Spoken Language & Adjacency Pairs

Spoken Language Overview

• Spoken language is broad, and the statistical distribution of speech types in daily life is not definitively known.
• The frequency of different speech types depends on one's daily occupation and contacts.
• Speech types include telephone calls, service encounters, interviews, classroom interactions, rituals, monologues, language-in-action and casual conversation.
• Language teachers rely on intuition to select relevant forms of talk to study and practice
• Forms of talk to investigate include casual conversation, language-in-action, monologues, telephone calls, service encounters, and classroom talk.

Adjacency Pairs

• Utterances in talk are often mutually dependent.
• A question predicts an answer, and an answer presupposes a question.
• Utterance requirements can be stated in terms of expected responses and presuppositions.
• Examples of utterance functions with expected responses include:
  • Greeting - Greeting
  • Congratulation - Thanks
  • Apology - Acceptance
  • Inform - Acknowledge
  • Leave-taking - Leave-taking
• Pairs like greeting-greeting and apology-acceptance are called adjacency pairs (Schegloff & Sacks, 1973).
• The function of the first pair-part is confirmed when contextualized with the second pair-part and vice versa.
• 'Hello' can be a greeting, an identification request, or an expression of surprise.
• An imperative first pair-part can be classified functionally as an informing move, based on the acknowledging second pair-part.
• Ritualized first pair-parts may have an identical second pair-part (e.g., hello - hello, happy New Year - happy New Year).
• Other pairs anticipate a different second pair-part (congratulations – thanks).
• A second pair-part like "thanks" presupposes a range of first pair-parts including offers, apologies, informing moves, congratulations, commiserations.
• Other first pair-parts have multiple possibilities, including invitations.
• Politeness codes require a more elaborate response than a bald "No."
• Polite refusal includes appreciation, softener, reason, and face-saver, typically found between friends/colleagues in informal situations.
• More intimate situations may omit the softener.
• Different roles and settings will create different sequences
• Native speakers preface invitations, while non-native speakers may be too formal or blunt.
• Native speakers preface disagreement with partial agreement and softeners (Pearson, 1986).
• Role-play activities require pre-teaching linguistic elements for specific behaviors to simulate real-life discourse.
• Native/non-native speaker differences enable teachers to pinpoint deficiencies.
• Non-native speakers resort to ritualized apology formulae due to lower competence.
• Native speakers used other strategies like 'repair offers' or accusation challenges.
• Native speakers elaborate apologies, so linguistic equipment is vital in a second language.
• Pre-teaching strategies and language is important, because role plays can become tests that learners are certain to fail, instead of learning.
• Formula-based functional teaching was popular in the 1970s
• Native speakers have a wider range of formulaic and non-formulaic language.
• Adjacency pairs highlight the importance of creating minimal contexts when teaching common functions, and the structure is determined by role and setting.
• Chapter 1 notes the importance of follow-up moves in signaling function.

Exchanges

• Exchanges are the central unit in Birmingham-type analysis of classroom talk.

• Exchanges are independently observable entities.

• Adjacency pairs may be within them.

• First and second pair-parts don't necessarily coincide with initiating and responding moves.

• Adjacency pairing occurs in initiation and response (statement of achievement - congratulation), as well as the responding and follow-up move (congratulation - thanks).

• Three-part exchanges in traditional classrooms feature teacher initiation and follow-up, with students restricted to responding.

• Language classrooms impoverish opportunities to practice utterances and learners get limited initiating roles.

• Everyday talk involves evaluating the content of utterances, unlike classroom settings.

• Classroom talk involves the teacher evaluating the quality of utterances in terms of correctness and fluency.

• Common follow-up moves include:

  • being nice
  • that's interesting
  • oh dear
  • how awful
  • lucky you
  • oh no
  • I see
  • did you
  • right

• Evaluative moves occur also in responding moves in informing exchanges.

• Evaluations are of interest since they often do not directly translate language to language, like Swedish or Spanish to English.

• Evaluations are absent from learner’s conversational discourse, and learners may use vocalizations that can be culturally peculiar in English.

• Function-chain activities can help learners practice adjacency pairs.

• A sequence of functions is decided upon, and role cards are given to pairs that teach events to generate functions.

Role Play

• Role play involves asking for and giving topical information and saying one is unable to give information.
• Speaking activities design is crucial, especially the roles.
• Interviewing allows question-answer sequences
• A 'journalistic' interviewer focuses on information rather than exchanging, with low follow-up moves.
• Follow up moves include:
  • helping in utterances
  • 'became ill', 'you might go back'

Learner Data

• The absence of a feature in learner talk may mean the activity does not generate its natural use.
• The intimate relationship between exchange structure, role and setting means that designing activities affects patterns.
• Interview-style patterns are a poor substitute for natural conversation, and extended patterns where initiate-respond-initiate-respond would prompt interrogation.

Turn-taking

• Turn-taking involves discourse analysts observing how participants organize themselves to take turns at talk
• Natural discourse has smooth turns with limited overlap and brief silences.
• People take turns when selected or nominated by a speaker (self-selection).
• Listeners watch syntactic completeness and pitch level clues for turn closing.
• Linguistic devices are used to get the turn outside normal flow/settings.
• Formality of linguistic devices varies based on setting.
• Lack of turn-taking can be shown by back-channel responses, ex: mm, ah-ha, yeah, and short words/phrases.
• Back-channel realisations are also varied interestingly across culture.
• Speakers predict utterances, also completing and overlapping them.
• Natural data is often seemingly chaotic due to overlap.
• Messy talk would not be used as a dialogue, and real speech is idealized in teaching materials.
• Traditional classrooms had very ordered turn-taking under the teacher's control.
• Recent trends attempt to disrupt turn-taking in the traditional classroom, but there are issues with designs.
• Individuals intent on contributions pay too little attention and back-channel and utterance completion does not occur.
• Looser restrictions on speech allow for natural turn-taking and, for all its faults, contains natural turn-taking.
• The problem involves getting the target type instead of inhibiting it and dominant speakers can grab too many turns, as gender can be a factor
• Giving restricted roles helps with dominant speakers, while role provides anonymity for the shy.
• Some cultures give silence a more acceptable role, and discourse analysts try to describe different orientations
• Some cultures decree talk be kept going to buy time, or others decree that face be preserved, which can cause conversational breakdowns.
• English may prompt specific awareness training for turn giving or gaining; Body language such as inhalation and head movement as a turn-seeking signal, a drop in pitch, or grammatical tags.
• Direct teaching of lexical turn management can take place.
• Conventional phrases for interrupting and pre-planning or closing turns can happen.
• Turn-taking may not need ‘teaching’, but the realisations can be presented to the learner and practiced.

Transactions and Topics

• Transaction markers are marked in classrooms, surgeries, and interviews and present in conversation.
• Teachers can isolate transaction markers to divide lessons.
• Students can see how lessons can translate into languages, and the teacher marks out the boundary.
• Transaction boundary task will limit the given time.
• Task-based learning helps learner-management of discourse, while groups achieve goals and create real world outcomes.
• Spontaneous discussions among group members will often lead to opening and closing markers.
• It is the activity of responsibility will create transaction markers.
• Boundary makers raise awareness, and another way that it can be raised is through 'topping-and-tailing' activities, by leaving out key moments.

Topics

• Lingusitic markers used to signal a topic shift include: lexical (by the way, to change the subject) or phonological cues (changes in pitch).
• Different categories can be used including: semantic categories (holidays, buying a house), interactive (needs others to engage) or purely surface cohesive devices (chains of lexical cohesion).
• Topics can be the reason for talking, or arise because people are talking.
• "Three or two buttons" is a subtopic that never becomes a conversation.
• Talk is essential to achieving a specific goal, in most cases often used to continue talking, but people are always together.
• Cues include lexical or phonological ones that will show that the stop has sufficiently explored.
• Boundary markers can show the topic end, intonation, while C introduces a sub topic.
• A speaker behaviour has been the observation about the topic.
• Listeners must be active.
• Active readers will constantly predict what the message is based on the language they are using

Interactional and Transactional Talk

• Transactional talk gets the task done.
• Interactional talk lubricates social wheels.
• Extract (5.13) was on transactional talk and (5.14) was on chatting about someone.
• Worlds are always in small ways changed during conversational interaction.
• People often exchange chat during interactions.

Stories, Anecdotes, Jokes

• Conversation with friend will yield conversation.
• Stories have elements, such as the following (Labov model)
  • Abstract
  • Orientation
  • Complicating event
  • Resolution
  • Coda
• Evaluation is a element weaving in and out of data.
• Devices internal to the story include: exaggeration, recreating noises or evaluating individual events.
• Evaluation is not always the best term, so " validation might be more appropiate.
• Expect to tell decent stories is a tall order.
• Openers to spoken stories include the following list
• I'll always remember the time...
• Did I ever tell you about...
• Then there was the time we....
• I must tell you about...
• Have you heard the one about...
• You'll never guess what happened yesterday...
• I heard a good one the other day...
• I had a funny experience last week...

Markers Used for Complicated Events Include

• And then, suddenly/out of the blue...
• Next thing we knew...
• And as if that wasn't enough...
• Then guess what happened...

Useful Language in Codas

• Makes you wonder
• So, there we are
• And that was it, really
• Real day is useful, along with listener details, details are jointly recalled or an agreed version arrives through aternating contributions.
• Listeners react to the data.
• Conversational data is joint enterprise. Lower lever has moment by moment discourse skills and not evaluations by the teller or listener.

Speech and Grammar

• Teachers adjust standards in writing.

Conclusion

• Discourse can be achieved among any topic with any speaker, while those listeners maintain control of the topics and subjects
• Most important of all is A tells B and B tells A, with similar stories being triggered by speakers Activities help to the design more effective speaking activities