Turn-taking

11 Key excerpts on "Turn-taking"

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  Conversation Analysis and Second Language Pedagogy

  A Guide for ESL/ EFL Teachers

  • Jean Wong, Hansun Zhang Waring(Authors)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Without turns, there is no interaction. Learning how to manage Turn-taking is the very basis for learning how to communicate in a second language. Our international students frequently remark on the difficulty of knowing when to jump into a conversation. Many opportunities of participation and, by extension, learning are lost because of this difficulty. Moreover, specific practices of Turn-taking may vary from culture to culture, and understanding these differences can help learners avoid cross-cultural mishaps. The varying perceptions of silence, for example, lie at the heart of Turn-taking. The tendency to minimize silence in conversation is not necessarily shared by all, and those who have developed a comfortable tolerance for silence may never get a word in edgewise. Despite the importance of Turn-taking, pedagogical materials that specifically target this skill are difficult to find (Barraja-Rohan & Pritchard, 1997).

  Author’s story (HW): One of our students in applied linguistics writes this about Turn-taking in an online discussion: “I’ve really struggled with how to teach it. Maybe one of the reasons this is so hard is that I don’t quite understand how it works.”

  The above comment speaks to both the need for teachers to understand the system of Turn-taking as well as the need for available resources for teaching Turn-taking.

  Fortunately, the organization of Turn-taking has been well documented in a series of conversation analytic studies, including Sacks et al.’s (1974) ground-breaking paper. According to Sacks et al. (1974), Turn-taking in English features one party [speaking] at a time and the minimization of gaps and silences. These two “achievements” are made possible by a system that comprises (1) a turn-constructional component and (2) a turn allocation component (Sacks et al., 1974). The basic unit of a turn is a turn-constructional unit (TCU), and as each TCU unfolds, it comes to a possible completion point (PCP), which may become a place for speaker transition. In what follows, we consider the various practices involved in turn construction and turn allocation.

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  Current Trends in the Development and Teaching of the four Language Skills

  • Esther Usó-Juan, Alicia Martínez-Flor, Esther Usó-Juan, Alicia Martínez-Flor(Authors)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  Turn-taking awareness: Benefits for teaching speaking skills in academic and other contexts Rebecca Hughes Pre-reading questions Before you read, discuss the following: 1. What is the commonest problem that learners experience in terms of spoken English? 2. Other than grammar and vocabulary, what linguistic skills does a second language (L2) user need in a conversation? 3. Imagine that you ask someone their opinion of your new haircut, or that you ask them out to dinner. There is a pause before they re-spond. How would you interpret this? 4. Do you think an L2 user can ever be “comfortable” in conversation with a group of native speakers? 1. Introduction Turn-taking in spontaneous speech is at the same time the simplest and the most complex of mechanisms. At its most basic, a model of Turn-taking is straightforward: an A-B-A-B speaker exchange in which one speaker takes over from another at an appropriate point. There may be many speakers – Cs, and Ds, and Es – but a very influential conceptualization of spoken discourse is that it is constructed of turns and that these are discrete entities which can be labelled as belonging to the person holding the floor. It’s a model which will be familiar from many course-book dialogues and tran-scripts at the back of these books, or from speaking tasks where the learner constructs an invented dialogue to practice with a partner, or responds orally to recorded initiating prompts. However, two aspects of Turn-taking make it a more complicated than that model suggests. First, we need to consider how it is that a speaker knows or judges the appropriate point for the speaking move from one per-son to another. Second, we need to understand the extent to which the A-B- 216 Rebecca Hughes A-B model reflects the realities of Turn-taking. These two questions are at the basis of most of the research on Turn-taking, an under-studied, but dis-tinctive area of work on the spoken form.

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  Corpus Pragmatics

  A Handbook

  • Karin Aijmer, Christoph Rühlemann(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  This is reflected in the terminology: Turn-taking, turn-holding, and turn- yielding. Taking and holding suggest active intent on the part of the subject, whereas yielding is usually done less voluntarily. The American Heritage Dictionary glosses yield as follows: 2a. To give over possession of, as in deference or defeat; surrender 2b. To give up (an advantage, for example) to another; concede Although Turn-taking has been the focus of study in both CA and linguistics, the methods of approaching the subject have usually been pursued along different lines. However, CA analysts and linguists have agreed on the funda- mentals established by Sacks et al. (1974) that a current speaker can either select a next speaker or, if no one takes over the floor, the current speaker self- selects. But as turn-change usually takes place without explicit verbal selection of a next speaker, the problem remains of what the cues for the turn-change are. As Clayman (2013: 151) puts it: Turns are thus incrementally built out of a succession of turn-constructional units . . . (TCUs), such as sentences, clauses, phrases, and individual words . . . Each TCU’s 1 Few researchers have challenged their basic tenets, and Edelsky’s suggestion (1981) that we need to distinguish between two kinds of “floor,” a “single floor,” where people take turns at speaking, and a “collaborative floor” open to all speakers simultaneously, has not had a wide following in discourse studies; Coates (1996) is a notable exception. There have been surpris- ingly few monographs on Turn-taking; the only one on Turn-taking in English appears to be Oreström (1983), who subscribes to the single-floor model. 382 Gunnel Tottie completion establishes a transition-relevance place (. . . TRP . . .) where a change of speakership becomes a salient possibility that may or may not be realized. Finally, the completion of a TCU . . . is also projected in advance through various practices .

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  An Introduction to Interaction

  Understanding Talk in Formal and Informal Settings

  • Angela Cora Garcia(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  8 Chapter contents Introduction 48 The turn constructional component 49 Turn allocation component 52 Summary of turn allocation procedures 56 Facts about conversation explained by the Turn-taking system 56 Turn-taking in talk in institutional settings 58 Student activities 59 Recommended sources 59 The Turn Taking System 5 Introduction There are some activities that participants can or should do at the same time. For example, applauding is most effectively done in a group, with everyone in the audience coordinating their actions so that the applause becomes a collective rather than an individual response (Atkinson, 1984). Booing has a similar interactional structure. While an individual may start the process by booing independently, “successful” booing involves a group of people taking up the charge and booing together in a coordinated fashion (Clayman, 1993a). However, many of the activities we participate in are not successfully accomplished unless people take turns. For example, we take turns when playing a game of cards or a game of baseball. When we go shopping, some stores may ask us to take a ticket with a number on it in order to determine our turn to be served. When going to a movie we may simply wait in line, with the people at the front of the line going in first. Turn taking is also the convention in social actions involving talk. In some situations and types of activities the rules of turn taking are very explicit and routinized. For example, in a debate, the order of speakers is based on the role each participant will play in the debate. The Turn Constructional Component 49 The person taking the “pro” position speaks first, and the person taking the “con” position speaks second. In the television game show “Jeopardy” the first contestant to ring the buzzer gets to speak. Turn taking procedures are also used in informal interactions in every day settings.

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  Turn-Taking in Human Communicative Interaction

  • Kobin H. Kendrick, Judith Holler, Marisa Casillas(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Frontiers Media SA

    (Publisher)

  For example, under competition for the floor, or when responding to highly predictable utterances, speakers may decide to launch articulation without waiting to identify turn-final cues. In cases of long transition latencies, speakers may not have been able to plan the initial stages of their turn early enough to launch articulation when the interlocutor’s turn-final cues become available. This may indeed be due to a low attentional level on the part of the speaker, or to the interlocutor’s turn being unclear in purpose until its end or simply to the complexity of the response required ( Torreira et al., 2015 , this volume). 8. Conclusion This overview of work on Turn-taking behavior over the last half century shows that Turn-taking is a remarkable phenomenon, for it combines high temporal coordination between participants with the remarkable complexity and open-endedness of the language that fills the turns. The tension between these two properties is reflected in the development Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org June 2015 | Volume 6 | Article 731 | 23 Levinson and Torreira Timing in Turn-taking and psycholinguistics of Turn-taking in childhood (Proto-Conversation’ and Turn Taking in Human Development), and it poses a substantial puzzle for psycholinguistic models (i.e., dual-tasking comprehension and production processes), which until recently have completely ignored this, the most central form of language use. Acknowledgment This research was financed by the ERC Advanced grant #269484 INTERACT and by the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. References Altmann, G., and Kamide, Y. (1999). Incremental interpretation at verbs: restricting the domain of subsequent reference. Cognition 73, 247–264. doi: 10.1016/S0010-0277(99)00059-1 Bates, E., D’Amico, S., Jacobsen, T., Székely, A., Andonova, E., Devescovi, A., et al. (2003). Timed picture naming in seven languages. Psychon. Bull. Rev. 10, 344–380. doi: 10.3758/BF03196494 Bateson, M.

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  Conversation and Technology

  From the Telephone to the Internet

  • Ian Hutchby(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Polity

    (Publisher)

  length – are freely variable. In other, more formalized or ceremonial forms ranging from loosely structured interviews between doctors and their patients to high ceremonies such as weddings, various oriented-to constraints can be observed on one or more of the three parameters of turn form, turn content and turn length.

  Sacks et al. (1974) note three very basic facts about conversation: (a) Turn-taking occurs, (b) one speaker tends to talk at a time, and (c) turns are taken with as little gap or overlap between them as possible. This is not to claim that there is never more than one speaker talking at a time, or that gaps and overlaps do not occur. Rather, the point is that the ideal is for as much inter-speaker coordination as possible. The Turn-taking model has two components: a ‘turn-construction’ component and a ‘turn-distribution’ component. Turns at talk can be seen as constructed out of turn-construction units which broadly correspond to linguistic categories such as sentences, clauses, single words (e.g. ‘Hey!’ or ‘What?’) or phrases. It is important to realize that it is not part of the conversation analyst’s aim to provide an abstract definition of what a turn-construction unit is, as a linguist may want to define what a sentence is. Conversation analysts cannot take a prescriptive stance on this question, because what a turn-construction unit consists of in any situated stretch of talk is seen as a concern for the speakers themselves.

  There are two key features of turn-construction units. First, they have the property of ‘projectability’. It is possible for participants to project, in the course of a turn-construction unit, what sort of unit it is and at what point it is likely to end. This leads to the second feature, which is that turn-construction units bring into play ‘transition-relevance places’ at their boundaries. At the end of each unit, there is the possibility for legitimate transition between speakers. These two properties are illustrated in the following extract:

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  Working with Language

  A Multidisciplinary Consideration of Language Use in Work Contexts

  • Hywel Coleman(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  To summarize, senders can determine when they will 'speak', but the physical size of their message is determined by the medium, and the size of an utterance and a turn is determined by an inter-action between the system and the receiver. 2. Turn-taking in computer conversation How do interactants in computer conversation reformulate an oral discourse strategy for coordinating conversation (Turn-taking) to a medium which is both written (typed at a terminal) and con-versational (e.g. highly interactive and elliptical)? Although the data include dyadic and non-dyadic interactions, I have only analysed two-party conversations. There are two reasons for this decision. First, because of the technical constraints on computer conversation, parties do not have to allocate turns; they can be 'taken' more or less at will. Second, interactants have access only to messages specifically sent to them and do not receive interactions between other parties. This is not the case in teleconferencing or some other computer systems. However, for the system described here, computer conversations with more than two parties can best be analysed as one-to-many networks rather than as multi-party networks. That is, two-party conversation constitutes the basic unit of organization in computer conversation. 326 Denise E. Murray In face-to-face conversation, Turn-taking is a strategy for co-ordinating interaction. Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson (1974) were the first to establish principles for Turn-taking. Although other researchers (see above) have identified different principles operating in different cultures, speech events or styles, I will use the Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson model as a starting point for describing how turns are taken in computer conversation. Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson identified the following principles: a. Completion of a turn unit (e.g. sentence, clause, phrase) con-stitutes a potential transition to another speaker; and b.

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  Advances in Teaching Sign Language Interpreters

  • Cynthia B. Roy(Author)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Gallaudet University Press

    (Publisher)

  In Conversation: Cognitive, communicative and social perspec-tives, ed. T. Givon, 55–89. Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Coates, J., and R. Sutton-Spence. 2001. Turn-taking patterns in Deaf con-versation. Journal of Sociolinguistics 5/4: 507–29. Edelsky, C. 1981. Who’s got the floor? Language in Society 10:383–421. Repr. in D. Tannen, Gender and conversational interaction, 189–227. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993. Jones, L. 1983. Eight simulations: For upper-intermediate and more advanced students of English: Participant’s book. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Larrue, J., and A. Trognon. 1993. Organization of Turn-taking and mecha-nisms for Turn-taking repair in a chaired meeting. Journal of Pragmatics 19 (2):177–96. Lerner, G. H. 1993. Collectivities in action: Establishing the relevance of conjoined participation in conversation. Text 13 (2):213–45. Martinez, L. B. 1995. Turn-taking and eye gaze in sign conversations between Deaf Filipinos. In Sociolinguistics in Deaf communities, ed. C. Lucas, 272–306. Washington, D.C.: Gallaudet University Press. Mather, S. A. 1987. Eye gaze and communication in a deaf classroom. Sign Language Studies 54:11–29. Metzger, M. 1999. Sign language interpreting: Deconstructing the myth of neutrality. Washington, D.C.: Gallaudet University Press. 168 Mieke Van Herreweghe ———. 2000. Interactive Roleplays as a teaching strategy. In Innovative Practices for Teaching Sign Language Interpreters, ed. C. Roy, 83–108. Washington, D.C.: Gallaudet University Press. Roy, C. 1989. A sociolinguistic analysis of the interpreter’s role in the turn exchanges of an interpreted event. Ph.D. diss., Georgetown University, Washington, D.C. ———. 1993. A sociolinguistic analysis of the interpreter’s role in simulta-neous talk in interpreted interaction . Multilingua 12 (4):341–63. Sacks, H., E. A. Schegloff, and G. Jefferson. 1974. A simplest systematics for the organization of Turn-taking for conversation.

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  Turn-taking in English and Japanese

  Projectability in Grammar, Intonation and Semantics

  • Hiroko Furo(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Taylor & Francis

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER THREE Turn-taking in English Conversation 3.0. INTRODUCTION

  This chapter examines Turn-taking in English conversation for the purpose of investigating (1) the interrelationship among grammatical, intonational, and semantic units, (2) the occurrences of speaker changes, and (3) the relationship between the conjunction points of grammatical, intonational, and semantic completion points, i.e. CTRPs, and speaker changes.

  Approximately 20 minutes of continuous, face-to-face conversation among three American female friends was audio-taped and transcribed. The data is analyzed both quantitatively and qualitatively. The quantitative analysis includes the following procedures: (1) grammatical, intonational, and semantic completion points are counted in order to identify CTRPs, (2) points of speaker changes are counted and examined as to how frequently they coincide with completion points, and (3) completion points are examined as to how they relate to speaker changes. The qualitative analysis focuses on convergent and divergent cases between CTRPs and speaker changes, examining how and why the Turn-taking system of conversation is modified in the interaction.

  The main findings of the quantitative analysis are the following: (1) since intonational and semantic completion points always co-occur with grammatical completion points, conjunction points between intonational and semantic completion points are considered CTRPs, (2) about half of speaker changes occur at CTRPs, and (3) about two-thirds of CTRPs co-occur with speaker changes. The qualitative analysis reveals that the divergent instances between CTRPs and speaker changes are motivated by interactional factors and take place systematically. This chapter concludes that Turn-taking in English conversation is systematically realized and interactionally motivated.

  3.1 RESULTS This section presents the results of the data analysis. First, the data is analyzed quantitatively. Then, the results of the qualitative analysis are presented.

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  Concise Encyclopedia of Pragmatics

  • J.L. Mey(Author)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Elsevier Science

    (Publisher)

  CA thus studies the organization of talk as situated, socially organized sets of practices. It describes the methods members use for organizing talk as interactional structures that both shape the context in which they operate and enable its orderly, interactionally coordinated progression. The general model sketched in the initial paper about turn taking has been developed further and refined in work on systematic practices of overlap positioning and overlap resolution (Jefferson, 1986; Schegloff, 2000a), collaborative turn construction through anticipatory completion of compound turns (Lerner, 1991, 1996), and the role of gaze, gesture, and body positioning (Goodwin, 1981) ( see Gestures, Pragmatic Aspects ). The general characterization of the systematics of turn taking has appeared to be very robust across languages. Depending on the structural features of specific languages, however, the linguistic practices deployed to project possible completion points of TCUs may vary. The structure of English, for exam-ple, allows for early projectability of the design of TCUs. Its strict Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) word order in full clauses, for example, enforces early positioning of predicates. Function markers such as question words, imperatives, conjunctions, or quote attributions occur in sentence-initial position, just as the inversion of subject and auxiliary in yes/no inter-rogatives enables early recognizability. A language such as Japanese, on the other hand, is said to have an SOV-or OSV-type of word order, an aggluti-native morphology, and a preference for postposition-ing over prepositioning of markers of syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic functions. These properties result in a predicate-final design of clauses in TCUs. Consequently, the construction of TCUs may display a delayed projectability of possible completeness.

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  The Dynamic Interplay between Context and the Language Learner

  • Jim King(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  9 The Dynamic Interplay between Language and Social Context in the Language Classroom: Interpersonal Turn Taking for ELF Learners Michael Handford Language socialisation and language learning

  How important is social context when considering language learning? When comparing cognitive and sociocultural approaches, the former still form the considerable bulk of research into SLA (Zuengler & Miller, 2006; Dörnyei, 2009). Nevertheless, several approaches that attempt to account for second language learning from a social perspective have more recently been developed, including those working with Vygotskian sociocultural theory (Lantolf, 2000) and language socialisation (Ochs, 1996). The present study draws on work in language socialisation, specifically that of Ochs (1988, 1996), and also functionally/socially oriented discourse analysis (e.g., Halliday, 1989; Gee, 2011, 2012) to enable learners to achieve their communicative goals through effective manipulation of the social context through discursive choices. It approaches language acquisition in terms of ‘the systematic relationship between the social environment on the one hand, and the functional organisation of language on the other’ (Halliday, 1989, p. 11) and prioritises a sociocultural perspective in the language classroom. As such, while this study contrasts with others explored in the present volume in that it does not draw directly on dynamic systems theory, it shares with DST an interest with change over time (see Dörnyei, 2009, p. 111), an acknowledgement of the importance of social and environmental factors, and views language ‘not as a collection of rules and target forms to be acquired, but rather a by-product of communicative processes’ (Ellis cited in Dörnyei, 2009, p. 104).

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