2. Applied Linguistics (Inspirations from neighbor disciplines)
Bita Moradi; Zari Saeedi
Abstract
Conversational turns have long snatched the attention of discourse analysts. Despite this fact, and to the best of the researchers’ knowledge, intergenerational conversations made by females have never been investigated through the lens of turn-taking and interruptions. Accordingly, this study ...
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Conversational turns have long snatched the attention of discourse analysts. Despite this fact, and to the best of the researchers’ knowledge, intergenerational conversations made by females have never been investigated through the lens of turn-taking and interruptions. Accordingly, this study aimed at scrutinizing the differences between female Persian-speaking adults and adolescents engaged in casual conversations in terms of turn-taking organization, and interruption patterns. To this end, the casual Persian conversations of 5 adult and 5 adolescent females attending a private reunion were analyzed based upon the turn-taking model proposed by Sacks et al. (1974), along with interruption syntactic criteria introduced by West and Zimmerman (1983). The turn-taking model comprises two techniques (self-selection or selection by the next speaker) leading to gaining or allocating turns, and the interruption criteria emphasize deep intrusion of the last two or more syllables of the current speaker. The analysis of the recorded three-hour conversation revealed 1302 uses of the turn-taking techniques and 302 interruptions. The adults used approximately 86.01% of the turn-taking techniques while the counterpart group only used around 13.97%. Moreover, 93.37% of the interruptions were initiated by the adults compared with only 6.62 % initiated by the adolescents. Accordingly, the adult females were far more dominant speakers, adopted a much larger proportion of turn-taking techniques, and were considerably more inclined to use interruptions. The subsequent interview with the adolescents demonstrated that the dramatic between-group differences originated from some paralinguistic elements namely social, psychological, cultural, and power-related factors.
2. Applied Linguistics (Inspirations from neighbor disciplines)
Katayoon Afzali; Golshan Kianpoor
Abstract
Despite the fact that there are a wide range of strategies used to foster interactions in EFL conversation classrooms, many novice teachers are not aware of them. In view of this problem, the current study aimed to identify such strategies commonly used by EFL teachers in conversation classrooms. To ...
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Despite the fact that there are a wide range of strategies used to foster interactions in EFL conversation classrooms, many novice teachers are not aware of them. In view of this problem, the current study aimed to identify such strategies commonly used by EFL teachers in conversation classrooms. To this end, fifty sessions of college level conversation classrooms were observed andtheir teacher-student interactions were audio recorded. The class recordings were, then, transcribed by means of transcription symbols proposed by Hutchby and Wooffitt (2008), and were analyzed both quantitatively and qualitatively based on the taxonomy of foreign language interaction analysis system proposed by Walsh (2006). The findings revealed that teacher echo and asking questions were among the most frequent strategies teachers use to foster teacher-student interactions; however, asking questions and agreement strategies were used to foster student-student interactions.The findings have implications for teaching conversations in EFL classrooms which were discussed in the article.
