Interaction in a Chinese As a Foreign Language Classroom: a Conversation Analysis Approach

INTERACTION IN A CHINESE AS A FOREIGN LANGUAGE CLASSROOM: A CONVERSATION ANALYSIS APPROACH JOHN RYLANDER University of Hawai‘i ABSTRACT The following research involves the use of Conversation Analysis (CA) in the analysis of classroom discourse within a year-long university level Chinese as a Foreign Language (CFL) course. The goals of the research were: (a) to look at how a specific, two-part activity within a CFL classroom is bounded by a pre-allocated instructor turn, (b) how the turn-taking structure of the activity is organized in terms of question/answer adjacency pairs, (c) how repair occurs within the data and whether, as well as in what form, uptake exists, and (d) how students orient to the on-going speech in general by incorporating the lexical and grammatical elements of the conversation within their turn-taking strategy. Findings show that though the instructor provided little repair, learners were generally receptive to it and produced uptake, and that the on-going classroom interaction provided linguistic input rich enough that participants were able to incorporate lexical items from it for use in their own talk. INTRODUCTION Markee (2000) argues that Conversation Analysis (CA) be incorporated into Second Language Acquisition (SLA) research methodologies. In his book “Conversation Analysis,” he attempts to refute claims that because the focus of CA is on language use and that it is fundamentally a behavioral discipline stemming from research as a sub- discipline of sociology dating back to the late1960s, it is methodologically incongruent with SLA research, whose research purpose is the understanding of the cognitive processes involved in SLA. Markee shows that through the analysis of fine-grained transcriptions (in his case, second language classroom discourse) insights can be gained into the manner in which talk is used to achieve comprehensible input, a focus of much mainstream SLA research. The present research is concerned with whether, as Markee puts it, “fine-grained transcriptions [analyzed using CA methodology] would enable SLA researchers Second Language Studies, 23(1), Fall 2004, pp. 67-144. RYLANDER - INTERACTION IN A CHINESE AS A FOREIGN LANGUAGE CLASSROOM: 68 A CONVERSATION ANALYSIS APPROACH interested in understanding the effects on language learning of (a) conversational repairs and (b) conversational input in general to investigate whether the moment-by-moment sequential organization of such talk has any direct and observable acquisitional consequences” (p. 42). At present, research of this type is rare, especially in terms of classroom discourse, and having it could “potentially demonstrate whether and how members [i.e., classroom language learners] exploit repair on a moment-by-moment basis as a resource for learning new language” (p. 99). With this as a general research framework, the analysis presented in this research will look at (a) how a specific, two- part activity (student presentation followed by question/answer session) within a Chinese as a foreign language (CFL) classroom is bounded by a pre-allocated instructor turn, (b) how the turn-taking structure of the activity is organized in terms of question/answer adjacency pairs, (c) how repair occurs within the data and whether, as well as in what form, uptake exists, and (d) how students orient to the on-going speech in general by incorporating the lexical and grammatical elements of the conversation within their turn- taking strategy. Points (a) and (b) will detail the structures of interaction with the classroom environment under research, while points (c) and (d), both more in line with Markee’s (2000) research, will address issues of interaction and language learning in such an environment. The research foundation for the present research does not, however, stem from CA research within the field of SLA, which is at present relatively sparse. It stems from the experimental and quasi-experimental studies into interactional modification, or negotiation of meaning, that occurred throughout the mid-1980s on to the present. This research has provided rich findings into the nature of learner language input, comprehension, and output. However, it must be said that much of the basis for this experimental research was begun in the decade prior, in the 1970s, through various combinations of discourse analysis in the form of linguistic and sociolinguistic research methodologies, e.g., systemic functional linguistic analysis, interactional sociolinguistics, classroom ethnography (Gumperz & Hymes, 1972; Hatch, 1978; Mehan, 1979; Sinclair & Coulthard, 1975). In the field of SLA in the two decades since, due to the popularity of quantitative studies centered on the benchmark of statistical significance, little research using methods of discourse analysis, specifically using CA, has been done. RYLANDER - INTERACTION IN A CHINESE AS A FOREIGN LANGUAGE CLASSROOM: 69 A CONVERSATION ANALYSIS APPROACH CA’s research foundation in the 1960s and 1970s focused on the structure of everyday conversations and how competent interlocutors used language for communication. Markee (2000) defines CA as the study of “the sequential structure of talk-in-interaction in terms of interlocutors’ real-time orientations to the preferential practices that underlie, for participants and consequently also for analysts, the conversational behaviors of turn-taking and repair in different speech exchange systems” (p. 25). At the heart of CA is an emic perspective that focuses on what speakers themselves orient to within conversation. No subjective opinions about meaning are expressed by the researcher when discussing data; instead, the context of the conversation provides all necessary meaning from the turn-taking structure and the issues to which participants orient. The motivation of the analysts, then, is to root out the mechanisms of conversations, the rules by which participants abide and through which conversation is structured. This line of research is based on the assumption that conversation alone provides all necessary information. Issues of economic status, gender, and other forms of social categorization are not considered a priori to analysis of the data; nothing but what the conversation provides is salient to understanding the co-construction of meaning between the participants, what Markee (2000) calls the “underlying preferential structure of conversation” (p. 28). From an SLA perspective, CA methodology provides a record of input to which participants orient during conversation. This input can then be analyzed for message comprehension, output, and feedback, the means by which this comprehension comes about and evidence of how non-native speaking (NNS) participants incorporate input, either localized or general, into their output. Outline of Research The present research will start with a review of the literature concerning Interaction research in SLA. Following this will be a review of relevant methodological underpinnings of CA and the rationale for its use in this research. Then, a detailed description of the classroom context and the specific activity selected for analysis will be provided. Finally, conversation data will be analyzed and a discussion of findings will follow. RYLANDER - INTERACTION IN A CHINESE AS A FOREIGN LANGUAGE CLASSROOM: 70 A CONVERSATION ANALYSIS APPROACH Interaction in SLA Hatch (1978) proposed that the field of SLA adopt a research technique common in the field of first language acquisition, that of discourse analysis. She claimed that, by focusing on frequency and morpheme studies, first language learning research to date had ignored the question of how a language learner actively participates in the language learning process. First language researchers, in her view, had relied upon the mistaken assumption that language learning was simply a process of receiving language bit by bit, followed by a mental construction process whereby the learner would automatically fit the language together before using it. This computational idea, of course, reflected others of the time—notably Krashen’s Input Hypothesis relying upon “the silent period” and Chomsky’s Language Acquisition Device. Hatch, instead, claimed that, “language learning evolves out of learning how to carry on conversations” (p. 404, stress in original). Topic-nomination, attention-drawing markers, attending to meaning and scaffolded interaction found within the data, to Hatch, “suggest[ed] that…discourse structure is at the heart of sentence structure from the beginning of its development” (p. 407, stress removed). Discourse analysis of this sort is found in earlier work done by Hymes (1972) in regards to an understanding of ‘communicative competence’ and, though different in design, Selinker (1972) in terms of interlanguage (IL) performance data. SLA researchers in the 1980s, turned their attention to the effects of negotiation in interaction, focusing on how learners become more communicatively competent and display greater control of sociolinguistically appropriate, native-like language output, i.e., how negotiation develops learners’ IL toward the target language (TL) in ways other than syntactic development. Instrumental in this research was earlier work by Long (1981b, 1983a, 1983b, 1996), whose Interaction Hypothesis states that “environmental contributions to acquisition are mediated by selective attention and the learner’s developing L2 processing capacity, and that these resources are brought together most usefully, although not exclusively, during negotiation

Load more