Achieving mutual understanding when talk cannot resolve

The analyses throughout the first two chapters demonstrated that participants in these chat rooms often act in a way which allows for possible troubles in understanding, even when such forms of trouble are not explicitly displayed. Analyses also suggested that some troubles can emerge as a consequence of the nature of the setting, as has been discussed. The third analysis chapter examined instances in which trouble in understanding surfaced, and also how one of the technological affordances of the setting can be employed to deal with such trouble.30

Section 7.2 provided a single case analysis in which a participant ultimately sent an IPM to his interlocutor in order to aid understanding of the TS, which was the lexical item ‘whale’. The sending of an IPM as a form of repair came following multiple attempts to resolve the trouble through talk, via elaboration, repetition, and explanations. In fact, before sending the IPM, the speaker of the TS even spelled the word out to his interlocutor. When this was unsuccessful, the TS speaker verbally signaled that he would send a message, and soon after receipt of the message, the other speaker was able to respond to the initial question.

Although spelling out words may occur in classrooms, particularly language classrooms, it would appear to be very uncommon in other interactional settings. However, Firth (1996) provides an example from his corpus of business telephone calls, in which two interactants put a lot of work into establishing the correct spelling of one of their names. Firth argues that information such as names and telephone numbers, which are crucial in business, require the kind of attention not necessarily required of less ‘fatal’ details.

Although understanding, and so responding to, a comment in an online chat room about eating whale meat may not be as extrinsically important as obtaining the correct telephone number of an important business partner, the participants in the chat room display its importance to them at this time. While the question could easily have

30 _{Of course, this is not to claim that all exposed troubles in understanding were resolved through the}

use of IPMs. There are other sequences within the corpus in which troubles in understanding are exposed, and subsequently resolved through the regular (talk-based) repair mechanism.

been abandoned by the participants, without any serious consequences, this was clearly not desirable to them. Being understood by, and able to understand, one another is demonstrably important to the participants in these chat rooms, even when discussing matters which do not involve important business transactions.

As was discussed in Chapter 2, research has shown how L2 users, much like L1 users, can draw upon non-verbal resources in order to aid the achievement of mutual understanding (e.g. Carroll 2008; Mori and Hayashi 2006; Mori and Hasegawa 2009; Olsher 2004). For these participants, in the absence of non-verbal resources such as embodied actions and gaze, they demonstrate themselves to be resourceful in still finding means to work towards understanding beyond the verbal.

However, it was also suggested that there was an orientation on the part of the participants to use the IPM feature as a last (or at least ‘late’) resort. In Section 7.3, an episode was examined in which one interactant requested an entire response-seeking turn be sent to him in a written format. This request was denied, and a repair as reformulation appeared to be sufficient. Additionally, in all of the other examples which were provided (and in fact, in all of the other cases to emerge from the corpus), IPMs were used only as a last resort, and exclusively for a singular lexical item. This suggested a tendency by the participant to keep their interaction in spoken form.

This may be because the participants had joined the chat rooms in order to practice their English, but it may also have been partly due to the fact that the talk was the only medium which was publicly available to all participants; IPMs were precisely that – private, and there was no publicly available written forum in these chat rooms. As was explicated throughout the chapter, the participants routinely oriented to the IPM in their talk, and resumed the interaction through talk once the trouble had been resolved. An example of this is the audible change-of-state token present in all of the sequences analysed. This made the resumption of mutual understanding publicly available not only to the speaker of the TS, but also to all of the other chat room participants.

The single case provided in Section 7.4 also demonstrated the importance of connecting the written communication to the spoken floor. The episode took place over two separate occasions in the chat room. At time 1, one participant was unable to understand the response to her question about astrological star sign (quite possibly because the response given by her L1 interlocutor – ‘acquarian’ – is not an

was not forthcoming, the participant experiencing the trouble later requested the IPM again, this time apparently initiating it via an IPM. The recipient of this IPM then responded verbally, addressing the sender but being heard by all present. The sender then made her request publicly known, asking again verbally and providing an account for this request.

One more observation came from this final sequence. The second sequence in the episode came some 45 minutes after the first. As such, chat room participant experiencing the trouble demonstrates the importance to her in understanding the TS, even though the talk has progressed well beyond it. This is indicative of the kind of determination of L2 speakers which has been uncovered by other researchers, such as Egbert et al (2004). The understanding of the term ‘acquarian’ did not hinder the progressivity of the ongoing talk, in fact, the talk had long since progressed. Despite this, the participant demonstrated a desire to understand. Additionally, it once again suggests that, for participants in these chat rooms, the maintenance, and

establishment, of mutual understanding is an important matter to them, regardless of the lack of any ‘fatal’ implications (e.g. Firth 1996; Jordan and Fuller 1975) should understanding not be achieved.

This section has summarized and discussed the findings from the three analysis chapters. In the next section, the overall findings will be discussed further, and considered in relation to the existing research literature on L2 interaction and technologically-mediated talk.