ALIS Newsletter - Volume 31 Number 1 (Plain Text Version)
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CONVERSATION ANALYSIS AND PRAGMATICS IN LANGUAGE TEACHING
Pragmatics in language pedagogy begins with teachers' own awareness of language and its structures of action. And with the help of a conversation analysis (CA) perspective, we can regard meaning and action as constituted in and through social interaction. Indeed, Kasper (2006) commented on the usefulness and success of CA as an analytic tool for understanding discursive pragmatics:
Just as we think of language as a system, we may regard conversation as one as well although teachers do not usually think of the latter as reflective of a system. Conversation or talk-in-interaction more generally is composed of a set of generic organizational practices that cuts across a diverse range of languages (Sidnell, 2009). These interactional practices, which may be viewed heuristically as forming a model of interactional practices for talk-in-interaction, include turntaking, sequencing, overall structuring, and repair (Wong & Waring, 2010). We briefly explain each of the organizational components of conversation as a system and then zoom in on sequencing practices. Turntaking organization lies at the base because turns are the basic building blocks of interaction. Now after speakers get a turn, they have to know what to do with it, how to build and shape the turns to form sequences and to perform actions such as requesting, offering, or inviting. (This is also the stuff of speech acts.) Following from sequencing, overall structuring practices refer to the ways in which conversation is shaped and oriented to as a whole unit, for example, including larger sequences or segments such as openings and closings. Finally, repair refers to participants' efforts to deal with troubles in speaking, hearing, or understanding the talk.
Sequencing practices include agreement and disagreement, announcement, complaint, compliment response, invitation, offer, request, and so on. I take a closer look at disagreement, invitation/offer, and request sequences below. Here is an example of a disagreement sequence from an ESL textbook.
Chuck's utterance, "No, it doesn't. They told me eleven," may be viewed by its recipient Mary as (somewhat) impolite precisely because it was delivered without any prefacing silence or uncertainty markers. In the real world, disagreeing without any hesitation can sometimes be seen as rude, aggressive, or uncooperative. In ESL/EFL textbooks, the teaching of disagreement typically does not include issues of timing, that is, the delivery of utterances early versus late. Timing does matter; it can be quite crucial, interactionally speaking, as a "strategy" used by a conversational partner. Moreover, the issue of timing can be particularly difficult for ESL/EFL learners because they are still struggling to comprehend a message as well as to respond to it. DISAGREEMENTS In real conversation, disagreements often, although not invariably, involve silence, questions, reluctance, hesitation markers (e.g., "uh," or "well"), and/or agreement prefaces (e.g., "yeah but") as shown in the examples below, which are taken from naturally occurring conversation. Teaching how to do agreement and disagreement is indeed relevant to ESL students. As one teacher remarks: "Students find it mystifying that they should at first agree with a stranger's unprompted initiation (such as a complaint about how bad a class is, for example) even when they completely disagree . . . many students coming to America assume that we value directness" (Wong & Waring, 2010, p. 68). INVITATIONS AND OFFERS Next, here is an example of an invitation sequence from a textbook (Bernsten, 2002). It looks unproblematic at first glance. A calls B to invite the latter to A's birthday party, and B accepts.
In real-life invitations, the inviter closely tracks the likelihood of the invitation being accepted, and there is such a thing as a "monitor space" (Davidson, 1984) where this is done. The additional element "it's oka:y" at line 01 above constitutes one such monitor space. There is also such a thing called "a subsequent version" (Davidson, 1984), which is the original invitation made more attractive. As shown above, given the absence of any uptake from B, A redoes his/her invitation in line 03 to include "beer and stuff." Offers are similar to invitations in terms of the monitor space and doing of subsequent versions, and thus learning to manage the complexities of an invitation or offer sequence is indeed a challenge for nonnative speakers of English. In the following telephone conversation on what to bring to a picnic, the nonnative speaker Ruan has made an initial offer of eggrolls, which was immediately accepted by the host. However, he goes on to issue a much less attractive subsequent offer of "drinks" later on:
The fact that Ruan's pragmatically inappropriate second offer is not favorably accepted by Liz is subtly indicated in Liz's silence at line 02 and hesitations, hedges, and delays at lines 03, 05, and 06. Liz finally agrees at line 09, but notice the slight hesitation at line 11 that is captured by the breathiness and pause before she utters "a good idea." REQUESTS Finally, we consider requests. Requests are often presented in ESL texts as a list of questions or imperatives modulated on a scale of formality ranging from, for example, "Would you mind repeating what you said" to "What?" A real-life request, however, can develop across multiple turns, and there is a preference of offer over request (Schegloff, 2007). In the following example, Donny the requester issues multiple hints at his request for a ride without ever succeeding in obtaining the offer from Maria. In the end, his request is never fully articulated; neither is Marcia's rejection:
Learning how to request appropriately is an important skill for second language learners. Some anecdotal evidence in Wong and Waring (2010) includes the following: In a role play with a noisy neighbor, one learner would begin with "Can you please be quiet?" In parent-teacher conferences, some Japanese parents would start with "Can you pay more attention to my son in class please?" These requests sound abrupt and rude because in real life, requests tend to develop over multiple turns. We need to help our language learners understand that a speech act such as a request is dispreferred, and thus is typically, although not invariably, delivered with delay, hesitations markers, accounts, and/or mitigation. Delivering requests (too) directly, as in the anecdotal cases mentioned here, might bear negative interactional consequences in the real world. In summary, the call for using authentic materials in ESL/EFL teaching is not new, but authentic materials are not automatically usable materials. CA findings help us crystallize the rules and patterns of authentic interactions. Armed with the findings of CA, teachers can offer learners a more specific, more situated, and more complex picture of how language works. To give one example, in helping learners understand about sequencing practices, learners may be given one card with either a first pair part (e.g., invitation, offer, compliment) or a second pair part (e.g., rejection or acceptance of the invitation, offer, compliment). The learner's task is to walk around in the classroom and compare cards with other classmates with the ultimate goal being to find a match, that is, an adjacency pair. This activity could be used by itself, or as a way of finding a partner to engage in another classroom activity. Doing this task gets learners to think about appropriate adjacency pairs (e.g., what constitutes an invitation, offer, compliment) and current- and next-turn relationships. Teachers can also add presequences (e.g., pre-invitation sequences) into the mix as well. These are just some sample ideas. Finally, whenever possible, we suggest using and modifying data transcripts culled from the CA research literature, particularly for high-intermediate and advanced learners, because this will give learners a (better) sense of how real talk is actually produced. (For an introduction to CA in second language pedagogy along with a collection of awareness-raising and practicing activities designed for the teaching of speaking based on CA findings, see Wong & Waring, 2010.) REFERENCES Bernsten, (2002). Using conversation analysis to examine pre-sequences in invitation, offer and request dialogues in ESL textbooks. Unpublished Master's thesis, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Davidson, J. (1984). Subsequent versions of invitations, offers, requests, and proposals dealing with potential or actual rejection. In J. M. Atkinson & J. Heritage (Eds.), Structures of social action: Studies in conversation analysis (pp. 102-128). Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press. Kasper, G. (2006). Speech acts in interaction: Towards discursive pragmatics. Pragmatics and Language Learning, 11, 281-314. Pomerantz, A. (1984). Agreeing and disagreeing with assessments: Some features of preferred/dispreferred turn shapes. In J. M. Atkinson & J. Heritage (Eds.), Structures of social action (pp. 57-101). Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press. Schegloff, E. A. (2007). Sequence organization in interaction: Vol. 1. A primer in conversation analysis. Cambridge, England: CambridgeUniversity Press. Sidnell, J. (Ed.). (2009). Conversation analysis: Comparative perspectives. Cambridge, England: CambridgeUniversity Press. Tillitt, B., & Bruder, M. N. (1985). Speaking naturally: Communication skills in American English. Cambridge, England: CambridgeUniversity Press. Wong, J., & Waring, H. Z. (2010). Conversation analysis and second language pedagogy: A guide for ESL/EFL teachers. New York, NY: Routledge. |
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