Conversation Analysis and Second Language Pedagogy

A Guide for ESL/ EFL Teachers

Jean Wong, Hansun Zhang Waring

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781136975837
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Conversation and speaking skills are the key building blocks for much of language learning. This text increases teachers' awareness about spoken language and suggests ways of applying that knowledge to teaching second-language interaction skills based on insights from Conversation Analysis (CA).

Conversation Analysis and Second Language Pedagogy:

• reviews key CA concepts and findings
• directly connects findings from CA with second language pedagogy
• presents a model of interactional practices grounded in CA concepts
• includes numerous transcripts of actual talk
• invites readers to complete a variety of tasks to solidify and extend their understandings
• features a useful collection of practical teaching activities.

The time is ripe for a book that blends conversation analysis and applied linguistics. This text takes that important step, extending the reaches of these once separate academic fields. Assuming neither background knowledge of conversation analysis nor its connection to second language teaching, it is designed for courses in TESOL and applied linguistics and as a resource for experienced teachers, material developers, and language assessment specialists seeking to update their knowledge and hone their craft.

Chapter 1
Interactional Practices and the Teaching of Conversation

Pre-reading Questions

1. How important are conversational skills in relation to other skills needed in language learning?

2. Think of someone easy to talk with and list 3–5 qualities of his/her way of speaking.

3. Think of someone difficult to communicate with and list 3–5 qualities of his/her way of speaking.

4. If you were asked to teach a conversation class, what would you include in your lesson plans?

5. Imagine that an alien from outer space will be living with you. Give this alien a name. As an extremely considerate, sensitive, and culturally attuned host, think about this alien’s total well-being and answer these questions:

(a) What will you tell the alien about how to interact in English?

(b) What will you say about the ways in which speakers take turns?

(c) What will you say about the ways in which speakers open and close conversations?

(d) What kinds of sample utterances would you give, if any?

(e) What will you tell the alien about our ways of correcting the talk that we produce in conversation?

(f) What other aspects of talking and participating in a conversation would you teach your warm and fuzzy friend?

(g) How will you know whether your alien is ready to interact with other human beings?

Chapter Overview

The importance of conversation as the foundation of all language learning cannot be overstated. As Clark (1996) writes, “face-to-face conversation is the cradle of language use” (p. 9). This chapter begins with a discussion of what is still lacking in the teaching of conversation and introduces conversation analysis (CA) as a unique and innovative tool for achieving this goal. Against the backdrop of communicative competence and interactional competence, a heuristic model of interactional practices is proposed. The model lays out a range of practices for language learners to master in becoming interactionally competent. The chapter ends with an outline of the various chapters that comprise the rest of this volume.

Teaching Conversation

Learning to engage in ordinary conversation is one of the most difficult tasks for second language learners. As Hatch (1978) suggests, one learns how to “do” conversation, and out of conversation syntactic structures develop. In other words, conversation is the medium through which we do language learning. Clearly, then, knowing how to teach conversation is of critical importance for language teachers; this knowledge begins with a solid understanding of what constitutes conversation or talk-in-interaction.

Talk-in-interaction refers to differing kinds of talk and their accompanying body language that occur in daily life across settings from casual to institutional contexts. One can have casual conversations in work settings, and vice versa.

Over the past three decades, discourse analysts have made great contributions to our understanding of interaction (e.g., Celce-Murcia & Olshtain, 2000; Hatch, 1992; McCarthy, 1991). In fact, resource books for teachers often emphasize that learners need instruction on features of conversation, and applied linguists have worked to describe those features in relation to pedagogy (Lazaraton, 2001). Thornbury and Slade (2006), for example, discuss the vocabulary, grammar, and discourse features of conversation. However, the descriptions of language or discourse may not yet sufficiently reflect language use. Consider the following from a widely used teacher-training textbook:

In most oral language, our discourse is marked by exchanges with another person or several persons in which a few sentences spoken by one participant are followed and built upon by sentences spoken by another.

(Brown, 2007, p. 224)

Although the examples that Brown provides in his teacher-training book (not shown here) illustrate that people don’t actually talk by stringing sentences together, the general characterization of “sentences spoken” can be misleading (Schegloff, 1979a). As leading conversation analysts Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson (1974) have shown early on, the “sentence” is not the basic unit of conversation (cf. “real grammar” in Biber & Conrad, 2009; for a much broader definition of grammar, also see Purpura, 2004). Accurate understandings of how conversation works take hours of investigations into minute details of recorded interactions, a hallmark of conversation analysis (CA).

The suggestion that ESL/EFL textbook writers use authentic spoken language data for the design of language instructional materials is gaining increasing prominence (Burns, 1998; Carter & McCarthy, 1997; McCarthy, 1991; Scotton & Bernsten, 1988; Thornbury, 2005). Nonetheless, as Burns (1998) notes, even though communicative language teaching (CLT) has been promoted for a number of years now, there is always room for improvement in terms of instructional materials and teaching techniques. Applied linguists have recognized the contribution of CA over the years with an increasing interest in a merger between the two disciplines (Bowles & Seedhouse, 2007; Richards & Seedhouse, 2005; Schegloff, Koshik, Jacoby, & Olsher, 2002; Seedhouse, 2005a). The nod to CA, however, often lacks sufficient details to be of direct pedagogical usefulness for language teachers. For instance, the importance of turn-taking is frequently mentioned in various teacher training books, but instructors are given minimal, if any, information regarding how the turn-taking system operates. Just as a novelist has the ability to help readers zoom in on an aspect of daily life that they might not have noticed or thought about as important, a CA outlook on talk-in-interaction can help ESL/EFL teachers reach a similar kind of heightened awareness and understanding of oral language.

This book brings the core findings of conversation analysis to language teachers. It provides a comprehensive and systematic introduction to the basic features of conversation. It is designed to invigorate teachers’ interest in the structures of interaction. Teachers can translate this awareness into pedagogy, using the suggested teaching activities provided in subsequent chapters as a guide. Our goal is to equip language teachers with a new kind of tool kit for teaching conversation.

Author’s story (JW): When I was training to become an ESL teacher at UCLA in the early 1980s, I first learned of conversation analysis (CA) in a discourse analysis course. The professor said, “There’s a guy named Schegloff in the sociology department here who does this stuff called CA, which examines the details of conversation.” I thought, “Gee, if I’m going to teach English, I should know how conversation works just as I should know how grammar works.” So I sashayed across the campus to Schegloff’s office. That was how I got into CA.

Conversation Analysis

Each of us engages in talk-in-interaction on a daily basis. Ordinary conversation is the most basic mode of interaction or “primordial site of sociality” (Schegloff, 1986, p. 112). It is the means by which we handle our daily lives and get things done, from mundane matters such as chatting with a friend to critical ones such as planning a wedding, a divorce, a business partnership, and so on. Conversation analysis is a unique way of analyzing language and social interaction. It originated in sociology in the 1960s with the work of Harvey Sacks, Emanuel Schegloff, and Gail Jefferson. During the course of its forty-year history, CA has spread rapidly beyond the walls of sociology, shaping the work of scholars and practitioners in a variety of disciplines, including but not limited to: applied linguistics, anthropology, psychology, and communication studies.

One of CA’s fundamental concerns is: what do people do in order to have a conversation? What are the commonsense practices by which we engage in conversation? Remember the times when someone was angry with you and gave the cold shoulder, not answering your hello or how are you? No matter how hard you tried, the other party did not say a word. If you think about those cold-shouldered moments in social interaction, you realize that it takes two people to do the talk. What does it mean to keep a conversation going? From a CA perspective, having a conversation is the product of much joint effort (Schegloff, 1997a).

CA researchers analyze actual instances of talk, ranging from casual conversation between friends, acquaintances, co-workers or strangers to talk in more formal settings such as classrooms, doctor–patient consultations, courtroom proceedings, radio talk programs, interviews, and so on. The latter falls within the domain of institutional talk (Drew & Heritage, 1992). Thus, an umbrella term for CA’s research object is talk-in-interaction. In what follows, we introduce the principles of CA in three broad categories: (1) collecting data; (2) transcribing data; (3) analyzing data.

Collecting Data

CA requires naturally occurring data that has been recorded and transcribed.

Naturally occurring data refers to actual occurrences of talk not gathered from interviewing techniques, observational methods, native intuitions, or experimental methodologies.

Artificial or contrived conversations in experimental settings (e.g., asking two strangers to talk and record their conversation) should not be taken as the representative of what goes on in naturally occurring talk.

The naturally occurring data must be audio- or video-recorded for the following reasons (Pomerantz and Fehr, 1997, p. 70):

(1) certain features are not recoverable in any other way;

(2) playing and replaying...