week discussion tasks. Specific findings are as follows: in the task opening phase, while the learners show immediate orientation to the task topic early on, a question-response sequence is found over time for some learners, which constitutes preliminaries before launching the topical talk; in the topic development phase, some learners are found to develop topic-as-action from topic-as-script; in the topic closure phase, single appreciation pre-closings are further prefaced over time by a summary or a confirmation check sequence. The study also finds that the development of topic management competence in online interactions is influenced by language proficiency level, online communication mode, topic difficulty level and learners’ personality. Finally, the paper discusses how to teach L2 interaction in online communication.
Key words: L2 pragmatics; interactional competence; topic management; online communication
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