Conversation Analysis and Second Language Pedagogy

A Guide for ESL/EFL Teachers

Jean Wong, Hansun Zhang Waring

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429947674
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Now in its second edition, this volume offers a strong synthesis of classic and current work in conversation analysis (CA), usefully encapsulated in a model of interactional practices that comprise interactional competence. Through this synthesis, Wong and Waring demonstrate how CA findings can help to increase language teachers' awareness of the spoken language and suggest ways of applying that knowledge to teaching second language interaction skills.

The Second Edition features:

• Substantial updates that include new findings on interactional practices
• Reconceptualized, reorganized, and revised content for greater accuracy, clarity, and readability
• Expanded key concepts glossary at the end of each chapter
• New tasks with more transcripts of actual talk
• New authors' stories

The book is geared towards current and prospective second or foreign language teachers, material developers, and other language professionals, and assumes neither background knowledge of conversation analysis nor its connection to second language teaching. It also serves as a handy reference for those interested in key CA findings on social interaction.

1 Interactional Practices and the Teaching of Conversation

Pre-reading Questions

1. Think of someone easy or difficult to talk with and list three to five qualities of their way of speaking.
2. If you were asked to teach a conversation class, what would you include in your lesson plans?
3. 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 consider what you will tell the alien about how to interact in English.
   1. What will you say about the ways in which participants take turns?
   2. What will you say about the ways in which participants open and close conversations?
   3. What will you say about the ways in which participants ask for help, reject invitations, express disagreement, etc.?
   4. What will you tell the alien about our ways of correcting the talk that we produce in conversation?
   5. What other aspects of talking and participating in a conversation would you teach your warm and fuzzy friend?
4. How will you know whether your alien is ready to interact with other human beings?

Introduction

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 on the importance of teaching conversation in second language education and the challenge of specifying its curriculum. We then introduce conversation analysis (CA) as a unique and innovative tool for obtaining those specification—specifications, as we propose, may be encapsulated in a heuristic model of interactional practices. Based on decades of conversation analytic findings, the model lays out a range of practices—the stuff that interactional competence is made of—for language learners to master in becoming interactionally competent. The bulk of the chapter is devoted to providing an overview of this model.

Teaching Conversation

Each of us engages in conversation 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 or a business partnership. In fact, 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 different kinds of talk and their accompanying body language that occur in daily life across settings from casual to institutional contexts.

The question is: Is talk-in-interaction teachable? What do we teach exactly when we try to teach “conversation” to second language learners? Typically, textbook writers would rely on intuitions to determine what is there to be taught. As Wong (2002, 2007) has demonstrated in her evaluations of telephone conversations in English language teaching (ELT) textbooks, however, such intuitions are not always reliable (also see Grant & Stark, 2001). Based on his examinations of some of the most widely used commercial ELT textbook at the time, Gardner (2000) also notes “a widespread neglect of the kinds of things people do as responses—the second pair parts—such as acknowledging, agreeing, or disagreeing” (p. 40). In a similar effort to gauge the authenticity of ELT textbook conversations based on CA findings, Bernsten (2002) found that the explicit teaching of pre-sequences (e.g., What are you doing tonight? as a pre-invitation to the actual invitation of Wanna go to a movie?) was largely absent and often inadequately represented. In short, there is a noticeable gap between how people supposedly communicate as captured in ELT materials and how they actually communicate based on CA findings, and this disconnect can be detrimental to ensuring that the right learning objects are being presented in the ELT classroom.

The call for ESL/EFL textbook writers to use authentic spoken language data for the design of language instructional materials has been around since the 1980s (Burns, 1998; Carter & McCarthy, 1997; McCarthy, 1991; Scotton & Bernsten, 1988; Wong, 1984). Applied linguists have also 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). The nod to CA, however, often lacks sufficient details to be of direct pedagogical use for language teachers. Citing CA as one of the four approaches with findings that have influenced the language descriptions in published ELT materials, Gilmore (2015) laments the weakness of such influence given the various practical challenges.

Still, notable efforts have been made to translate CA findings to teachable materials (Barraja-Rohan, 2011; Huth & Taleghani-Nikazm, 2006). Gardner (2000), for example, calls Beyond Talk (Barraja-Rohan & Pritchard, 1997; available at https://monash.academia.edu/AnneMarieBarrajaRohan) an “innovative set of materials” (p. 42) based on unscripted natural conversations designed to teach the CA-based skills of conducting real-life conversations. Another CA-based booklet Your Turn at Talk developed by Don Carroll (2000) to teach conversation skills is now available on the LANSI Resources page at www.tc.edu/lansi. Existing resources also include individual articles that include discussions on the teaching of specific CA-based interactional practices such as taking turns (Carroll, 2011a; Ryan & Forrest, 2019), doing disagreements (Carroll, 2011b), making requests (Carroll, 2012), conducting telephone openings and closings (Wong, 2011a, 2011b), producing responses (Carroll, 2016a; Olsher, 2011a, 2011b), and angling for an answer (Carroll, 2016b).

Across the various endeavors, what remained lacking was a central resource that comprehensively and systematically addresses the question of what is there to be taught when we teach conversation? In the first edition of our book, we made an initial attempt to render core findings of conversation analysis pedagogically available to language teachers, and, in this second edition, we present a substantially updated version of these findings. By providing a comprehensive and systematic introduction to the basic features of conversation as such, we aim to invigorate teachers’ interest in the structures of interaction. We hope that 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 powerful 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

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 60-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 (Sidnell & Stivers, 2013). 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, 1997).

CA researchers analyze actual instances of talk, ranging from casual conversation between friends, acquaintances, coworkers, 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 social interaction.

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

1. certain features are not recoverable in any other way;
2. playing and replaying facilitates transcribing and developing an analysis;
3. recording makes it possible to check a particular analysis against the materials;
4. recording makes it possible to return to an interaction with new analytic interest.

Transcribing Data

The recorded data must be finely transcribed, using CA’s transcription system (see complete key at the beginning of this volume; for a comprehensive treatment of various transcribing practices, see Hepburn & Bolden, 2017). The symbols indicate speakers’ pauses, sound stretches, stress, pitch, pace, volume, or the like, as illustrated below in Figure 1.1:

Figure 1.1 Transcription Illustrations

Transcriptions are exacting in these minute ways because it is participants who are so exacting in talk-in-interaction. Inbreaths, outbreaths, silence, sound stretches, cut-offs, pitch rises and falls, and so on are not extraneous elements of ordinary talk. For example, silence carries interactional meaning. If you wait too long before answering someone’s invitation, the inviter may think you are not interested.

Analysts transcribe the talk as they hear it, not making any corrections or changes in relation to what speakers actually say (e.g., gonna for going to). For the sake of visual clarity, we have in subsequent chapters standardized some unconventional spellings in CA transcripts that readers might find distracting, such as sistuh for sister, bedder for better, wz/wuz for was, t’ for to, thet for that, yer for you’re, etc.

Aside from the above, we have left intact more commonly used spellings of spoken forms such as gonna, wanna, gotta, cuz, y’know, etc. Increasingly, we see these spelling forms in newspaper articles, advertising, and daily correspondence, at least in American English. An issue of New York Times Sunday Magazine had “fuhgitduhaboutit” (“forget about it”) on its cover. A 2009 New York Times op-ed article about the...