Stephen van Vlack

Sookmyung Women`s University

Graduate School of TESOL

Discourse Analysis

(Spring 2006)

Week 8 - McCarthy, Chapter 5 and PD, Chapter 7 and James (1998) Chapter 8 - Answers

1. There are several forms and patterns of different types of talk: adjacency pairs, exchanges, turn

taking, transactions and topics, interactional and transactional talk, etc. Choose one and briefly explain about it, and consider whether there are things that can be taught and practiced to assist language learning (McC5)

Adjacency pairs

The whole idea behind adjacency pairs is that some utterances cannot exist alone. They can only be understood as a response to an initial utterance. Rather than thinking about a certain utterance triggering a response, we need to think the other way around. The response is incomprehensible and weird without the initial utterance. In essence, these utterances come in pairs. This does not, however, mean that they are by any means fixed or solely formulaic. While some adjacency pair might seem rather formulaic, for example Good morning followed by Good morning, but they often aren`t as Good morning can just as easily be followed by Oh yes. Isn`t it really. So as with everything else we are finding out in relation to language and speaking in particular, there are formulas, but they are often extended.

Turn-taking

In real interactions, turn-taking occurs smoothly, with only little overlap and interruption, and only very brief silences between turns. Moreover, turn-taking shows three major features: 1) back-channeling, which is showing to the speaker that I am attending to the message with such markers as, mm, ah-ha, yeah, no, right, and sure 2) utterance-completions, which means the listener completes the utterances for the speaker and 3) overlaps, which means that more than one person speak at the same time. When the turn shifts, there often exist several linguistic devices such as syntactic completeness, changes in the pitch level (falling intonation to signal one's turn will be ended soon), among others to show that he speaker is relinquishing her or his turn. In addition, speakers need to follow certain conventions to get their own turn: they need to choose the right form based on formality and appropriacy to the situation. In order to get the turn, therefore, we need to be attentive to linguistic clues mentioned above and follow certain conventions which helps choose the right form based on formality and appropriacy to the situation

            Turn taking in itself is something that may not need to be 'taught', but specific linguistic realizations can be presented and practiced and significant cultural differences can at least be pointed out to the learner so that learners can function appropriately in terms of ending or getting their turn. In order to do so, teachers need to choose the right teaching materials. That is, teaching materials needs to be authentic so that learners can get exposed to how turn-taking works in real situations. Teachers also need to be careful when they design classroom activities. The looser the restrictions on what and when people may say, the more naturally the turn-taking emerges. Last but not least, teachers need to raise learners' cultural awareness with regard to turn-taking. Teachers can introduce the idea that different cultures require different norms of turn-taking by having them compare and contrast learners' culture and the target culture, or just draw their attention to the target norms of the target culture. In this respect things like power distance are important variables. Teachers can give explicit instruction on body language and linguistic devices which can be used to realize turn-taking.

Transactions

Transactions refer to talks for getting business done, whose openings and closings are marked with markers such as right, now, so, okay, or high key for openings and low key for closings. The optimal approach for practicing transactional talk is task-based learning where learners open and close talks in order to achieve a specified goal within a specified time limit. Transactional talk, as mentioned in McCarthy (1991), has been handled extensively and virtually as the only type of speaking in the communicative approach, so teachers are often well-versed in this, particularly in contrast to other types of speaking.

Topics

There are various definitions for a topic: 1) structural view - a talk bounded by certain topic and/or transactional markers(lexical and phonological markers), 2) semantic view - with different content, 3) interactive view - more than one person makes an utterance relevant to it, 4) pragmatic view - perceived as relevant by participants in talk, 5) purely surface cohesion view - where chains of lexical cohesion peter out, and 6) dominating view - titles for the subject matter of speech events. Then, how do topics start, grow, change, and end? Topics are raised for a variety of reasons to achieve a certain goal or just to keep the talk going. And change in topics is signaled either by linguistic resources which include lexical devices (changes in vocabulary) and phonological devices (falling intonation and a short pause for ending a topic jumping to high key for opening a new topic).

            So far, language teachers have concentrated on the vocabulary of topics. But the interactive features of topics also can be taught and practiced such as the use of markers (opening and closing), pitch changes, summarizing and evaluating.

Interactional and transactional talk

Transactional talk, as mentioned above is for getting business done in the world. For example, people talk in order to produce some change in the situation that pertains. On the other hand, interactional talk is for establishing roles and relationships with another persons prior to transactional talk, confirming and consolidating relationships, expressing solidarity, and so on. However, the talk is hardly all one thing or the other. In natural data, even in the most strictly transactional of settings, people often engage in interactional talk such as exchanging chat about the weather and many unpredictable things. It has implications for classroom teaching. As Belton(1988) mentions, teachers have over emphasised transactional language at the expense of interactional. By teaching students these talk style, we can help them not to be embarrassed when they face unpredictable interactional talk before transactional talk.

Stories, anecdotes, jokes

Stories, anecdotes, and jokes are an important part of being a proficient language speaker. The ability to tell a good story or joke is a highly regarded talent, probably in all cultures. Discourse analysts tries to describe what all narratives have in common. One analyst, Labov (1972) specified elements that are commonly found in normal narratives. They are as follows.

(Abstracts) : short statements of what the story is going to be about

e.g) I must tell you about an embarrassing moment yesterday.

Orientation : the time, place and characters for the reader/listener

e.g) you know that secretary in our office, well, last week..

Complicating events : the main events that make the story happen

e.g) Xerox machine caught fire.

Resolutions : how the events sort themselves out

e.g) and she got $2000 compensation

(Codas) : a bridge between the story world and the moment of telling

e.g) and ever since, I've never been able to look at a mango without feeling sick.

Evaluation : make the story worth listening to /reading 1) by directly telling one's audience 2) by a number of devices internal to the story exaggeration (he came in with this huge, gi-normous watermelon.) recreating noises (and she went scr-r-r-u-nch, splat) 3) by constantly evaluating individual events

Then why do we learn these? Because, some things can be observed and taught and practised in relation to storytelling, and listening activities based on storytelling are a good way of raising awareness of narrative skills. To do this, we need to learn markers that are used in narratives : common openers, regularly occurring markers for complicating events

(1) common openers

Did I tell you about....

Have you heard the one about...

I had a funny experience last week..

(2) regularly occurring markers for complicating events

 Next thing we knew...

 And as if that wasn't enough..

The markers mentioned above are not given in dictionaries, and often absent from coursebooks too, though they are every bit as important as the written-text counterparts such as 'once upon a time.' When we look at real data, two things are notable. The first thing is about stories which are collaboratively made by more than one person. Next one is about listener who is active by constantly reacting and asking questions.

Here are also teaching implication. Teachers who want to train learners in narrative skills would do well to think of listeners as well as tellers. Activities involving joint telling are also possible using real data from radio, television chat show. Because these make more authentic contexts than the single narrator telling a tale to a wall of silence.

Speech and grammar

In written language, clause and sentence structure are clearly defined.

However, in speech, especially in unprepared speech, there are several ungrammatical mistakes even made by native speakers. Then what are the mistakes? They are verbless clauses, ellipses, lack of concord and omitted relative particles, false starts, slips of the tongue and so on.

e.g) The thing is is that I don't know her number.

There's a few problems are likely to crop up.

Therefore, language teachers wishing to encourage natural talk have to adjust their standards when it comes to correcting learners. That is we need to decide which features we should correct and which are the sorts os features we might let pass as typical of the kinds of things found even in native-speaker conversational.

2. What are some of the most important variables in teaching pragmatics in the classroom? (PD7)

The most important variables that we need to think about when teaching pragmatics are really no different than the variables in general language teaching. In fact we may go so far as to say that teaching pragmatics really is the basis of general language teaching or at least it should be. So obviously we have learner variables which involve age, proficiency, learning history, the goals of the learner, and of course affective variables that each learner has in relation to the target language. We also have, of course, situational variables which relate to how many people we have in the class, how many hours each week we have with the students and how those hours are setup, and of course the class syllabus itself. In designing our course we need to try to think about aspects of discourse (texts), pragmatics, and of course how people are supposed to learn pragmatics. This last element is what is often called interlanguage pragmatics. So we need to have a fixed idea for all of these different sides. We need to have a good idea about what texts are and how they're produced blah, blah, blah as well as underlying pragmatics skills or pragmatic competence and how this is supposed to develop within an individual. This knowledge must be tempered with classroom knowledge. This is all a part of good teaching practice regardless of which skill area we are focussing on.

3. What are the basic research findings of classroom pragmatics instruction? (PD7)

Pure and simple, the main research findings on pragmatic construction in the classroom, and remember this means particular pragmatic instruction in a foreign language classroom, is that overt instruction seems to be more effective then covert instruction. The idea being that overt instruction will encourage or hopefully lead to explicit learning. Purely covert instruction, on the other hand, is generally thought to lead to more implicit types of learning. It might seem strange to us (considering Krashen`s distinction) and possibly like a bit of a contradiction to try to encourage more explicit learning. Certainly we are told in teaching programs that implicit learning is often better and more effective, particularly when we think about performance. Strictly speaking and based on the research evidence this is not seem to be absolutely true. One way of explaining this is through the noticing hypothesis. The idea being that while we need implicit learning to fire up certain types of neural mechanisms and we also need to notice certain elements of our own speech in relation to the speech we are hearing. We need to notice patterns and gaps between our own patterns and patterns that others produce, both those more (and here`s what they forget to tell you) also less proficient than ourselves. A tremendous amount of covert instruction will provide people with patterns and at some level they will store and have all the patterns they will need, but there's no guarantee that they'll actually focus their attention on the patterns that we want them to, or be able to produce them. For this reason a certain amount of overt teaching would seem to be beneficial, and this is certainly supported by the results of these studies. So what we really find is that we certainly need both overt and covert teaching simply because input alone does not lead to intake or output.

            Based on what we said last week we can now not only say that it is better, potentially anyway, to learn something in the classroom as opposed to going to the target language environment, but within the classroom itself a certain amount of overt teaching is also beneficial. Of course there are serious age-related variables to this. Adults are much better at focusing attention and understanding concepts. Therefore, if we have adult students they will certainly benefit from a kind of fixed instruction which guides them and prepares them to deal with both input and practice. For children who, depending on their age, do not understand concepts very well, even their own language, then more overt instruction may not help or at least we need to think very carefully about how we present our overt instruction. For children overt instruction might come much better packaged in the form of directed feedback and not necessarily explanations or presentations of concepts.

4. What are some of the main teaching approaches and issues in focused pragmatics instruction(PD7)

There is overt and convert. Obviously we need to use both but in what proportion and how? The answer is not easy because it really depends on the different variables we mentioned above. In general we should be using much more covert teaching than overt and neither should appear in a solid boring block as we so often do in the classroom. They should both be used and as naturally as possible as we discussed in our new type of classroom environment where we build or create a socialized setting. Input is forever the key!

5. What are some of the major design issues in focused pragmatics instruction? (PD7)

Based on our answer to the above question it seems to be clear that some overt teaching is helpful in developing pragmatic skills and speaking prowess in general. Exactly how much overt instruction and how it should be applied is are serious questions that need to be answered. The research we read in the chapter really doesn't mention very much about how people went about teaching overtly. When we think of teaching overtly we think of the implementation of a top-down teaching process. This is certainly one aspect, or one possible aspect of overtly teaching pragmatic skills. We did simply mention before that a piece of input is supplied or before an activity aspects of pragmatics and pragmatic development. So we might actually teach our students something about speech acts by explaining about them or at least naming them. Another approach is in the types of input we choose. Even though we are teaching certain things overtly the input that we give our students is still the most important aspect of our teaching. So we need to find good input and useful input based on what we now know about discourse and how discourse is produced. We also need to make sure that we sequence our input according to elements of pragmatic development. What we deal with the input is that a very important aspect or technique in teaching pragmatics. Nunan (1989) makes an important distinction between what he calls real world type activities and pedagogical activities. Real world types of activities would be things that you would expect your students to have to do in the real world, such as making a phone call, filling out a form, making a presentation. Pedagogical activities, on the other hand, are activities which the students would really only expect to encounter in the classroom. We need to make sure that we used both types of activities in developing pragmatic skill. And getting our students to do things rather than giving top-down explanations we might intermingle or mix and match pedagogical activities, which would certainly be more overt, and real world activities which are much more covert. Finally, one of the last elements of design and when we are thinking about focused pragmatics instruction is feedback. The whole point of this pragmatic focus or overtness in teaching pragmatics, is so that the students can actually notice what is going on in the input and in their output. They somehow need to identify the mismatch between what they do in what they have observed other skill in the type of input that they receive which of course should be good input. Feedback that is extremely important element in getting them to notice. The trick in giving feedback is to make it as overt as possible without stopping a conversation or damaging the ego of the speaker. In doing so the probably simplest rule that we can think of would be to try to make the input meaningful and natural.

6. Why do teachers correct errors and should they really do so? (Ja8)

Despite all the worry about the negative effects of error correction on classroom interactions, there are two main reasons why teachers need to correct errors. The first of these is simply that students want teachers to correct their errors. Of course there are variables related to this age is certainly one and it might be argued that adults prefer to have errors corrected not because of some sort of maturational difference from children but rather simply because that is the learning culture they have been brought up in. They want errors corrected because that is what they are used to, maybe. But there is more to it than that. Another variable has to do with speaking as opposed to writing. Certainly it is easier, for both teachers and students, to correct written errors as opposed to speaking ones. It is easier for the teacher to do because there is time for consideration and the whole product lies in front of her so she can really choose where things should be corrected and how. Written correction is easier for students because it is private, and because it is always there. It has a lasting effect. The second reason teachers should correct errors is that is does work. Despite some L1 reports of the ineffectual nature of error correction (the claim is that children have to be ready to understand the error correction - (see Pienemann`s Processability Theory), there are also reports that error correction does indeed work, particularly in an Foreign Language (FL) setting where there is much less input available.

            While error correction does work, it must also be acknowledged that it is a double edged sword. While error correction can enhance a students noticing it can also be a weapon against a learner`s feelings and teachers and students do use it in this way to show their individual power over others. Bearing this in mind, we need to create a classroom situation where error correction is given as a way of teaching. It should be taken to that next level, it is not just to stop them from making the same mistake again, or ever to punish a student for making a mistake. Error correction should be used as a way of giving knowledge which enhances their linguistic knowledge.

7. What are some different ways of correcting errors? (Ja8)

In the same way that we said that problems come in three types (slips, mistakes, errors), there are basically three types of responses two errors. They are feedback, correction, and remediation. In the order in which they are presented, each of these is a little more specific than the other. Feedback could include a simple facial expression of confusion (not anger) or a sound like `huh`. Correction involves telling the students that there was a problem and possibly identify the problem, `there was a problem with the tense`. Remediation involves explaining not only what was wrong but what a better replacement might be and why the replacement is better (it does not involve trying to explain why that particular mistake was made). It should be remembered that these three are not mutually exclusive. We can use all three if need be.

            As far as correction (we will use the word `correction` as our generic term here) goes, there are three things that we want to remember which will hopefully make our correction more useful for the students.

Correct efficiently

Correction should be sensitive

Match correction to student preferences

As a general rule correct as little as possible while adhering to the three maxims (we can call them that) above. Keep your correction balanced among those three and fine-tune it for each individual student. Also, take into consideration that less is sometimes more. Following suggestions from Vygotsky and socioculturalism we can think of more formal types of error corrections as scaffolding. As with scaffolding in general, only scaffold when necessary. Error correction seems to work best when it is delivered at the level required by the student. Try feedback first and if that does not get the student to realize the error, then try correction and if that doesn`t work, then and only then try remediation. This idea needs to be linked as well with simple classroom management practices. Remediation might be something that might be best used with the whole class and not individuals as regards speaking.

8. How is error correction related to noticing and why is this important? (Ja8)

It should be quite clear to us how error correction might relation to noticing. There is so much going on in a speaking-focussed class and so quickly that students might not be able to notice what they need to. Everything that is going on (that is perceived) in the class will become part of active memory. Through error correction we want to turn at least some of these things into accessible memory. We do this by having students notice it, by creating a special event which fosters noticing and through this more specific, meaningful memories. At a very basic level speakers need to be aware not only of what they are saying hut how they are saying it and how it might vary from other ways that more proficient speakers might achieve a similar function in a similar situation. Good error correction can link all those things together, not for all utterances obviously, but for the ones that matter, the ones where there is a mismatch or a lag. That is the power of error correction.