● Everything the teacher does provides the learner with opportunities for encountering the language.
● Be aware of the two levels at which language enters into the classroom.
● Be aware of the different sources of input.
● The input that the students are getting is far more than just the sentences they encounter.
● Students learn what they are taught (in some sense).
9.3 Describing conversation
Describing conversation 165
● Think of a way of starting a conversation. When would you use it? How would you teach it?
● What do you do if you realize someone has not understood what you have said?
● How do you respond when someone pays you a compliment?
Focusing questions
Conversation Analysis: the discipline that studies conversational interaction by
close analysis of transcripts (Note: this is often abbreviated to CA; in the older SLA literature, however, CA stands for Contrastive Analysis, mentioned in Chapter 1)
adjacency pair: a pair of conversational turns such as question and answer repair: the way that the speaker or listener gets the interaction back on course
when something goes wrong
Keyword
When people talk to each other, they are constructing a conversation by making particular moves and by responding to the moves of others. For 50 years people have been trying to describe how this works.
The first interest in SLA research came through the work of Evelyn Hatch and her associates, who called her approach ‘discourse analysis’ (Hatch, 1978). The starting point was how L2 users interact with native speakers. The opening move in a conversation is to get someone’s attention:
A: Hi.
Next the participants need to establish what they are talking about – topic
nomination:
A: Did you see the news in the paper? At last they can say something about the topic:
A: There’s been a bridge disaster.
In a second language we may need to establish the topic more firmly. The listener has to make certain they have grasped what is being talked about – topic identification:
B: There’s been a what?
To which the other person may respond with topic clarification: A: An accident with a bridge that collapsed.
Often we need repairs to keep the conversation going: B: A fridge that collapsed?
Conversation is driven by the attempt to get meanings across to someone else; it comes out of the topic we want to talk about.
My beginners’ coursebook, People and Places (Cook, 1980), was based partly on the ideas of Hatch (1978), using conversational categories such as initiating topic (‘You know Edna?’), checking (‘What?’), repeating (‘Edna?’), stating facts (‘Edna is an old-age-pensioner’) and confirming (‘Yes, that’s right’). These were incorporated into a teaching exercise called a conversational exchange. First students get some sample exchanges, with alternative forms for each move:
identifying: A: My name’s Mickey Mouse.
checking: B: What?
confirming: A: Mickey Mouse.
acknowledging: B: Oh I see, Mickey Mouse.
Then they have to invent exchanges with other celebrity names taken from pic- tures; finally they supply names of their own to put into the exchange. While this teaching exercise reflected conversational interaction, it was highly controlled; the students were not negotiating for meaning so much as learning the patterns and moves for negotiating for meaning. A similar type of exercise is used in
Touchstone (McCarthy et al., 2005); students match questions and answers in a
dialogue, ‘Complete the conversations’ in fill-in sentences and then practise cor- rect responses to ‘Thank you’ and ‘I’m sorry’.
This view of conversation relates to the speech act theory derived from philoso- phy or linguistics, which assigns functions to utterances: ‘Open the door’ is mak- ing a command; ‘Why is the door open?’ is making a question, and so on. This is closer to Lang4, the social side of language. Such functions of speech formed the
basis for the communicative teaching approach, seen in the functional/notional syllabus advocated by David Wilkins (1972). Its influence can be seen in almost any coursebook to this day. Just Right (Harmer, 2004), for instance, teaches func- tions such as ‘making promises’, ‘paying compliments’ and ‘giving opinions’.
The difficulty with teaching functions has often been the disconnection from the structure of conversation involved in teaching one function at a time; how do you practise paying compliments without knowing when to pay a compliment or how to reply to it? Hatch’s conversational structure provided one way of connect- ing functions to conversational moves. Hence People and Places taught compli- menting as part of a three-move interaction:
stating: Simon: This is my new jacket.
exclaiming: Helen: What a smart jacket!
complimenting: Helen: It suits you.
Students had to continue in this vein by commenting on the other things that Simon and Helen were wearing in their pictures and then describing the clothes of other students.
Paul Seedhouse (2004) points out how this type of approach differs from the discipline of Conversation Analysis (CA) that it superficially resembles. CA does not try to establish categories and units in a fixed structure; instead it looks at a slice of conversational interaction and tries to work out what is going on from the point of view of the participants; ‘For those trying to understand a bit of talk, the key question about any of its aspects is – why that now?’ (Schegloff et al., 2002).
The most obvious feature of interaction is that people take turns to speak. One exchange of turns is the adjacency pair:
A: What’s the time? B: Five o’clock.
The move by the first speaker is followed by a related move by the second speaker, chosen out of a limited range of acceptable options. Sometimes, as in question and answer, the second speaker has little choice; after compliments, there may be a less conventional range of responses; after stating opinion:
‘I love Picasso’s blue period.’
there may be an obvious agreeing/disagreeing move: ‘I can’t stand it.’
or a more nebulous range of options. While the second speaker may indeed decide to say nothing at all, this is a highly marked option: deliberately failing to respond to ‘Good morning’ would be the height of rudeness, in CA amounting to a refusal to accept social solidarity.
The two parts of the adjacency pair, however, do not necessarily follow each other:
A: What’s the time?
B: Why do you want to know? A: So I can put this letter in the post. B: Five o’clock. You’re too late.
The speakers keep an ongoing idea of the adjacency pair in their minds even when they are diverting onto side issues. In an early experiment (Cook, 1981), I tried to see the extent to which the concept of the adjacency pair was established in L2 users’ minds by getting them to supply first or second moves, finding that the adjacency pair indeed had psychological reality for them.
Central to the idea of interaction is what happens when it goes wrong – the organization of repair. According to Emanuel Schegloff et al. (2002), this is not the same as the failure to communicate covered by the communication strategies described in Chapter 6, but is an interruption, after which interaction is restored. Usually a distinction is made between self-initiated repair by the same person:
A: Where’s the saucepan? Sorry, the frying pan. and other-initiated repair by the other speaker:
A: Where’s the saucepan? B: Where’s the what? A: The saucepan.
B: Oh, it’s on the bottom shelf.
For the classroom this occurs at two levels; one is the repair of the classroom inter- action itself, where the teacher or students have to make clear what is going on, which may well be in the first language; the other is at the level of the interaction sequence of the language learning activity, which will normally be in the second language. Schegloff et al. (2002) point out that repair is the essence of the L2
classroom interaction and that much depends on how people understand and produce self-repair in a second language.
While CA has often been concerned with interaction in constrained institutional settings, this is seen as related to wider settings rather than unique. The language teaching classroom has its own characteristic forms of turn-taking, adjacency pair, repair, and so on. Paul Seedhouse (2004) shows how turn-taking depends on the task involved, particularly crucial in task-based learning. The problem with applying CA to language teaching, however, is that its aim is to describe conversational interaction as it happens, rather like a Lang3sense of language as a set of external
sentences. But it does not say how the participants acquire the ability to interact and so help with how to teach it. It may be possible to deduce how the learner is proceeding and what the teacher should do, but this depends largely on other learning theories and approaches, such as the interaction hypothesis dealt with in Chapter 12, not on Conversation Analysis itself. A CA analysis can tell us whether a repair occurred and whether it was successful, but it cannot in itself say whether anything was learnt.