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APPLI ED LI NGUISTICS
Applied Linguistics
Volume 30 Number 1 March 2009
Volume 30 Number 1 March 2009
ISSN 0142-6001
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APPLIED LINGUISTICS Volume 30 Number 1 March 2009 CONTENTS Articles The Effects of Input-Based Tasks on the Development of Learners’ Pragmatic Proficiency MASAHIRO TAKIMOTO Soliciting Teacher Attention in an L2 Classroom: Affect Displays, Classroom Artefacts, and Embodied Action ASTA CEKAITE ‘Lego my keego!’: An Analysis of Language Play in a Beginning Japanese as a Foreign Language Classroom CADE BUSHNELL A Novel Approach to Creating Disambiguated Multilingual Dictionaries IGOR BOGUSLAVSKY, JESU´S CARDEN˜OSA and CAROLINA GALLARDO
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26
49
70
Interpreting Inexplicit Language during Courtroom Examination JIEUN LEE Memorial Article: John Sinclair (1933–2007) The Search for Units of Meaning: Sinclair on Empirical Semantics MICHAEL STUBBS
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FORUM Ideology in Applied Linguistics for Language Teaching ALAN WATERS
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REVIEWS Nikolas Coupland: Style: Language Variation and Identity GEOFF HALL Malcolm Coulthard and Alison Johnson: An Introduction to Forensic Linguistics: Language in Evidence FRANCES ROCK D. Block: Second Language Identities SAMANTHA NG
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147 150
Alastair McLauchlan: The Negative L2 Climate: Understanding Attrition Among Second Language Students JIM COLEMAN
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ERRATUM
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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
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Applied Linguistics 30/1: 1–25 doi:10.1093/applin/amm049
ß Oxford University Press 2007
Advance Access published on 12 December 2007
The Effects of Input-Based Tasks on the Development of Learners’ Pragmatic Proficiency MASAHIRO TAKIMOTO The present study evaluates the relative effectiveness of three types of input-based approaches for teaching English polite request forms to sixty Japanese learners of English: (a) structured input tasks with explicit information; (b) problem-solving tasks; and (c) structured input tasks without explicit information. Treatment group performance was compared with control group performance on pre-tests, post-tests, and follow-up tests consisting of a discourse completion test, a role-play test, a listening test, and an acceptability judgement test. The results revealed that the three treatment groups performed significantly better than the control group. However, the group that received the structured input tasks with explicit information did not maintain the positive effects of the treatment between the post-test and follow-up test on the listening test component.
INTRODUCTION Among the issues in second language (L2) pragmatics, a fundamental question is which instructional approaches are most effective for teaching L2 pragmatics. Most studies that compare the effectiveness of different teaching approaches select two types of awareness-oriented instruction, explicit and implicit instruction. Kasper and Rose (2002) argued that some form of awareness-oriented instruction is necessary because pragmalinguistic forms and sociopragmatic rules are often not salient enough for learners and that mere exposure to these rules in action does not help learners notice them. Recent studies within the awareness-oriented instruction framework have lent empirical support to this claim (e.g. Alco´n 2005; Koike and Pearson 2005; Martı´nez-Flor and Fukuya 2005). Alco´n (2005) reported that learners’ awareness of a target pragmatic feature, request strategies, benefited from both types of awareness-oriented instruction. Similarly, findings in Koike and Pearson (2005) indicated that treatment groups with these types of awareness-oriented instruction became aware of not only a greater number of options for expressing suggestions but also the necessity for performing pragmatic mitigation more quickly than the control group. Finally, Martinez-Flor and Fukuya (2005) showed that groups exposed to both types of awareness-oriented instruction improved in their production of pragmatically appropriate suggestions. Two key issues here are the extent to which it is possible to provide learners with opportunities for developing
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their pragmatic proficiency and the level of awareness learners should develop to improve their pragmatic proficiency.
AWARENESS-ORIENTED INPUT-BASED INSTRUCTION The present study bases its definition of awareness-oriented instruction, explicit/implicit instruction, on Jeon and Kaya (2006) which described instruction as a continuum between the absolutely explicit and the absolutely implicit extremes. The extent to which the target of the instruction is made overt to the learners determines the positioning of that kind of instruction between explicit and implicit poles. To test claims about the role of awareness and attention in L2 learning, researchers have conducted a number of interventional studies on grammar and pragmatics teaching. Norris and Ortega’s (2001) meta-analysis of instructional studies, with an emphasis on morphosyntax research, suggested the superiority of explicit instruction (e.g. Fotos and Ellis 1991) over implicit instruction (e.g. DeKeyser 1995; Robinson 1996). Jeon and Kaya’s (2006) meta-analysis on the role of instruction in the development of L2 pragmatics also indicated that explicit instruction is more effective than implicit instruction (for explicit instruction see Lyster 1994; Witten 2000; for implicit instruction see Fukuya and Zhang 2002). However, Jeon and Kaya (2006) noted that due to limited available data, the seemingly superior effects of explicit pragmatic instruction should not be taken as definitive but should be examined in greater detail in future studies. In the existing literature on teaching pragmatics, some interventional studies have shown that pragmatic features can be taught explicitly together with input enhancement activities whereas others have shown that pragmatic features can be taught implicitly with input enhancement activities (for explicit instruction see House 1996; Tateyama et al. 1997; Rose and Ng 2001; Takahashi 2001; for implicit instruction see Takahashi 2005). A review of interventional studies on input-based teaching of L2 pragmatics reveals that the studies were largely motivated by the theories and frameworks built for grammar learning. Ellis (2003) explained that two types of input-based approaches, structured input and consciousness-raising, can be best used in teaching grammar. The adaptability of both approaches to the teaching of L2 pragmatics will be examined thoroughly in the present study.
Structured input Research on the development of grammatical ability offers L2 pragmatics ways of conceptualizing and implementing different instructional approaches, in particular structured input tasks.
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The structured input task occupies an important part in processing instruction. According to VanPatten (1996), processing instruction entails three basic features: 1 an explanation of the relationship between a given form and the meaning it can convey; 2 information about processing strategies, showing learners how natural processing strategies may not work to their benefit; and 3 structured input activities in which learners are given the opportunity to process form in the input in a controlled situation so that better formmeaning connections might happen compared with what might happen in less controlled situations (VanPatten 1996: 60). A number of grammar teaching studies have provided empirical evidence that structural input tasks themselves, without explicit information, are effective in improving learners’ grammatical proficiency level (e.g. VanPatten and Oikennon 1996). Ellis (1997) argued that structured input texts must be designed in such a way that the target forms are frequent, the meanings of the target forms are clear, and comprehending the target forms is essential for comprehending the whole text. Although Ellis described two ways of structuring input, input flooding and interpretation tasks, only the latter is of direct relevance to the present study. The following are general principles for the design of interpretation tasks (Ellis 1997). 1 An interpretation activity consists of a stimulus to which learners must make some kind of response. 2 The stimulus can take the form of spoken or written input. 3 The response can take various forms, such as true/false, check a box, select the correct picture, draw a diagram, perform an action, but in each case, the response will be either completely non-verbal or minimally verbal. 4 The activities in the task can be helpfully sequenced to require first attention to meaning, then noticing the form and function of the grammatical structure, and finally error identification. 5 Interpretation tasks should require learners to make a personal response, that is, relate the input to their own lives, as well as a referential response (Ellis 1997: 155–9). The present study draws on the interpretation framework proposed by Ellis (1997) and employs interpretation tasks designed to engage learners in intentional and conscious learning of target pragmatic expressions based on exemplars in the input. A key issue is exploring how such interpretation tasks can be extended to the teaching of L2 pragmatics. To teach pragmatics, instruction must promote learners’ conscious noticing of both the relationship between forms and meanings of target structures and the relationship between strategies for realizing speech intentions, linguistic forms used to
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express these intentions, and social conditions governing language use. Knowledge of the strategies for realizing speech intentions and linguistic items used to express these intentions is called knowledge of pragmalinguistics, whereas knowledge of the social conditions governing language use is called knowledge of sociopragmatics (Leech 1983; Thomas 1983). Therefore, the fourth general principle above needs to be revised so that activities in the task are sequenced to first require attention to sociopragmatic features, then noticing of pragmalinguistic features of target structures, and finally, aiding the learner in error identification.
Problem-solving Another type of input-based approach is consciousness-raising. In the present study the term problem-solving is used in place of the term consciousness-raising. The goal of both problem-solving and structured input tasks is to make better form–meaning connections with different degrees of overtness. Whereas problem-solving tasks lead to more overt instruction, structured input tasks lead to less overt instruction. Furthermore, the content of the problem-solving tasks is the language used in the tasks, while the structured input tasks are built around the content of general topics other than language used in the tasks, such as stories, pictures of objects, or opinions. Empirical evidence from a number of grammar teaching studies has shown that problem-solving tasks are effective in improving learners’ grammatical proficiency level (e.g. Fotos 1994; Fotos and Ellis 1991). Thus, the rationale for using problem-solving tasks in the present study is to compare a more overt way of raising awareness of pragmalinguisticsociopragmatic (problem-solving tasks) with a less overt way (structured input tasks). Ellis (2003) argued that three types of operations, identification of the target structure, judgement of appropriateness of the target structure, and rule provision of the target structure, can be embedded in the problem-solving tasks by: (a) isolating a specific linguistic feature; (b) providing data to illustrate the target feature; (c) encouraging learners to use their intellectual resources to understand the target feature; and (d) requiring learners to verbalize rules describing the grammatical structure in question. Again, the important question here is how the problem-solving approach can be extended to the teaching of L2 pragmatics. As with the structured input task, the problem-solving task needs to be revised for pragmatic teaching purposes. Important revisions should include isolating specific pragmalinguistic features, providing learners with data for the target pragmatic features, engaging learners’ intellectual efforts, and requiring students to understand and verbalize the pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic features of the target structures.
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INPUT-BASED INTERVENTION STUDIES OF L2 PRAGMATICS As noted in the previous section, intervention studies on L2 pragmatics have employed input-based approaches in teaching pragmatics with explicit and implicit instruction. Approaches on the explicit end of the intervention continuum include studies of teacher-fronted explicit explanation treating awareness-raising as a method to promote better pragmatic ability (House 1996; Tateyama et al. 1997; Rose and Ng 2001) and studies of teacher-fronted explicit explanation treating awareness-raising as an objective (Takahashi 2001). For example, House (1996) studied the effect of two types of instruction on high-intermediate to advanced university students of German as a foreign language and examined their improvements in the areas of initiating and responding to speech acts and conversational routines. In the explicit instruction group, students received teacher-fronted explicit metapragmatic information about the sociopragmatic conditions governing the use of routines and their pragmatic functions. Students in the implicit instruction group did not receive explicit metapragmatic information about the target features. After 14 weeks of instruction and listening to tapes of their own language behaviour, sample conversation recordings showed that both groups had improved, but the explicit group’s improvement exceeded that of the implicit group. Tateyama et al. (1997) investigated how beginner learners of Japanese as a foreign language developed Japanese pragmatic proficiency under two types of instructional treatment. Targeted pragmatic features were the three functions of the routine formula sumimasen as an attention-getter, an apology, and an expression of thanks. In the explicit group, students discussed the different functions of sumimasen, received explicit teacherfronted explanations, and watched short video clips of examples of the pragmatic routines. The implicit group watched the same video clips as the explicit group but did not engage in any explicit metapragmatic activities. After only 50 minutes of instruction, the results of quantitative and qualitative instruments, including role-play, multiple-choice test, and selfreports, showed the explicit group’s advantage over the implicit group. In a similarly designed study, Rose and Ng (2001) investigated the effectiveness of explicit and implicit approaches to teaching compliments and compliment responses. Both explicit and implicit instruction groups followed the same procedures with one exception: the implicit group was exposed to film segments and additional examples with a guided questionnaire on the target feature in place of teacher-fronted instruction. After six 30-minute lessons, self-assessment, discourse completion, and metapragmatic questionnaires showed that both groups improved in pragmalinguistic proficiency, but only the explicit instruction group effectively developed sociopragmatic proficiency. In a later study, Rose (2005) explained the similar improvement of both explicit and implicit instruction groups as a result of participants’
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advanced proficiency and the relative easiness of the pragmalinguistic target features. In another study that provided support for explicit instruction, Takahashi (2001) investigated four input enhancement conditions for Japanese learners acquiring request strategies in English: explicit instruction, form-comparison, form-search, and meaning-focused conditions. In the explicit instruction condition, a teacher provided metapragmatic and explicit explanations of the target feature. In the form-comparison condition, learners compared their own request strategies with those provided by native speakers of English. In the form-search condition learners compared request strategies of Japanese learners of English with those provided by native speakers of English. Finally, in the meaning-focused condition, learners simply listened to, read, and answered comprehension questions based on the input. After four 90-minute weeks of instruction, the results of discourse completion tests and self-reports demonstrated that the explicit group learned all of the different request strategies more successfully than the other three groups. Despite general support for explicit instruction in the literature, a number of studies have reported inconclusive findings regarding the effectiveness of explicit instruction on the acquisition of L2 pragmatics. In their study of English pragmatic mitigators in requests, Fukuya and Clark (1999) compared input enhancement with explicit metapragmatic instruction for intermediate and advanced ESL learners. The explicit group watched a video of explicit instruction on English mitigators with 30 example scenarios without subtitles. In contrast, the implicit instruction group watched a video of explicit instruction on listening comprehension strategies with thirty example scenarios where requests were subtitled, and the mitigators were highlighted. After one 48-minute lesson, the results of two assessment measures, a listening comprehension test and a pragmatic multiple-choice test, indicated no differences between the input enhancement group and explicit group. Fukuya and Clark suggested that the brevity of treatment may have contributed to their statistically insignificant results. Although lesson length affects pragmatic learning, it should be noted that Tateyama et al. (1997) produced clear results even within a short, 50-minute lesson. To reexamine previous findings, Tateyama (2001) conducted a follow-up study, increasing the instructional period to four 20-minute sessions and found that there were no significant differences between the explicit and implicit groups. As explanation, Tateyama noted that students in the implicit group had more contact with native speakers of Japanese outside of class, and this threat to internal validity contributed to the inconclusive results. Lastly, regarding the nature of the L2 pragmatic learning, studies show differing levels of acquisition in terms of accuracy and retention. Takahashi (2001) found some of the participants in the explicit teaching condition used non-target pragmalinguistic forms in the discourse completion tests as a result of previous instruction interfering with their restructuring process. House (1996) also found that neither implicit nor explicit instruction
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improved learners’ performance in the realization of appropriate routinized responses. Finally, Takahashi (2001) observed that the degree of attainment and lasting effect of L2 pragmatic proficiency under the explicit teaching condition was doubtful. These findings lead to the question of what sort of input-based approach, with or without the teacher-fronted explicit information, is the most appropriate way of allowing learners to access and integrate sociopragmatic and pragmalinguistic knowledge more quickly and efficiently.
THE PRESENT STUDY To date, only a small number of studies have examined input-based methods of teaching L2 pragmatics. For this reason, there is no clear indication in the literature as to what type of input-based task involving pragmalinguistic–sociopragmatic connections is most effective in teaching L2 pragmatics. Moreover, no studies have compared the effectiveness of structured input tasks with and without explicit information for L2 pragmatics. To address these gaps, the following research question is investigated in this study. What are the relative effects of three different input tasks including (1) structured input with explicit information, (2) problem-solving, and (3) structured input without explicit information on the development of Japanese learners’ pragmatic proficiency in English?
METHOD Participants Prospective participants were solicited in Japan through an employment advertisement in a weekly magazine and on the Internet. Both the weekly magazine and the Internet website target students. After checking applicants’ scores for the Test of English for International Communication (TOEIC), only learners with intermediate English proficiency, defined as TOEIC scores between 500 and 700, were selected for inclusion in the study. This decision was made to exclude the extreme ends of learner proficiency levels, low and high, which might obscure the effects of the different types of instruction. The sixty participants were assigned to one of the four groups consisting of the three treatment groups, structured input tasks with explicit information, problem-solving tasks, and structured input tasks without explicit information, and the control group (n ¼ 15 for all four groups). The participants included three high school students, ten vocational training school students, twenty-nine university students, and eighteen non-students. All participants had studied English in Japan for a range of five to twentytwo years without receiving explicit instruction on English pragmatics.
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All had Japanese as their first language and they ranged in age from 18 to 40. The present study was conducted at an English conversation school instead of at a regular EFL school because it was not possible at the instructor’s institution, a regular university, to include the control group necessary for observing and comparing the effects of the different instructional treatments.
Instructional goals The present study draws on past research on EFL Japanese students’ acquisition of downgraders, a pragmatic resource for mitigating the strength of a statement or request (Takahashi 1996; Hill 1997). Takahashi (1996) found that Japanese EFL learners tended to use monoclausal English request forms when downgrader biclausal request forms were more appropriate, for example ‘Would/Could you VP?’ vs. ‘Would it be possible to VP?’ Hill (1997) found that even as the proficiency of Japanese EFL learners increased, they continued to underuse clausal downgraders, lexical downgraders, and syntactic downgraders. Lexical/clausal downgraders soften the difficulty that the speaker experiences when asking the hearer to perform a request by modifying the Head Act lexically or clausally, for example ‘Could you possibly come here?’ (lexical) or ‘Would it be possible to come here?’ (clausal-mitigated preparatory question); ‘I wonder if you could come here’ (clausal-mitigated preparatory statement); ‘I would appreciate it if you could come here’ (clausalmitigated want statement). Syntactic downgraders, on the other hand, modify the Head Act syntactically by mitigating the level of difficulty that the speaker experiences through syntactic choices using tense or aspect, for example ‘I am wondering if you could lend me a book’ (continuous aspect); ‘I was wondering if you would come’ (past tense). Given Takahashi (1996) and Hill’s (1997) findings, the current study focuses on teaching lexical/clausal and syntactic downgraders in English requests. Three social context variables were carefully controlled for in the dialogues in the instructional and testing materials: (a) power, the status of the speaker with respect to the hearer; (b) distance, the relationship between the speaker and the hearer; and (c) speaker difficulty, the difficulty that the speaker experiences when asking the hearer to perform the request. These three variables were selected because in cross-cultural pragmatics, they are considered to be the three independent and culturally sensitive variables that subsume all other variables and play important roles in speech act behaviour. The participants in the three treatment groups were instructed to pay attention to these social context variables as well as the pragmalinguistic features of the target structures. Only participants in the structured input tasks with explicit information group were provided with the explicit information about the pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic features of the target structures.
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Table 1: Treatment features of each group Group
Treatment
Structured input tasks with explicit information (n ¼ 15)
Explicit information (10 minutes) þ Pragmalinguistic-sociopragmatic connection activities (18 minutes) þ Reinforcement activities (12 minutes) Pragmalinguistic-focused activities (10 minutes) þ Sociopragmatic-focused activities (10 minutes) þ Pragmalinguisticsociopragmatic connection activities (10 minutes) þ Metapragmatic discussion (10 minutes) Pragmalinguistic-sociopragmatic connection activities (24 minutes) þ Reinforcement activities (16 minutes) TOEIC reading comprehension exercises (40 minutes)
Problem-solving tasks (n ¼ 15)
Structured input tasks without explicit information (n ¼ 15) Control group (n ¼ 15)
Explicit information Yes
No
No
No
Instructional treatments Each group received four 40-minute treatment sessions in Japanese at a major English conversation school in Osaka, Japan. All groups received instruction from the same instructor, who was also the researcher.1 The three instructional treatments were matched for target structure, and all four groups were matched for instruction time. The first treatment session highlighted lexical/clausal downgraders in English requests, and the second treatment session focused on syntactic downgraders. The third and fourth treatment sessions were reviews of the first and second treatments. Handouts contained highlighted pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic features to promote participants’ conscious noticing of those features. Specific treatment features of each participant group are presented in Table 1.
Structured input tasks with explicit information The structured input tasks with explicit instruction treatment consisted of two components: (a) teacher-fronted explanation of the target downgraders, and (b) structured input tasks comprising pragmalinguistic–sociopragmatic connection activities and reinforcement activities of the target downgraders. In each lesson, the group received handouts with a brief summary of the targeted downgraders and examples of the target structures in English. The explicit teacher-fronted component lasted 10 minutes, during which time the teacher read the summary and examples aloud in English and explained the summary and the examples in Japanese with special attention to
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sociopragmatic conditions. In the second part, the group engaged structured input tasks consisting of three pragmalinguistic–sociopragmatic connection activities and three reinforcement activities (see Appendix A available online to subscribers at http://applij.oxfordjournals.org/). In the pragmalinguistic– sociopragmatic connection activities, the participants read dialogues for given situations and chose the more appropriate request form out of the two offered based on their pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic knowledge. Participants then listened to an oral recording of the dialogue and underlined the correct request form. In the reinforcement activities, participants read each dialogue aloud and listened to the oral recordings again. Finally, they were asked to rate the level of appropriateness of each underlined request on a 5-point scale. The goal of the pragmalinguistic–sociopragmatic connection activities was to ensure that participants focused on understanding the relationship between the request, the relevant social context variables, and the targeted pragmalinguistic resources. In contrast, the purpose of the reinforcement activities was to strengthen the pragmalinguistic–sociopragmatic connections by providing the participants with more opportunities to observe and understand how the different factors, the request, the social context variables, and the targeted pragmalinguistic features, were interrelated.
Problem-solving tasks The problem-solving treatment consisted of four activities highlighting the targeted downgraders in English: pragmalinguistic-focused activities, sociopragmatic-focused activities, pragmalinguistic–sociopragmatic connection activities, and metapragmatic discussion. In each lesson, the participants received handouts with three sets of English dialogues (see Appendix A available online to subscribers at http://applij.oxfordjournals.org/). The participants read each situation and the dialogue and then listened to the dialogue. In the first activity, the pragmalinguistic-focused activity, participants were asked to copy and compare the underlined request forms in two dialogues while looking for the differences between the request forms. In the second activity, the sociopragmatics-focused activity, participants answered two questions regarding the relationship between the two characters and the difficulty of the requests. In the third activity, the pragmalinguistic–sociopragmatic connection activity, participants were asked to rate the level of politeness of the requests in both dialogues and to list the ways in which one character tried to be more polite than the other character when making requests. In the last activity, paired participants discussed the features of the target structures with each other. The aim of the first three activities was to provide participants with step-by-step problem-solving opportunities through which they could develop their own explicit knowledge about the target features. In turn, this explicit knowledge would help participants to reinforce the pragmalinguistic–sociopragmatic
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connections during their paired metapragmatic discussions of the features of target structures. The decision to include paired metapragmatic discussions was based on findings in Rose (2005) that suggested metapragmatic discussion about the target request forms in context is more effective for learning sociopragmatic distinctions than the teacher-fronted approach.
Structured input tasks without explicit information The treatment for the structured input tasks without explicit information group was the same as for structured input tasks with explicit information but without the teacher-fronted explicit instruction.
Control group Lessons for the control group were designed to help participants do well on the TOEIC. Participants in this group engaged in reading comprehension exercises for the TOEIC; however, they were not exposed to the target structures at all.
Testing instruments and procedures This study employed a pre-test, post-test, and follow-up test design. The pretest was administered two to three days prior to the instructional treatment, the post-test eight to nine days after the treatment, and the follow-up test in the fourth week following instruction. Each test consisted of two input-based tests, a listening test and an acceptability judgement test, and two outputbased tests, a discourse completion test and a role-play test. Immediately following the treatments, participants completed an evaluation questionnaire. Situations in the four testing instruments comprised the speech act request with the three social context variables, power, distance, and speaker difficulty. In particular, the tests included situations with a high level of speaker difficulty combined with power and distance, which were validated by Hill (1997), Hudson et al. (1992, 1995) and Takahashi (1998, 2001). One high speaker difficulty item is shown below. You are writing a difficult paper for Professor Hill. You need some help with the paper but Professor Hill is away for a month. A friend of yours has suggested you go and see Professor Watson. Although you do not know Professor Watson and Professor Watson is extremely busy, you have decided to ask Professor Watson to look through your long paper before you hand it in the next day. What would you ask Professor Watson? (based on Takahashi 1998, 2001) Situations with a low level of speaker difficulty were added as distractors to increase the reliability of instruments. The discourse completion test, the role-play test, and the acceptability judgement test consisted of twenty situations (ten high speaker difficulty and ten low speaker difficulty items), while the listening test consisted of fifteen situations (nine high speaker difficulty items and six low speaker difficulty items).
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THE DEVELOPMENT OF LEARNER’S PRAGMATIC PROFICIENCY
Three versions of the four tests were developed and counterbalanced for order of presentation of the same situations across the pre-tests, post-tests, and follow-up tests. During the testing, these counterbalanced versions were used to minimize the possible effect of test learning. During the pre-tests, post-tests, and follow-up tests, test components were administered in the following order: discourse completion test, role-play test, listening test, and acceptability judgement test. The two input-based tests were administered after the output-based tasks to address the concern that they might provide participants with models for the production tests. Although participants were instructed to complete the four tests in the span of 2 hours, only the listening test was timed. In the listening test, participants had two seconds to judge the appropriateness for each question, which required participants to access their proceduralized knowledge of the target structure.
Discourse completion test The discourse completion test (see Appendix B available online to subscribers at http://applij.oxfordjournals.org/) required the participants to read short descriptions of twenty situations in English and to write what they would say in each situation in English. Although there was no time limit for the discourse completion test, most participants finished in 30–45 minutes. Each response was rated by two native English speakers according to the appropriateness of the request forms on a 5-point scale. The test contained ten target items with a maximum score of 100 based on the two raters’ scores (10 5 2).
Role-play test The role-play test (see Appendix B available online to subscribers at http:// applij.oxfordjournals.org/) consisted of short descriptions of twenty situations written in English and required the participants to play particular roles with an interlocutor. Prior to the role play, participants received role cards that described the situations and their roles. In each role play, the participants were required to initiate the conversation by requesting something from their interlocutor.2 The instructor, a non-native speaker of English, acted as the interlocutor. On average, participants took 2–3 minutes to prepare for each role play. Role plays were tape-recorded and individual performances were rated for appropriateness of request forms on a 5-point scale by two native speakers of English. The test contained 10 target items with a maximum score of 100 based on the two raters’ scores (10 5 2).
Listening test The listening test (see Appendix B available online to subscribers at http://applij.oxfordjournals.org/) required participants to listen to dialogues between a Japanese university student and a native speaker of English in fifteen different situations and to score the appropriateness of the Japanese university student’s request forms on a 5-point scale. The test
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involved an audio-recording of the dialogue and had a time constraint of 2 seconds per question for responding to each dialogue. Participant ratings were compared with English native speakers’ baseline data3 on a 5-point scale. The test contained nine target items with a maximum score of 45 (9 5).
Acceptability judgement test The acceptability judgement test (see Appendix B available online to subscribers at http://applij.oxfordjournals.org/) was a computer-based test that required participants to read written English descriptions of 20 situations. After reading the descriptions, participants were presented with a series of isolated requests and instructed to score the first request on an 11-point scale and then to score subsequent responses proportionally higher or lower in accordance with the degree of perceived acceptability. Participant ratings were compared with English native speakers’ baseline data4 on a 5-point scale. The test contained ten target items with a maximum score of 50 (10 5).
Evaluation questionnaire The evaluation questionnaire was administered as a supplement to the present study with the goal of examining whether the aims of the instructional treatments had been achieved and how the instruction could be improved for future use. The questionnaire consisted of three 5-point scale close-ended questions and three open-ended questions.
RELIABILITY Interrater reliability was estimated by calculating the correlation of the two raters’ scores. Correlation coefficients for the discourse completion and role-play tests were .995 and .994 respectively, which were statistically significant (p 5 .001). With regard to internal consistency, the Cronbach Alpha reliability estimates for the tests ranged from .853 for the listening comprehension test5 to .926 for the role-play test with .893 for the acceptability judgement test and .917 for the discourse completion test.
VALIDITY To promote content validity, the present study matched test items to the theoretical framework that outlined the degree of the three social context variables: speaker difficulty, power, and distance. Tables 2 and 3 show the distribution and degree of social context variables across tests.
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THE DEVELOPMENT OF LEARNER’S PRAGMATIC PROFICIENCY
Table 2: Distribution of social context variables (Version A for the discourse completion, role-play, and acceptability judgement tests) S4 S6 S10 S18 S2 S8 S12 S14 S16 S20 S1 S3 S5 S11 S13 S7 S9 S15 S17 S19 SD þ þ þ P D þ þ þ
þ þ
þ þ þ þ þ þ
þ þ
þ þ
þ þ
þ þ þ
þ
þ
Note: S ¼ Situation; SD ¼ Speaker difficulty; P ¼ Power; D ¼ Distance; þ ¼ More; ¼ Less; ¼ Equal.
Table 3: Distribution of social context variables (Version A for the listening test)
SD P D
S3
S5
S8
S13
S2
S6
S10
S12
S15
S1
S4
S9
S7
S11
S14
þ þ
þ þ
þ þ
þ þ
þ þ
þ þ
þ þ
þ þ
þ þ
þ
þ
þ
Note: S ¼ Situation; SD ¼ Speaker difficulty; P ¼ Power; D ¼ Distance; þ ¼ More; ¼ Less; ¼ Equal.
RESULTS The results showed that the three treatment groups performed significantly better than the control group. However, the group that received the structured input tasks with explicit information did not retain the positive effects of the treatment between the post-test and follow-up test on the listening test component. In the data analysis a Bonferroni adjustment was employed to maintain an approximate experiment-wide .05 alpha level. In other words, the overall alpha level was set at .05, but with four group comparisons (discourse completion, role-play, acceptability judgement, and listening tests) for one item type (high speaker difficulty). Therefore, .05 was divided by the number of comparisons (four), resulting in a p value of .0125 for individual statistical decisions.
Results from the discourse completion test Results of a two-way repeated-measures ANOVA revealed a significant main effect for Instruction for the three treatment groups (structured input tasks with explicit information, problem-solving tasks, and structured input tasks without explicit information), F (3, 56) ¼ 99.92, p ¼ .000. A significant main effect for Time across the pre-test, post-test, and follow-up test was also
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100 90 INSTRUCTION MEAN
80
SP
70 PS 60 SI 50 Control 40 Pre-test
Post-test
Follow-up test
TIME
Figure 1: Interaction plot for the discourse completion test Note: SP ¼ Structured input tasks with explicit information; PS ¼ Problemsolving tasks; SI ¼ Structured input tasks without explicit information
found, F (3, 56) ¼ 583.57, p ¼ .000. Lastly, the results revealed a significant interaction effect between Instruction and Time, F (9, 56) ¼ 48.64, p ¼ .000. Figure 1 illustrates three important characteristics of the discourse completion test results: (1) there were no statistically significant differences among the four groups on the pre-test scores; (2) the three treatment groups made gains from the pre-tests to the post-tests and the follow-up tests; and (3) positive effects for the three treatments were maintained through the post-test to the follow-up tests. These results suggest that the three different types of treatment were effective in promoting learners’ acquisition and retention of English request forms in the context of discourse completion activities. Furthermore the lack of crossover between the treatment and control groups on the post-tests demonstrates the relative superiority of the three treatment groups’ performances over the control group’s performance. Post-hoc Scheffe´ tests conducted on the post-test and the follow-up test scores for the main effect for treatment showed the following two contrasts: (1) the three treatment groups performed significantly better than the control group on the discourse completion test, and (2) there were no significant differences among the three treatment groups.
Results from the role-play test The results of a two-way repeated-measures ANOVA for the role-play test scores revealed the same significant main effects as the discourse completion test: a significant main effect for Instruction, F (3, 56) ¼ 83.93, p ¼ .000, a significant main effect for Time, F (3, 56) ¼ 502.61, p ¼ .000, and a
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THE DEVELOPMENT OF LEARNER’S PRAGMATIC PROFICIENCY
100 90 INSTRUCTION MEAN
80 SP 70 PS 60 SI 50 Control 40 Pre-test
Post-test TIME
Follow-up test
Figure 2: Interaction plot for the role-play test Note: SP ¼ Structured input tasks with explicit information; PS ¼ Problemsolving tasks; SI ¼ Structured input tasks without explicit information significant interaction effect between Instruction and Time, F (9, 56) ¼ 33.88, p ¼ .000. The results displayed for the role-play test in Figure 2 follow the same pattern as the discourse completion test: there were no statistically significant differences among the four groups on the pre-test scores, the three treatment groups improved from the pre-test to the post-test and the follow-up test, and positive effects for the three treatments were retained. As in Figure 1 above, the lack of crossover between the treatment and control group scores in Figure 2 shows the superior performance of all three treatment groups on the post-test and follow-up tests. Post-hoc Scheffe´ tests provided further evidence for the following two contrasts: (1) the three treatment groups performed significantly better than the control group on the role-play test, and (2) there were no significant differences among the three treatment groups.
Results from the listening test The results of a two-way repeated-measures ANOVA of the listening test scores showed the same significant main effects as both the discourse completion and the role-play test: a significant main effect for Instruction, F (3, 56) ¼ 27.48, p ¼ .000; a significant main effect for Time, F (3, 56) ¼ 81.27, p ¼ .000; and a significant interaction effect between Instruction and Time, F (9, 56) ¼ 7.97, p ¼ .000. Figure 3 reveals two of the same main results for the listening test as for the discourse completion and role-play tests: there were no statistically significant differences among the four groups on the pre-test scores and the three treatment groups improved from the pre-tests to the post-tests and the
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50
INSTRUCTION
MEAN
40
SP 30 PS 20 10 Pre-test
SI Control Post-test TIME
Follow-up test
Figure 3: Interaction plot for the listening test Note: SP ¼ Structured input tasks with explicit information; PS ¼ Problemsolving tasks; SI ¼ Structured input tasks without explicit information follow-up tests. However, Figure 3 also shows that unlike the problemsolving tasks and structured input tasks without explicit information groups, the structured input tasks with explicit information group did not retain the positive effects of the treatment between the post-test and the follow-up test. A separate one-way ANOVA performed on the follow-up test scores showed a significant difference between the three treatment groups’ performance on the listening test. Despite the differences in the follow-up test performance, all three treatment groups outscored the control group without any crossovers between group scores, confirming the superior performance of the treatment groups on the listening test. Post-hoc Scheffe´ tests provided further support for the following four contrasts: (1) all three treatment groups performed significantly better than the control group on the post-test and follow-up test; (2) there were no statistically significant differences among the three treatment groups on the post-test; (3) there were no statistically significant differences between the problemsolving tasks and structured input tasks without explicit information groups on the follow-up test; and (4) problem-solving tasks and structured input tasks without explicit information groups performed significantly better than the structured input tasks with explicit information group on the follow-up test.
Results from the acceptability judgement test The results of a two-way repeated-measures ANOVA for the acceptability judgement test showed two of the same significant main effects as the other tests: a significant main effect for Instruction, F (3, 56) ¼ 7.32, p ¼ .000 and a
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THE DEVELOPMENT OF LEARNER’S PRAGMATIC PROFICIENCY
60
MEAN
50
INSTRUCTION SP
40 PS 30 20 Pre-test
SI Control Post-test
Follow-up test
TIME
Figure 4: Interaction plot for the acceptability judgement test Note: SP ¼ Structured input tasks with explicit information; PS ¼ Problem-solving tasks; SI ¼ Structured input tasks without explicit information significant main effect for Time, F (3, 56) ¼ 43.07, p ¼ .000. However, no significant interaction effect between Instruction and Time was found, F (9, 56) ¼ 3.21, p ¼ .006. The results displayed in Figure 4 for the acceptability judgement test follow the same pattern as the other test components: there were no statistically significant differences among the four groups on the pre-test, the three treatment groups’ performance improved from the pre-test to the post-test and follow-up test, and positive effects for the three treatments were maintained. As with the other test components, the acceptability judgement test scores exhibit no crossover between groups, showing the superior effects of the three treatment conditions as compared with the control condition on participants’ post-test performance. Post-hoc Scheffe´ tests provided further evidence for the following contrasts: (1) the three treatment groups performed significantly better than the control group on the acceptability judgement test; and (2) there were no significant differences among the three treatment groups.
Results from the evaluation questionnaire Analysis of responses on the evaluation questionnaire provided insight into the participants’ experience from a first-person, retrospective point of view. Table 4 summarizes responses on the close-ended questions (Q1–Q3) with the mean, standard deviation, degrees of freedom, and p-values for each question. Participants responded on a scale of 1–5 with 1 ¼ not at all, and 5 ¼ very interesting/difficult/clearly.
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Table 4: Results for close-ended questionnaire items (Q1, Q2, and Q3) Question
Mean
SD
Q1: Did you find the lessons interesting? Q2: Did you find the lesson difficult to follow? Q3: Did you understand clearly how to make polite requests?
3.78 2.49
.83 1.05
F (2, 42) ¼ .51, p ¼ .60 F (2, 42) ¼ .97, p ¼ .39
3.89
.76
F (2, 42) ¼ 1.89, p ¼ .17
Table 5: Summary of open-ended question items (Q4, Q5, and Q6) Questions and reported contents
Task types Structured input Problem-solving Structured input tasks with explicit tasks without information explicit information
Q4: Write down the main points you learned in lessons Including all main points 15 (100%) 15 (100%) 15 (100%) Q5: Were there things you liked a lot about the lessons? Learning polite requests 12 (80%) 12 (80%) 11 (73%) Learning the same 2 (13%) 1 (7%) 1 (7%) thing over and over Other 1 (7%) 2 (13%) 3 (20%) Q6: Were there things you did not like about the lessons? Monotonousness of lessons 4 (27%) 4 (27%) 8 (54%) No output practices 1 (7%) 1 (7%) 0 (0%) Little feedback 3 (20%) 3 (20%) 2 (13%) Prohibition on taking 4 (27%) 1 (7%) 0 (0%) materials home Other 3 (20%) 6 (39%) 5 (33%)
These results suggest that the lessons were interesting (Q1: M ¼ 3.78), relatively easy to follow (Q2: M ¼ 2.49), and comprehensible (Q3: M ¼ 3.89). The results also show that there were no significant differences among the treatment groups’ responses on Q1, Q2, or Q3. Analysis of the participants’ responses on the open-ended questions (Q4, Q5, and Q6) are reported in Table 5. Responses for Q4 demonstrate that all participants were able to remember the main points they learned in the lessons. In their responses to Q5, 73–80 per cent of the participants reported that the main good point of the lessons was learning polite requests. The fact that all participants remembered the main points of the lessons and a high proportion of the
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THE DEVELOPMENT OF LEARNER’S PRAGMATIC PROFICIENCY
participants reported learning polite requests as a highlight of the lessons indicates that the three types of input-based instruction were effective. Responses to Q6 show differing participants’ views on the weaknesses of the lessons including monotony, no chance to produce language, and limited feedback.
DISCUSSION The aim of the present study was to investigate the relative effects of input tasks including structured input tasks with and without explicit information and problem-solving tasks on the development of Japanese learners’ L2 pragmatic proficiency in the area of requests. The results show that participants who received the three different types of input-based instruction outperformed the control group. Furthermore, the results for the two types of input-based tasks, structured input tasks (with or without explicit information) and problem-solving tasks, indicate that both types are equally effective. These results show that the development of L2 pragmatic proficiency can be influenced by manipulating input, lending support to findings in previous studies on the effects of structured input tasks and problem-solving tasks on the acquisition of L2 pragmatics. There are two possible reasons for the effectiveness of the different types of input-based tasks. One possibility is that the different treatments drew the participants’ attention to pragmalinguistic forms in the input that they received. Despite their differences, the treatment conditions may have made the target structures equally salient. The participants in the structured input task condition, with or without explicit information, engaged in tasks that required their attention to the pragmalinguistic forms of target structures. In the pragmalinguistic–sociopragmatic connection activities, the participants chose the more appropriate request form from two options, and in the reinforcement activities, participants rated the level of appropriateness of each bold-faced underlined request. On the other hand, participants in the problem-solving condition had to pay attention to the highlighted requests in two dialogues in order to copy and compare the request forms before discussing the metapragmatic features of target structures in the dialogues. The second possible reason for the effectiveness of the input-based tasks is the deeper processing that arises when pragmalinguistic–sociopragmatic connections are involved. In their discussion of the level of processing involved in meaning, Craik and Lockhart (1972) claim that the quality of a memory trace depends on the level or depth of perceptual and mental processing where meaning plays an important role. When the participants focused on the pragmalinguistic–sociopragmatic connections of the target feature, they may have been inclined to process the meanings at a deeper level, leading to greater retention. The tasks in the present study were designed to require participants to access and integrate their pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic knowledge through various activities. Moreover, the
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participants in the problem-solving tasks had the opportunity to discuss the metapragmatic features of target structures, thereby reinforcing pragmalinguistic–sociopragmatic connections and allowing for processing at a deeper level. The results indicate that the three types of treatments had similar effects on the development of Japanese learners’ pragmatic proficiency as measured by three of the four test components: discourse completion, role-play, and acceptability judgement tests. However, regarding the listening test, although all three treatment conditions showed significant improvement on the posttest, the structured input tasks with explicit information group performed at a significantly lower level than the other two conditions on the follow-up test. Why, then, did the structured input tasks with explicit information group perform as well as the problem-solving and structured input tasks without explicit information groups on the listening post-test but not the follow-up test while all the groups performed similarly on the other post-tests and follow-up tests? Any answer to this question is necessarily speculative as no information on the psycholinguistic processing involved in either the treatments or the test was available. What distinguishes the listening test from the other tests is the requirement for online processing. Online processing tests place demands on working memory, as participants have to process and respond to the stimuli rapidly. Also, all three treatments can be assumed to have provided the participants with some explicit knowledge, but the treatments differed in how this knowledge was achieved. In the case of the first treatment, structured input tasks plus explicit information, the participants were simply given explicit information; they did not have to discover the rules for themselves. In the other two treatments, problem-solving and structured input tasks minus explicit information, participants had to discover the rules for themselves. It is possible, then, that the problem-solving and structured input tasks without explicit information participants attended to the pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic features of the target structures more deeply. That is, the provision of explicit information did not push the participants in the structured input tasks plus explicit information group to process the target structures deeply. The problem-solving and structured input tasks without explicit information treatments, however, involved greater depth of processing, resulting in knowledge that was more firmly embedded and thus more easily accessed. Immediate post-test results did not reveal this difference because the explicit knowledge was fresh in the participants’ memories. However, on the listening follow-up test, participants in the structured input tasks with explicit information group were less successful in accessing their weakly established explicit knowledge while coping with the test’s demands on their working memory capacities. Participants in problem-solving and structured input tasks without explicit information groups, however, were still able to cope with the demands of the listening test because their explicit knowledge was firmly entrenched. Although the
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THE DEVELOPMENT OF LEARNER’S PRAGMATIC PROFICIENCY
explanation provided here is speculative at best, the current study’s results are consistent with results in VanPatten and Oikennon (1996) which showed that in that teacher-fronted explicit information is not important because structured input tasks by themselves are effective. Takahashi (2001) also found that the explicit teaching condition was effective through the post-test stage but expressed doubts regarding the lasting effect of gains in L2 competence due to explicit enhancement.
CONCLUSION The present study examined the relative effects of input-based approaches and the presence or lack of explicit information on teaching polite request forms in a Japanese EFL context. The results indicate that input processing tasks, including structured input and problem-solving tasks, function effectively when they provide learners with an emphasis on the pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic features of the target structure. An important pedagogical implication of this study is that teachers should be aware that effective learning occurs when the tasks provide learners with opportunities for processing both pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic features of the target structures. Structured input tasks and problem-solving tasks can be used together and can even complement each other. The findings of this study have practical applications, especially in the Japanese EFL context, where English pragmatics rather than English grammar is an increasingly important area of instruction. In such classrooms, learners are encouraged to have strong pragmatic awareness to make use of the limited class time typically available for learning English. These findings may be generalizable to other EFL countries with similar situations. Limitations of the present study suggest several areas for future research. Regarding the activities within each treatment condition, multiple activities were packaged together, and there is no way of disentangling the contributions of each individual activity to the effect on learning outcomes. Another limitation of the study was the representativeness of the participants and the generalizability of the results. Participants in the present study were recruited on a volunteer-basis and may have differed in their outcomes and responses than students at existing educational institutions or the general population given the same instruction. Conducting the same experiment at an existing educational institution would strengthen the generalizability of the results to other EFL situations. Furthermore, conducting the same experiment with a representative sample of any population would improve the generalizability of the study’s results to broader contexts. Kasper (2001) argued that the benefit of conducting research within an established institution is that the results can be translated into recommendations for pedagogical practice with more plausibility than laboratory studies. Perhaps the relationship between teaching at different types of institutions, for example, language schools vs. universities, and learning outcomes could be a subject for future research.
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Despite the shortcomings above, the present study contributes to our understanding of how input-based approaches to teaching English pragmatics lead to positive outcomes in the Japanese EFL context. The author hopes that the results of the present study will show researchers and teachers that successful input-based tasks should involve effective pragmalinguistic– sociopragmatic connection activities and be designed to raise the learner’s interest in acquiring L2 pragmatics. Final version received September 2007
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to express my sincere gratitude to Dr. Rod Ellis and Dr. Gabriele Kasper for their valuable comments and guidance. I would also like to thank anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments and suggestions. Thanks are also due to Mattew Prior and Castle Sinicrope for proofreading the manuscript
NOTES 1 In behavioural research, researcher expectancy can be a problem when the researcher teaches experimental groups. The researcher followed the instructional guidelines rigidly controlled for the effect with the double-blind technique after the data were collected in order to minimize any researcher expectancy effect during the treatments. 2 Ellis (2003) suggested that a testing situation where the examinees interact with other non-native speakers rather than with native speaker examiners is more likely to elicit the examinees’ best performances. 3 Ten native speakers of English listened to a dialogue between a Japanese university student and a native speaker of English in fifteen different situations and then scored the appropriateness of the Japanese university student’s request forms on a 5-point scale. The native speakers’ data were relatively uniformed and consistent (SD ¼ .00 .53, range ¼ .00 1.00). These data were used as the baseline data.
4 Ten native speakers of English were required to read written English descriptions of twenty situations with a Japanese supplement. They were then presented with a series of isolated requests and instructed to score the first request on an 11-point scale and then to score subsequent responses proportionally higher or lower in accordance with the degree of perceived acceptability. The native speakers’ data were relatively uniformed and consistent (SD ¼ .82 1.08, range ¼ 2.00 4.00). These data were used as the baseline data. 5 The reliability estimate for the LT was low because of five problematic items. By deleting the five problematic items out of the twenty items, a higher level of reliability was achieved. However, the reliability estimate for the LT was still somewhat lower than the others and this might be related to the narrower rating scales in this test. That is, the LT used a 5-point scale, while the AJT used an 11-point scale. According to Hatch and Lazaraton (1991), a broader scale range encourages more precision in respondents’ judgements.
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New York: Cambridge University Press, pp. 171–99. Takahashi, S. 2005. ‘Noticing in task performance and learning outcomes: A qualitative analysis of instructional effects in interlanguage pragmatics,’ System 33: 437–61. Tateyama, Y. 2001. ‘Explicit and implicit teaching of pragmatic routines: Japanese sumimasen’ in K. Rose and G. Kasper (eds.): Pragmatics in Language Teaching. New York: Cambridge University Press, pp. 200–22. Tateyama, Y., G. Kasper, L. Mui, H. Tay, and O. Thananart. 1997. ‘Explicit and implicit teaching of pragmatic routines’ in L. Bouton (ed.): Pragmatics and Language Learning, Monograph Series 8. Urbana-Champaign, IL: Division of English as an International
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Language, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, pp. 163–78. Thomas, J. 1983. ‘Cross-cultural pragmatic failure,’ Applied Linguistics 4: 91–112. VanPatten, B. 1996. Input Processing and Grammar Instruction in Second Language Acquisition. Norwood, NJ: Ablex. VanPatten, B. and S. Oikkenon. 1996. ‘Explanation versus structured input in processing instruction,’ Studies in Second Language Acquisition 18/4: 495–510. Witten, C. 2000. ‘Using video to teach for sociolinguistic competence in the foreign language classroom,’ Texas Papers in Foreign Language Education 5/1: 143–75. (Eric Document Reproduction Service No. ED468314.)
APPENDIX A: EXAMPLES OF INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS USED Structured input task Pragmalinguistic-sociopragmatic connection activities: Read the following situation and the dialogue and choose the more appropriate request form out of two offered for each underlined part and indicate your choice by circling ‘(a)’ or ‘(b)’. Then, listen to an oral recording of the dialogue and indicate whether the actual request used in the dialogue is ‘(a)’ or ‘(b)’. Situation: Yuka is about to start her car when she notices that her car battery has gone flat. She needs to go to school now and she does not have any other means but to ask her landlord, Mr. Brown, whom she has never spoken to before, to give her a ride to school. Her landlord is extremely busy, but she decides to ask her landlord to drive her to school.
Brown:
Hello.
Yuka:
Hi, you are Mr. Brown, aren’t you?
Brown:
That’s right.
Yuka:
I’m a tenant next door. My car battery has just gone flat and I can’t start my car. I really need to get to school. 1. (a) I wonder if I could get a lift; (b) Could I get a lift?
Brown:
Well, actually, I am really busy helping other tenants moving into this apartment. So, I can’t really help you.
Yuka:
I understand, but it’s important that I get to school today because I have exams.
Reinforcement activities: Read the following situation and the dialogue and answer the following question. Situation: John is living in an apartment. He is extremely busy working on his assignment, but he needs to send a big parcel to England today. His landlady, Mrs. Taylor, whom he has never spoken to before, is extremely busy, but he decides to ask his landlady to send the big parcel. John sees the landlady.
John:
Hi, you are Mrs. Taylor, aren’t you?
Taylor:
That’s right.
John:
Hello. My name is John.
Taylor:
Oh, you are the tenant.
John:
Yes. I live next door.
Taylor:
How is it going?
John:
Pretty good, thank you. I’m very busy working on my assignment. 1. Could I possibly ask you a favor?
Taylor:
What’s the favor?
Indicate the appropriateness level of the underlined request from your point of view based on the scale below. very unsatisfactory 1—2—3—4—5 completely appropriate
Problem-solving task Read Dialogue A and Dialogue B and answer the following questions.
Dialogue A. Situation: Yuka is about to start her car when she notices that her car battery has gone flat. She needs to go to school now and she does not have any other means but to ask her neighbor, James, whom she knows well, to give her a ride to school. She sees her neighbor go out by car and she decides to ask her neighbor to drive her to school.
James:
Hi, Yuka.
Yuka:
Hi, Jim. My car battery has just gone flat and I can’t start my car. I really need to get to school. (a) Could I have a lift ?
James:
Sure. Get in.
Dialogue B. Situation: Yuka is about to start her car when she notices that her car battery has gone flat. She needs to go to school now and she does not have any other means but to ask her landlord, Mr. Brown, whom she has never spoken to before, to give her a ride to school. Her landlord is extremely busy, but she decides to ask her landlord to drive her to school.
Brown:
Hello.
Yuka:
Hi, you are Mr. Brown, aren’t you?
Brown:
That’s right.
Yuka:
I am a tenant next door. My car battery has just gone flat and I can’t start my car. I really need to get to school. (a)' I wonder if I could get a lift.
Brown:
Well, actually, I am really busy helping other tenants moving into this apartment. So, I can’t really help you.
1. Pragmalinguistic-focused activities: Write up the requests Yuka makes in Dialogue A and Dialogue B in the table below and also comment on the differences between the two. Dialogue A (a)
Dialogue B
Differences
(a)'
2. Sociopragmatic-focused activities: Indicate the level of the relationship between Brown and Yuka in Dialogue A and Dialogue B. Dialogue A:
very distant 1—2—3—4—5 very close
Dialogue B:
very distant 1—2—3—4—5 very close
3. Sociopragmatic-focused activities: In consideration of the respective relationship between Brown and Yuka in Dialogue A and Dialogue B, do you think that Yuka is asking for something simple or difficult in Dialogue A and Dialogue B? Dialogue A:
very simple 1—2—3—4—5 very difficult
Dialogue B:
very simple 1—2—3—4—5 very difficult
4. Pragmalinguistic-sociopragmatic connection activities: Look at the requests you found in #1 and answer the following questions. (1) Do you think Yuka is being polite in Dialogue A? Indicate the politeness level of the request by Yuka in Dialogue A. very impolite 1—2—3—4—5 completely polite (2) Do you think Yuka is being polite in Dialogue B? Indicate the politeness level of the request by Yuka in Dialogue B. very impolite 1—2—3—4—5 completely polite
5. Pragmalinguistic-sociopragmatic connection activities: How does Yuka try to be polite when making requests?
APPENDIX B: EXAMPLES OF TEST MATERIALS USED Discourse completion test Directions: Read each of the situations. After each situation write what you would say in that situation in a normal conversation.
You are writing a difficult paper for Professor Hill. You need some help with the paper but Professor Hill is away for a month. A friend of yours has suggested you go and see Professor Watson. Although you do not know Professor Watson and Professor Watson is extremely busy, you have decided to ask Professor Watson to look through your long paper before you hand it in the next day. What would you ask Professor Watson? (based on Takahashi 1998, 2001) Note: speaker difficulty =＋; power =‐; distance =＋; ＋= more; ‐= less;
= equal
You:__________________________________________________________________________
Role-play test Directions: There are 20 role-plays. You will be given a role-card before each of the role-plays. The role-card will describe the situation and your role (Role B). Read the situation described on the first card. It will require you to ask for something from the native speaker so you will have to start the role-play. The native speaker may or may not respond.
You must write an essay on a topic and turn it in by tomorrow. You have just found a very long interesting article on the topic, but it is written in Chinese. You can’t read the article in Chinese and you need to translate it into Japanese. You have just heard that there is a student in another department who is bilingual in Chinese and Japanese. Although you have never spoken to the student before, you decide to ask the student to translate the article into Japanese. (based on Hill 1997) Note: speaker difficulty =＋; power =
; distance =＋; ＋= more; ‐= less;
= equal
Now: You see the student.
Listening test Directions: Read each of the following situations and after each situation listen to a conversation between Taro (a Japanese university student) and an interlocutor (a native speaker of English) and then score the appropriateness of
Taro’s request on a 5-point scale.
Taro is working in a restaurant. The owner has asked Taro to get each customer to complete a very long questionnaire about the quality of the food and the service in the restaurant. Taro has given the questionnaire to a customer. Taro notices that the customer has not filled it in but is about to leave in a hurry. Taro needs to have the questionnaire filled by the customer. (based on Hudson et al. 1992, 1995) Note: speaker difficulty =＋; power =‐; distance =＋; ＋= more; ‐= less;
= equal
Taro:
Excuse me. I can see you are in a hurry. But please fill in this questionnaire.
Brown:
Oh, look. I’m sorry I really haven’t got the time.
not appropriate at all 1—2—3—4—5 completely appropriate
Acceptability judgment test Directions: Read each of the situations. After each situation you will be presented with three possible responses. Score the first possible response on an 11-point scale and score subsequent responses with a proportionally higher or lower number in accordance with the response’s degree of acceptability.
You overslept and missed the final exam for Professor Jackson’s course. You are not so familiar with Professor Jackson and you know that Professor Jackson has to hand in students’ grades in a few days and does not like to offer students a make-up exam. However, you need to pass the final exam to graduate and you have decided to go and ask Professor Jackson to give you a make-up exam. What would you ask Professor Jackson? (based on Takahashi 1998, 2001) Note: speaker difficulty =＋; power =‐; distance =＋; ＋= more; ‐= less;
a:
= equal
I was wondering if it would be possible for me to have a make-up exam. not appropriate at all 0—1—2—3—4—5—6—7—8—9—10 completely appropriate
b:
I want you to give me a make-up exam. not appropriate at all 0—1—2—3—4—5—6—7—8—9—10 completely appropriate
c:
Could you possibly give me a make-up exam? not appropriate at all 0—1—2—3—4—5—6—7—8—9—10 completely appropriate
Applied Linguistics 30/1: 26–48 ß Oxford University Press 2008 doi:10.1093/applin/amm057 Advance Access published on 14 February 2008
Soliciting Teacher Attention in an L2 Classroom: Affect Displays, Classroom Artefacts, and Embodied Action ASTA CEKAITE Linko¨ping University This paper explores L2 novices’ ways of soliciting teacher attention, more specifically, their summonses. The data are based on detailed analyses of video recordings in a Swedish language immersion classroom. The analyses illuminate the lexical shape of summonses in conjunction with prosody, body posture, gestures, and classroom artefacts. As demonstrated, a simple structure of summoning provided a handy method for soliciting and establishing the teacher’s attention, and facilitated the novices’ participation in classroom activities from early on. Importantly, however, the local design of the summonses was influenced by the competitive multiparty classroom setting. The analyses illustrate how the novices upgraded their summonses by displaying a range of affective stances. Different aspects of the students’ embodied actions were employed as ways of indexing affective stances, for example ‘tired’, ‘resigned’, or ‘playful’, that in the local educational order created methods that invited the teacher’s attention and conversational uptake. These locally available resources allowed children to upgrade their summonses and to indicate their communicative projects, in spite of their limited Swedish (L2) resources. The findings are discussed in terms of their implications for understanding participation in L2 classroom interactions as being a matter of delicately calibrated collaborative accomplishments. Keywords: L2 novices; summonses; embodied action; affective stances; classroom artefacts.
INTRODUCTION The present paper explores how primary school students solicit and secure teachers’ attention and participation in an immersion class context, where a second language (L2) constitutes the primary mode of classroom life. Recently, ethnographic discourse-oriented studies have illustrated how the micropolitics of classroom life shape children’s access to ‘linguaculture’ and resources in L2 learning (Willett 1995; Toohey 2000; Day 2002). To underscore the relevance of active participation in language practices, a growing number of microanalytical studies highlight how language learning opportunities are collaboratively constructed in learners’ interactions with teachers in mundane classroom discourse (Hall and Verplaetse 2000; Mondada and Pekarek Doehler 2004; Seedhouse 2004). As indicated by
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prior research, to be reviewed below, the ability to recruit participation of expert others is crucial for language learners. Managing to secure the teacher’s attention forms a part of a student’s interactional competence in the social ecology of the classroom (cf. Mehan 1979; Markee 2004). However so far, little is known about how children at an early stage of L2 learning are able to bring about the teacher’s attention and conversational involvement. Attention-getting strategies are important interactional devices that children employ to bring about the teacher’s involvement. The present study focuses on children’s (L2 beginners’) summonses as well as the responses they occasion in the unfolding classroom interaction. As an initiating speaker’s part in a sequence of actions, a summons (a vocative address, physical action, e.g. raising a hand) is typically designed to solicit the recipient’s attention (Schegloff 1968: 1080). The recipient’s answer to the summons (e.g. ‘yes’, gaze, nod) displays her/his expectation for further action on the first speaker’s part (C. Goodwin et al. 2002). Thereby, the recipient commits him-/herself to staying within the encounter (cf. Schegloff 1968). This type of sequence provides the most rudimentary form of attention-getting activity in L2 novice’s talk. However, in everyday life in the classroom, L2 novices attempting to secure the teacher’s attention often face a much more elaborate interactional task. Classroom life takes place in an interactional environment, where multiple simultaneous activities are pursued by various constellations of participants (van Dam 2002). Thus, an overwhelmingly pressing concern for students is to secure the teacher’s attention and interactional uptake in the context of many competing voices. By investigating ways in which children solicit and establish the teacher’s attention, the present study seeks to address the issue of learners’ access to participation in educational activities in a complex interactional setting. More generally, by examining the complex communicative abilities required when learners attempt to get conversational access to classroom activities, the present study seeks to enhance our understanding of a multilingual classroom as a social site for participation and language learning (Willett 1995; Breen 2001).
EARLIER RESEARCH ON ATTENTION-GETTING IN CHILDREN’S L2 INTERACTIONS Focusing on child L2 learners, several studies have illustrated the importance of attention-getting within L2 conversations. In her early discourse-oriented study, Hatch (1978) has shown that summonses are a crucial interactional resource in language learning. Attention-getting formats facilitate language acquisition in that they allow for collaborative topic nominations, establishment, and negotiations together with a more competent speaker (Hatch 1978; on L1 see Bruner 1981). Summoning is reported to be an initial and recurrent interactional device in children’s early L2 use (Hatch 1978; Linnakyla¨ 1980; Cathcart 1986; Cathcart-Strong 1986; Willett 1995; Pallotti 1996). For instance, in her study
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of a 5-year-old Finish boy learning English, Linnakyla¨ (1980) documented that attention-getting strategies (vocatives, directives to look at something) were crucial initial means of achieving participation in informal conversations. Moreover, at an early stage of learning, such actions were often the only lexical contributions the child could make to the interaction (see also Krupa-Kwiatkowski 1998). Educational settings, including language classrooms, present institutional environments in which students’ and teachers’ actions are guided by the local institutional order that defines participants’ mutual rights and responsibilities and makes them accountable for specific actions (Freebody and Freiberg 2000). They also delineate what provides access to the teacher’s interactional space. Classroom discourse entails a variety of speech-exchange systems that define what counts as a legitimate way of gaining the conversational floor and the teacher’s attention (Mehan 1979; Merritt 1982; Seedhouse 2004). Merrit’s (1982) analysis of children’s solicitation of the teacher’s attention (during individual seatwork) in an L1 primary classroom setting revealed that getting the teacher’s attention was by no means unproblematic: the students often needed to recycle their soliciting moves several times. They used numerous lexical reformulations of their summons turns, at times verbally indicating their reason for wanting the teacher’s attention and assistance (e.g. ‘Ms. C. I haven’t done this one yet’). Clearly then, being accepted as a ratified conversational participant presents a basic communicative challenge that the student faces in multiparty classrooms and requires complex interactional skills (Merrit 1982). Studies on formal L2 learning settings have also provided some evidence that securing a teacher’s attention involves considerable interactional work. For instance, Cathcart (1986), in her study of Spanish children’s interactions in a bilingual English–Spanish immersion class, demonstrated that calling the teacher’s attention (‘Lookit’, ‘Mrs P.’) and asking for compliments on their classroom work constituted a substantial part of novices’ language use during classroom seatwork. Such interactional moves also entailed a nonverbal element in that the children held out their papers when summoning the teacher. Further, in a study of a 5-year-old Moroccan girl’s L2 learning during her first year in an Italian kindergarten, Pallotti (1996) demonstrated that the novice initially learned and used words (‘Look’, ‘teacher’, proper names) that allowed her to become accepted as a communicative partner in this multiparty kindergarten setting. Yet although studies on children’s early L2 learning show that summoning forms a crucial interactional resource, we know surprisingly little about the interactional organization of such practices as they are produced within the dynamic flow of classroom encounters.
EMBODIMENT IN L2 SPEAKER TALK C. Goodwin argues that in order to properly understand how people manage their face-to-face encounters, we must take into account the multiple
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semiotic systems on the basis of which interaction is designed (C. Goodwin 2003). Multimodality is fundamental for the organization of social interactions, and talk gains its meaning as a social action in conjunction with embodied features, encompassing activities, sequential structures, and the material structure in the surround (Kendon 1990; C. Goodwin 2003). Although van Lier (2000) suggested that nonverbal aspects of action comprise significant interactional resources for L2 novices at an early stage of learning, it is fair to say that work on multimodal aspects of L2 interactions is still an emergent area of research. In general, second language acquisition (SLA) research has been preoccupied with verbal aspects of language learning. Lately, however, several microanalytic studies have focused on teacher’s gestures and other nonverbal behaviour as significant forms of input in L2 classrooms (e.g. Allen 2000; Lazaraton 2004). Several studies have explored the role of nonverbal aspects, primarily gestures, in L2 learners’ speech. However, they have mostly dealt with dyadic interactions between native and non-native speakers (McCafferty 2002) and story retelling tasks (Gullberg 1998; McCafferty 1998) rather than complex multiparty classroom environments. Some of the few studies on L2 novices’ small group interactions demonstrate the intricate ways in which adult L2 learners employ verbal and nonverbal resources in interaction (Carroll 2004; Olsher 2004). For instance, Olsher (2004) explored adult learners’ embodied practices evolving during small group project work. He demonstrated how the novices completed the (initially verbal) turn with gestures and embodied displays. In conversations between adult L2 and L1 speakers, such embodied completions provide opportunities for language learning because they allow L1 speakers to reformulate what the L2 speaker has said with a more elaborate linguistic expression (Mori and Hayashi 2006). As language use is inextricably interwoven with embodied aspects of action, it is important to consider the multimodal resources deployed by the participants in relation to talk. That is, in addition to examining L2 novices’ summons sequences as segments of talk alone, this study also places the locus of interest on embodied accomplishment of these communicative practices (cf. Hatch 1978 on the importance of visual aspects in the analysis of learner–expert interactions). Such an approach may provide insights into how L2 novices deploy a broad range of resources in order to facilitate interaction and elucidate how learners and teachers organize and coordinate their participation in the dynamic classroom setting. In line with studies that investigate ‘the social construction’ of language classroom talk (cf. Markee 2004: 583; see also Hall and Verplaetse 2000), the present study presents an in-depth analysis of L2 novices’ interactional work when summoning the teacher during individual seatwork. By attending to the sequential organization of the participants’ actions, I will explore how L2 novices deploy summons–answer sequences in pursuit of their teachers’ attention. More specifically, the lexical shape of the summons will be
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examined in conjunction with the multiple semiotic resources exploited by the participants, including body posture, gestures, and the artefacts provided by the surroundings. Importantly, when located in the interactional ecology of the classroom, summoning sequences can be defined as a type of interactional routine involving language use as an enactment of specific social relations (Peters and Boggs 1986: 81). By highlighting the recipient design (Sacks et al. 1974) of children’s summons, I will explicate how children’s ways of designing such calls display their sensitivity to the social ecological demands of classroom discourse. By demonstrating how complex the ability to recruit the teacher’s attention is, the present paper tentatively suggests that summoning (in and of itself) may provide a context for the development of interactional skills. In the dynamic multiparty classroom setting, L2 novices face several tasks when summoning the teacher, including (i) establishing attention and (ii) indicating what they want to interact about, that is, achieving a shared understanding of specific actions. Moreover, students have restricted rights to initiate talk in classroom settings, as well as restricted rights to choose topics; they also face the task of securing the teacher’s uptake. So, how do they solicit and establish the teacher’s attention?
METHOD Methodologically, the present study adopts conversation analysis’ (CA) detailed attention to interactional processes explored through participants’ sensemaking orientations on a turn-by-turn basis (Sacks et al. 1974; Lerner 2004). By attending to the sequential organization of talk, it explores the resources and methods participants rely on in the accomplishment of talk-in-interaction. The analysis also incorporates from language socialization a concern with participants’ use of indexical resources for the enactment of specific communicative roles and social relations (cf. Ochs 1988, 1996; Garrett and Baquedano-Lopez 2002). Integrating microanalyses with ethnographic observations allows us to more fully analyse children’s interactional contributions, which in many cases are comprehensible only in the light of the classroomspecific interactional arrangements (e.g. Kasper and Rose 2002).
Setting The analyses presented in this paper are based on video recordings and ethnographic observations of everyday interactions in a Swedish immersion class for refugee and immigrant children—a so-called ‘mottagningsgrupp’ (‘reception classroom’) in a Swedish school. ‘Reception’ classes have several aims, such as introducing the children to the Swedish language, and preparing them for transfer to regular classes, that is, introducing them to the Swedish educational system. The present group included children in grades 1–3 (7–10 years). They represented several languages: Arabic,
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Kurdish, and Thai. All children in this class were beginner learners who had recently arrived in Sweden. However, the children’s time spent in Sweden and the time spent in this class varied, as did the children’s L2 proficiency. Swedish was the language of instruction as well as the language taught, in that the teachers Vera (a native Swede, not present in the current episodes) and Fare (a Swedish-Arabic bilingual) taught Swedish vocabulary and reading, as well as maths and other school subjects. Fare used Arabic (as a language of instruction) only when the Arabic-speaking children experienced repeated problems in understanding classroom activities.
Data and recordings The present study is part of a larger investigation of children’s participation and L2 learning in an immersion classroom, where the children’s classroom interactions were video-recorded during three periods, covering an early (autumn), middle (winter), and late phase (spring) of the school year (90 hours of recordings). The data for this study are recordings from the middle phase (winter period) of the school year.1 The present study focuses on two girls, Fusi (a Kurdish 7-year-old) and Nok (a 7-year-old from Thailand), who were some of the latest arrivals in the class. During the mid-period of data collection, they had spent between 4 and 5 months in this class and were the least proficient in Swedish. Fusi also mastered some basic Arabic and used it occasionally when addressing Fare or Arabic-speaking classmates (girls). At the time, the other children had spent up to one year in the classroom and were more proficient in Swedish. Although Fusi’s and Nok’s Swedish skills were (still) very limited, they were actively engaged in individual work on assignments (instrumental classroom activities where talk was just one mode of participating, e.g. Goffman 1963).2
Interactional organization of individual work on assignments This study presents analyses of the girls’ participation during individual work on an assignment. During these classroom activities, the children usually worked on their own. They were seated in a half-circle, while the teacher walked around assisting them. Hand-raising was rare (Figure 1). The students were usually involved in many separate activities (doing exercises at their own skill level in, for instance, maths, writing, drawing), and the teacher was engaged in multiple tasks with multiple students. The students needed continuous supervision from the teacher in order to get instructions on a new task, to get an evaluation of completed work or to get help on work in progress. Because the teacher was continuously assisting the children, there were generally no ‘empty’ conversational slots during which the teacher was ‘free’ from involvement with other students. Therefore, it was often the case that several students were soliciting the teacher’s attention simultaneously, and they were often facing the task of either getting the teacher’s attention
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SOLICITING TEACHER ATTENTION IN AN L2 CLASSROOM
Layla
Miran
Ali
Ahmed
Rana Whiteboard
Nok Hiwa Sawan
Fusi
Figure 1: Classroom layout by disrupting the teacher’s current activity or having to wait for his/her postponed involvement.
Analytic unit The analytic units are students’ summonses of the teacher. They have been analysed in relation to the children’s communicative projects. The term communicative project is meant to include not only the verbally invoked topic related to the summons, but also a range of visible displays (e.g. of classroom artefacts) that invoked the reason for the call. A communicative project is defined as ‘the task it is designed to solve, and/or in fact actually solves’ (Linell 1998: 220). Communicative projects are inherently dialogical in the sense of being jointly produced in an interactional context by the participants (Linell 1998). In the present analyses, the communicative projects were identified through post-hoc analysis of the students’ summonses. Thus, in the context of individual seatwork, the students’ summoning can be related to distinct communicative projects, such as calling for assistance or inviting evaluations.
SOLICITING TEACHER ATTENTION Summons sequences and verbal contributions among more advanced learners In order to outline a more complete picture of the interactional ecology of the present classroom, I will initially illustrate the methods that the more advanced students in the classroom relied upon when calling for assistance from the teacher. At the time, they displayed a broad repertoire of
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interactional resources in that they could produce rather elaborate linguistically formed turns; they also participated in conversation-based classroom activities. When soliciting the teacher’s attention, they recurrently introduced their communicative project verbally, as a request for action on the teacher’s part.
Excerpt 1. Individual work on maths. Teacher Fare, class, including the girls Layla and Nok. Fare is standing close to Nok and is helping her.
Layla (an Arabic speaker) calls for the teacher, who is involved in talking to a nearby child, Nok (line 3). Layla employs lexical means to perform several actions within a single turn. She (i) specifies the recipient of the utterance, the teacher; (ii) calls for his attention; (iii) indicates that she is experiencing difficulties in her work on the assignment, identifying why she needs the teacher’s assistance, that is, providing a reason for the summons (cf. C. Goodwin et al. 2002). Note that the teacher does not stop talking to Nok (moreover, he does not even shift his gaze from Nok to Layla). Thus, despite the overlapping talk and the teacher’s gaze towards another student, Layla succeeds in securing his assistance, in that he (i) moves to Layla and (ii) answers her request by immediately providing instructions on the task (‘take the first’ in line 7). In this way, Layla and other relatively advanced learners performed several actions within the same turn using verbal means, indicating the communicative project at issue in their initiating move; they did not need to first secure the teacher’s visual orientation. Thus, similar to the L1 primary grade students in Merrit’s study (1982), the advanced students in the present study could verbally introduce the reason for their summons, thereby making the teacher accountable for providing assistance. Naturally, this is not to say that their calls for the teacher’s
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attention lacked embodied characteristics (see line 3, Layla’s gaze at the book)3 but rather that the analysis above aimed at highlighting the verbal means that the students used to solicit the teacher’s attention.
Visual displays of classroom artefacts in novices’ summons–answer sequences In contrast to the more advanced students in Excerpt 1, the L2 novices in this classroom did not have elaborate verbal resources at their disposal. In the following, I will present the ways in which they solicited the teacher’s attention through their summons turns. Excerpt 2 illustrates how an L2 novice deploys a summons when addressing the teacher during individual maths work. In particular, I will focus on how a visual display of a classroom artefact, the book, makes relevant a specific communicative project, that of securing the teacher’s assessment.
Excerpt 2. Individual work on maths. Teacher Fare, class, including Fusi and the boy Sawan. Fare assists Sawan at his desk.
The girl Fusi summons the teacher Fare, using a vocative (line 1). His response ‘jepp’ (‘yep’) indicates that he is waiting for Fusi’s forthcoming action, but he is still looking at the book of another student. Fusi’s directive to look ‘shuffi haie’ (‘look at this’ in Arabic) invites him to scrutinize her book, which she now holds raised towards him (line 3). Because of her limited skills in Arabic, Fusi wrongly uses a feminine verb form ‘shuffi’ to address the male teacher. The correct (masculine) form is ‘shuff’. Although grammatically incorrect, Fusi’s summons combined with her visual display of the book provides information on her communicative project and guides the teacher’s interpretation of her actions (lines 4 and 5). By looking at her book and producing an evaluation of her work (line 4), the teacher is
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orienting to Fusi’s communicative project. This interpretation is supported in that Fusi in fact packs her books, after obtaining his positive assessment. The (deictic) display of the specific page with the completed exercise constitutes an efficient ‘meaning producing system’ (C. Goodwin 2003: 228) and provides a way of precisely indicating the communicative project, that is, inviting an evaluation of work completed. That is, Fusi’s actions make relevant the contextually bound routines that together enable the teacher to ‘read’ and act upon her communicative project (asking for evaluation). Although the novices’ L2 vocabulary was still very limited, the teachers recurrently easily recognized what was apparently their communicative project. The participants’ shared knowledge of the encompassing activity (individual work on task) constituted the broad frame of interpretation for the visual displays of the classroom artefacts. Thus, a summons–answer sequence allowed the novices to recruit the teacher as a conversational partner in that (i) it committed the teacher to subsequent interaction, and (ii) it allowed for embodied demonstrations of the (significant) classroom artefacts. Such a summons sequence involves a multiparty performance of actions, organized and sustained within the ‘frameworks of attentiveness’ (M. Goodwin 1998: 39).4 Instead of directly telling the teacher why they need his/her assistance, the L2 novices first need to establish the teacher’s visual orientation (so as to be able to indicate their interactional concerns at hand).
Upgrading summonses During individual seatwork, the teacher was multitasking and several students would simultaneously call for assistance, thus summons turns were often unavoidably ignored. Although the classroom activities in this study were based on a student-centred approach, the student’s conversational rights were limited in terms of the topics to be brought up, the manner of speaking, and the timing of their contributions. Recruiting the teacher’s attention within the multiple voices of a classroom was usually a time-consuming activity that involved a considerable amount of interactional work. Although the L2 novices did not yet have elaborate lexical resources, the analysis demonstrated that through prosody, gesture, body posture and position, and the lexico-semantic features, their summons turns were highlighted, upgraded, and differentiated. The children upgraded their summonses in a number of ways, for example by moving towards the teacher (ambulatory design) and by combining their summons with displays of affect.
‘Ambulatory’ design of a summons Because the participants needed access to each other’s visual field, the novices could make their summons attempts visible by using what I will call
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an ambulatory design of a summons, which simply entailed moving into the physical proximity of the teacher.
Excerpt 3. Individual writing exercises. Teacher Fare, temporary teacher Martin, class, including the girls Fusi and Layla. Fare assists Layla at her desk.
When Fusi has finished her exercise, she issues an announcement concerning her progress with the work and directs it to Fare (line 1). Fare, however, is involved with some other children at the other end of the classroom and does not respond to her. Fusi then leaves her desk, grabs the teacher Martin (a temporary replacement) who is passing by, stops him and puts her writing book in front of him, displaying her finished exercise. By approaching the teacher, she actively constructs a state of ‘copresence’ (Goffman 1963: 17). Although she does not provide any verbal indication as to what is expected from the teacher when she approaches him, she successfully obtains his evaluation of her exercise.5
Affective design of a summons In producing and upgrading a summons, a student calling the teacher took up different affective stances (cf. Ochs 1996). Affective stances are important aspects of language use and language socialization, in that they are part of what constitutes interactional competence, in this case, students’ ‘appropriate’ classroom behaviour. Affect permeates different layers of human interaction, and even ‘novices are expected to recognize and to display emotions in culturally defined ways and according to local norms and preferences’ (Garrett and Baquedano-Lopez 2002: 352).6 While affect can be indexed at all levels of language—grammar, prosody, lexical, and conversational structures (e.g. Besnier 1990; Caffi and Janney 1994; Gu¨nthner 1997; Ochs and Schieffelin 1989)—it is also located within embodied sequences of action (Goodwin and Goodwin 2000).
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In the present classroom, the students recurrently employed gestures, body posture, and body position in arranging affective displays. Such bodily displays (e.g. half-lying on the desk, turned to the teacher, leaning away from the book, ambulatory design of actions) became meaningful in relation to situated classroom artefacts (books, desk). Repeatedly, novices and the more advanced students alike emphatically marked their summoning turns. In the conversational context of summoning, increased volume, accentuated and markedly prolonged vowels, and shifting the position of stress to the final prolonged vowel were recurrent features of prosody displaying the emphatically marked claims for the teacher’s co-orientation. While there are no prosodic features that can be straightforwardly associated with specific affective stances, an interactional approach to prosody has shown how some specific features tend to be recurrently employed in particular sequential and situational environments (e.g. Selting 1994; Local 1996) and can be seen to display ‘iconicity with the affective referents’ (Freese and Maynard 1998: 198)7. The present students’ emphatically marked summons turns carried a distinctive prosodic shape, marked by abrupt pitch leaps (high pitch) and a rising–falling pitch movement on a lengthened syllable (employed on key words, e.g. vocatives). Also, shifts in prosodic cues in relation to the prior turns as well as the surrounding talk in the classroom provided critical devices in the prosodic indexing of affectively charged summons turns. Such actions (prosodic indexing of affective stances) were significant interactional resources in that they audibly indexed an affective stance and could alert the teacher even before the teacher’s visual orientation was established (e.g. Excerpt 4). In the following example, I will discuss how multimodal resources are configured so as to bear on the interaction, by allowing the novice to display an affective stance as a ‘public and witnessable’ method for highlighting her claims for the teacher’s attention and assistance.
Excerpt 4. Individual work on maths. Teacher Fare, class, including Nok and the boy Hiwa. Fare is assisting Hiwa.
Nok summons Fare with an elongated (singing) vocative, Fare:::, in an intonation that can be glossed as ‘resignation’. She is also lying on her desk,
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looking at him, thereby ‘doing being ignored’ (e.g. Sacks 1992, vol. I). The prosodic indexing of ‘resignation’ (‘creaky’ voice and elongated final vowel) can be seen to indicate that this student is in trouble and needs help. The affective display is audible before the teacher has turned towards Nok, highlighting her summons. It is embellished by the ‘reclining’ body posture that can also be seen to indicate resignation. Nok’s affective display is coordinated with her simultaneous orientation to the classroom artefact, more specifically, her task. Through her body posture, Nok foregrounds the page with the problematic exercise while covering the irrelevant (left) page of the book, thus indicating that the teacher’s help is needed on the ongoing work (on the right page). Fare is turned away from Nok, involved in assisting Hiwa. While he turns to Nok, he produces a summons response (‘mh’), directing his gaze at Nok and her exercise, which is displayed on her desk. He then provides instructions and encourages her to continue to work on a particular ‘problematic’ exercise (line 4). Thereby, Nok’s visual display of the book provides for an interactionally economic performance in that it directly ‘catches’ the teacher’s eye and, together with the affective display, invokes the reason for the teacher’s assistance.8 As can be seen in Excerpt 4, resources such as prosodic cues, in coordination with body posture, and orientation to classroom artefacts were employed in constructing affective stance. The summons turn was tailored as affectively charged action that provided cues to the teacher concerning the reason for the student’s call for the teacher. Thus, when situated in the encompassing activity, the affective stances co-created the interpretative framework of the action. In this case, it was successful, in that the teacher, Fare, responded to Nok’s communicative project (line 4), even though she had not stated it in words. (Excerpt 5 and analysis can be found in the online version of this article, available to online subscribers at http://applij. oxfordjournals.org/.)
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Let us consider the participants’ interactional work in lines 7 and 8 in more detail:
Line .......... indicates Fusi’s pointing at the book; line ______ indicates Fare’s shifts in gaze towards Sawan (S) and Fusi (F).
Employing contrastive affective stances in pursuit of teacher’s attention As demonstrated in Excerpt 4, the affectively indexed summonses were not random displays of emotion. Instead, they provided the students with resources to take up different types of footing, or projected selves (Goffman 1981: 128), displaying their alignment with respect to the current action (summons). The way in which the present students shaped their summonses as emotionally charged action indicates their thorough work on recipient design (Sacks et al. 1974) and their delicate attunement to the institutional order of the classroom.9 Hence, the girls were able to recognize and deploy institutionally relevant ways for indexing social identities and relations (Ochs 1996; Antaki and Widdicombe 1998; Aronsson 1998). In the present classroom, affectively charged summons turns appealed to the teacher as a person responsible for the students’ classroom work, conduct, and emotional status. As Sacks (1992, vol. I: 256) has pointed out, an announcement of a relevant trouble to the other can serve as a proper beginning to a conversation when a conversationalist’s rights to talk to the other are somehow restricted. Affectively charged summonses provided interactional procedures for constructing locally relevant student identities interpretable as ‘needy’, ‘irritated’, ‘demanding’, ‘frustrated’, or ‘resigned’. They oriented to the teacher’s responsibility to supervise classroom work, thereby making him accountable for responding.
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Excerpt 6. Individual work on maths. Teacher Fare, researcher R, class, including the girls Nok, Layla,10 and the boy Hiwa. Fare is helping Nok at her desk.
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Nok has been doing a mathematics exercise (adding 5 to a preceding number). The teacher Fare, who has been assisting Nok, moves to another student, Layla (line 2). Nok comes up with an answer and writes it down (line 3), and she then summons Fare (lines 4–5). Her summons is embellished with a prosodic marking (rising tone), emphatically marked loudness (‘Fa"RE:’) (Selting 1994), a prolonged vowel, an additional loud outbreath, and a nonlexical response cry ‘o::hhh’ (Goffman 1981: 97). Nok’s actions, gliding down from the chair and raising herself with difficulty, are finely coordinated with her facial expression of a ‘tired’, ‘exhausted’ person, and with her response cry (line 5). In that Nok’s affectively indexed summons appears in the sequential context of her writing an answer to an adding operation, her multimodal performance makes her actions readable as those of a somewhat frustrated student who experiences trouble in her work on the current task and needs assistance. Upon returning to a seated position, Nok laughs and looks at the researcher. Her laughter and collusive gaze towards the researcher (line 6) indicate Nok’s somewhat playful attitude towards her immediately previous displays of the ‘exhausted student’ (in lines 4–5). Note that there is no uptake from Fare, who is still engaged in work with another student, Layla (line 7). Nok addresses the researcher in a rather loud collusive side-play ‘och tjugi tie’ (‘and twenty ten’) (line 8). Although this is not directed at the teacher, it is interpretable as a humorous comment on her task that flouts the task conditions, adding five to a preceding number (20þ5; 20þ10), and it is still formatted as ‘on-task’ action. Generally, the teachers responded to and corrected the students’ erroneous contributions. The ‘incorrectness’ of Nok’s loud comment can be seen to work on the conditions that the teacher will correct, that is, respond to such an action. Nok then turns to the teacher and produces her second recycled summons ‘Fare:!’, followed by nonsense talk (‘pepepe’) in a low volume (line 10). Her summons is marked by a prolonged final syllable and exclamative intonation, and presents a shift in affective stance (now to a serious summons mode). Thus, once again, while calling the teacher, Nok indexes her summons as an indignant request for the teacher’s attention, on the part of a student who is rightfully entitled to the teacher’s assistance. Nok also starts moving closer to the teacher using an ambulatory design in her actions, thereby upgrading her attempts to summon the teacher. Her summons (line 11) presents a contrast in affective stance in that it is marked
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by a playful mode, evident in the singing intonation and the metric pattern of the repetitive use of ‘little Fale’. In fact, the lexical design ‘lilla Fale’ (‘little Fale’) can be interpreted as an expression of inverted social relations, a tease, as the diminutive formula ‘little þ name’ was quite commonly used by the teachers to address the children. Clearly, Nok’s address is packaged as a humorous and teasing sort of action. The playful affective stance co-occurs with Nok leaving her desk and can be seen to modulate the ‘inappropriate’ character of her actions, that is, leaving her desk without permission. Simultaneously, the lexical design can be seen to highlight the student’s summons attempts in that it makes the teacher accountable for responding to her teasing. Nok again summons Fare (line 13). She elaborates her performance, playfully positioning her upper body and head on the desk, close to the teacher, and speaking in a playful key. She also points at him with a pencil. At this moment, he turns to Nok, their gazes meet, and the teacher finally leaves Layla’s desk. Nok moves back to her desk and waits for him (line 15). Finally, Fare looks at her book and instantly addresses the problematic issue in her exercise, that is, the adding operation (25þ5; line 16). The prosodic characteristics of the teacher’s turn (emphatic marking and voice quality) display an affective stance that makes his utterance ‘witnessable’ as a disciplining move, aimed at re-establishing the classroom order. Thereby he does not simply respond to Nok’s summons as a request for assistance but also to her playful affective displays. An important point demonstrated here is that whereas most of Nok’s utterances were summonses of relatively similar semantic content, they were differentiated in a progressive fashion through a range of contrasting affective stances when initial summoning attempts did not achieve success. While she employed a range of paralinguistic cues when highlighting her summonses, she was also actively rearranging her bodily position in the classroom space, thereby making her ‘non-working’ identity publicly witnessable. The ‘nonworking’ display was invoked by arranging body posture (and position) with respect to the workbook: while leaning away from the desk, gaze averted from the workbook, gliding down from the chair; or turned in body torque towards the teacher, moving closer to the teacher in an ambulatory design of summons (see also Excerpt 2). I want to argue that such multimodally structured summonses are based on some crucial knowledge of the classroom, namely, that if the student does not work, the teacher will— or at least will be expected to—deal with that. Thus, the different keyings of Nok’s affective stances are not unmotivated; rather they accomplish different interactional tasks. Nok shifts the affective indexing of her actions with regard to (i) the addressee (‘frustrated’, ‘resigned’ affective stance towards the teacher, whose help she is entitled to) and ‘playful’ towards the researcher (an observer, who has no responsibilities or rights to assist the student in classroom work), and (ii) the student’s own appropriate or inappropriate classroom conduct: calling the teacher from her own desk (‘resigned’ stance),
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or while approaching the teacher (playful keying of summons). Hence, Nok’s differentiated summonses located the teacher in a web of different institutional responsibilities: answering a ‘resigned’ student in need of assistance, or answering a playful action teasing the teacher’s authority. Such embodied performances served as powerful devices in pursuit of the teachers’ uptake in the socially and materially sedimented space of the local classroom setting (cf. M. Goodwin 1998) and were crucial for the local constitution and coordination of participants’ actions.
CONCLUDING DISCUSSION As demonstrated, a simple structure of summoning provided a handy method for soliciting and establishing the teacher’s attention and facilitated the novices’ participation in classroom activities from early on. Importantly, though, the local design of the summonses was influenced by the competitive multiparty classroom setting. A detailed analysis of multiple modalities in the summons turns demonstrates the intricate work in which the L2 novices engaged in order to achieve the communicatively loaded content of the summons. Thus the classroom was not a neutral setting, unaffected by (tacit) norms guiding the participants’ actions. As can be seen, both novices and more advanced students oriented to similar requirements concerning what constituted an appropriate reason for calling the teacher. In the local institutional order, they designed their initiating moves as displays of ‘trouble relevant for the other’ (Sacks 1992, vol. I: 256), orienting to the teacher’s responsibilities to help and assist the children. Such moves served as relevant warrants to initiate interaction and created additional incentives for the teacher to assist the student. The use of summonses as a method for engaging others in talk relied greatly on novices’ deployment of affective stances as well as their use of classroom artefacts. When highlighting and upgrading their summons, they deployed a multimodally structured performance. In conjunction with the visual displays of classroom artefacts, affective stances were employed as parallel ways of spelling out the communicative project (for instance, appealing to the teacher’s responsibilities to assist students who were experiencing difficulties with their work on an assignment). Also, summons turns could be designed as affectively charged action that invoked and exploited these institutional responsibilities. For instance, Nok’s publicly recognizable display of ‘not working’ (Excerpt 6) traded on the teacher’s responsibility to keep the students at work. That is to say, it spelled out the summons turn as ‘trouble for the other’ and invited the teacher’s response. Within the local classroom community, affective stances were accomplished through prosody, simple forms of grammatical structure, and embodied action, rather than ‘emotive vocabulary’ (Wierzbicka 1999). The nonverbal devices included prosody (pitch, loudness, tempo, etc.),
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paralinguistic characteristics, such as voice quality (smiley, creaky, tense voice), and body posture, movements and body positioning with respect to classroom artefacts (e.g. half-lying on the desk, gaze averted from the book). Such nonverbal resources were artfully used in conveying a range of affective stances, casting students as ostensibly ‘resigned’, ‘eager’, ‘bored’, ‘needy’, ‘challenging’, ‘indignant’, or ‘witty’. These affect displays simultaneously revealed the children’s orientation to the local classroom ethos and their intricate interactional work on recipient design in pursuing the teacher’s attention in the often fragmented and busy classroom interaction. As such, displays of affect comprised an integral feature of classroom interactions. For the L2 novices, the performative displays of affect supplemented the children’s limited lexical repertoire by establishing a framework for interpreting their interactional moves and provided embodied cues as to how one might construe a subsequent interactional move. Here, it is important to underscore the teachers’ readiness to make sense of minimal verbal or visual cues, to work out the communicative project invoked by the student, and to draw on the shared interactional history of the classroom. Achievement of involvement and participation in classroom activities, therefore, relies on participants’ employment of socially distributed methods for the production of accountable actions, including embodied action. Although the present study did not explicitly focus on L2 development, it may provide ground for considerations regarding potential implications of summons for language learning, more specifically, learners’ development of interactional competencies. As noted earlier, being able to recruit the participation of the ‘expert’ and direct the teacher towards specific interactional tasks is one of the basic conditions for gaining access to the ‘linguaculture’ of the classroom (e.g. Willet 1995; Toohey 2000). As the close scrutiny of children’s summonses demonstrated, these seemingly simple discursive structures involve rather complex communicative abilities. While summoning can be accomplished by employing resources that are already available even for language novices, these resources need to be configured so as to fit into the interactional ecology of the institutional setting (e.g. Ochs 1996; Garrett and Baquedano Lopez 2002). Language learners, thereby, need to display affective stances and identities in institutionally ratified ways. These interactional procedures, however, are not taught explicitly. The novices therefore (may) need to discover and appropriate these local procedures through observation and participation in the everyday classroom activities (e.g. Rogoff 1990; Ohta 2000). Summoning, thereby, may in and of itself provide a learning context. If we see language (including interactional competencies) as evolving from specialized ways of solving interactional problems (Hatch 1978; Bruner 1981), summons sequences may provide a fundamental framework for students’ initial L2 learning. Final version received June 2007
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SUPPLEMENTARY DATA Supplementary material mentioned in the article is available to online subscribers at the journal website www.applij.oxfordjournals.org
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Thanks are due to Karin Aronsson, Jakob Cromdal, Ann-Carita Evaldsson, Gabriele Kasper, and three anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this article. Financial support from the Swedish Research Council and the Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation is gratefully acknowledged.
TRANSCRIPTION KEY : [] (.) (2) YES x (xx) what jala
(()) 45 54 ? . ¼ Fare heh "#
prolonged syllable demarcates overlapping utterances micropause, i.e. shorter than (0.5) numbers in single parentheses represent pauses in seconds relatively high amplitude inaudible word unsure transcription translation into English word in Arabic denotes speech in low volume further comments of the transcriber quicker pace than surrounding talk slower pace than surrounding talk denotes rising terminal intonation indicates falling terminal intonation denotes latching between utterances sounds marked by emphatic stress are underlined indicates laughter rising, falling intonation
NOTES 1 Thus, this study does not entail a developmental focus. On the results of the longitudinal study, see Cekaite (2007). 2 Individual work on assignments provided a locus for the girls’ very early active participation in the classroom, documented already during the first period of recordings, see Cekaite (2007). 3 Szymanski (1999), for instance, has demonstrated how, during group work, the students relied on both
verbal and visual characteristics of actions to alert the others to the upcoming talk. 4 From a somewhat different setting, C. Goodwin et al. (2002) demonstrated that a person with aphasia employed the summons as a systematic procedure to establish the recipient’s visual orientation. When visual orientation was established, pointing, gestures, and embodied demonstrations of artefacts were deployed as meaningful interactional resources in collaborative meaning making.
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5 Although in this case Fusi achieved an evaluation of her work without being disciplined, the children were usually not allowed to leave their desks to approach the teacher. Instead, they had to comply with the norms of appropriate classroom behaviour and solicit the teacher’s assistance from their own desks. It is notable that Martin was a substitute teacher present in the classroom just for a couple of days, which is probably why he did not discipline Fusi. Simultaneously, his ‘reading’ of why his attention was needed demonstrates that even a novice teacher in the classroom orients to the book display as a locally meaningful artefact. 6 Different language communities and communities of practice may have certain commonalities ‘in the linguistic means used to constitute’ certain situational meanings, including affective stances (Ochs 1996: 425). These common features in the linguistic structuring of social activities may present a common ground for socialization for different categories of novices (Ochs 1996: 428). However, ‘these commonalities do not necessarily imply that the full social meanings of particular stances or particular acts are shared across communities’ (Ochs 1996: 426). Novices (including L2 learners) need to recognize, develop, and learn to deploy the distinctly local ways of indexing social situations (according to the expectations of the local community of practice).
7 Participants’ heightened emotive involvement is, for instance, indexed through an emphatic speech style, which is constituted through shifts in prosodic markers in relation to prior turns of talk (Selting 1994). Affective intensity may be indexed through modulation of volume, vowel lengthening, and code-switching between registers (Ochs 1996: 427). 8 Here, Nok pre-arranges the prospective locus of mutual attention during the ongoing summons, before the teacher indicates he has committed himself to participating in the encounter. Simultaneous displays of classroom artefacts can be seen as a method that provides early (visual) indications of the communicative project. 9 Ochs (1988), in her study on Samoan children’s primary socialization, demonstrated that even young children are sensitive to the social organization of the group with respect to participants’ mutual rights and responsibilities, and, consequently, communicative roles in child–adult interactions. The children designed their requests to caregivers by employing affective markers rhetorically, for instance, they used pronouns expressing sympathy for oneself in order to elicit sympathy from the adult (1988: 187). 10 Rana, who was usually sitting between Nok and Layla, is not present in the current episode.
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Local, J. 1996. ‘Conversational phonetics: Some aspects of news receipts in everyday talk’ in E. Couper-Kuhlen and M. Selting (eds): Prosody in Conversation: Interactional Studies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McCafferty, S. G. 1998. ‘Nonverbal expression and L2 private speech,’ Applied Linguistics 19/1: 73–96. McCafferty, S. G. 2002. ‘Gesture and creating zones of proximal development for second language learning,’ Modern Language Journal 2/2: 192–203. Markee, N. 2004. ‘Zones of interactional transition in ESL classes,’ Modern Language Journal 88/4: 583–96. Mehan, H. 1979. Learning Lessons: The Social Organization of Classroom Behavior. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Merritt, M. 1982. ‘Repeats and reformulations in primary classrooms as windows of the nature of talk engagement,’ Discourse Processes 5: 127–45. Mondada, L. and S. Pekarek Doehler. 2004. ‘Second language acquisition as situated practice: Task accomplishment in the French second language classroom,’ Modern Language Journal 88/4: 501–18. Mori, J. and M. Hayashi. 2006. ‘The achievement of intersubjectivity through embodied completions,’ Applied Linguistics 27/4: 195–219. Ochs, E. 1988. Culture and Language Development: Language Acquisition and Language Socialization in a Samoan Village. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ochs, E. 1996. ‘Linguistic resources for socializing humanity’ in J. Gumperz and S. Levinson (eds): Rethinking Linguistic Relativity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ochs, E. and B. Schieffelin. 1989. ‘Language has a heart,’ Text 9/1: 7–25. Ohta, A. 2000. Second Language Acquisition Processes in the Classroom. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Olsher, D. 2004. ‘Talk and gesture: The embodied completion of sequential actions in spoken interaction’ in R. Gardner and J. Wagner (eds): Second Language Conversations. London: Continuum. Pallotti, G. 1996. ‘Towards an ecology of second language acquisition: SLA as a socialization process’ in E. Kellerman, B. Weltens, and
T. Bongaerts (eds): Proceedings of EUROSLA 6, Toegepaste Taalwetenshap in Artikelen, No. 55. Peters, A. M. and S.T. Boggs. 1986. ‘Interactional routines as cultural influences upon language acquisition’ in B. Schieffelin and E. Ochs (eds): Language Socialization across Cultures. New York: Cambridge University Press. Rogoff, B. (1990). Apprenticeship in Thinking: Cognitive Development in Social Context. New York: Oxford University Press. Sacks, H. 1992. Lectures on Conversation: Volumes I and II (ed. G. Jefferson). Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Sacks, H., E. A. Schegloff, and G. Jefferson. 1974. ‘A simplest systematics for the organization of turn-taking for conversation,’ Language 50: 696–735. Schegloff, E. A. 1968. ‘Sequencing in conversational openings,’ American Anthropologist 70/6: 1075–95. Schegloff, E. A. 1998. ‘Body torque,’ Social Research 65/3: 535–96. Seedhouse, P. 2004. The Interactional Architecture of the Language Classroom: A Conversation Analysis Perspective. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Selting, M. 1994. ‘Emphatic speech stylewith special focus on the prosodic signalling of heightened emotive involvement in conversation,’ Journal of Pragmatics 22/3–4: 375–408. Szymanski, M. H. 1999. ‘Re-engaging and dis-engaging talk in activity,’ Language in Society 28/1: 1–23. Toohey, K. 2000. Learning English at School: Identity, Social Relations and Classroom Practice. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. van Dam, J. 2002. ‘Ritual, face, and play in a first English lesson: Bootstrapping a classroom culture’ in C. Kramsch (ed.): Language Acquisition and Language Socialization. London: Continuum. van Lier, L. 2000. ‘From input to affordance: Social-interactive learning from an ecological perspective’ in J. P. Lantolf (ed.): Sociocultural Theory and Second Language Learning. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wierzbicka, A. 1999. ‘Defining emotion concepts,’ Cognitive Science 16/4: 539–81. Willett, J. 1995. ‘Becoming first graders in an L2: An ethnographic study of L2 socialization,’ TESOL Quarterly 29/3: 473–503.
Applied Linguistics 30/1: 49–69 ß Oxford University Press 2008 doi:10.1093/applin/amn033 Advance Access published on 29 September 2008
‘Lego my keego!’: An Analysis of Language Play in a Beginning Japanese as a Foreign Language Classroom CADE BUSHNELL University of Hawai’i at Ma¯noa In this article, I present an analysis of talk-in-interaction from an introductory Japanese as a foreign language classroom at an American university. An examination of the data revealed language play (LP) to be a highly salient feature of the participants’ interactions. LP has come into increasing focus in the second language acquisition research of the last decade. Research in L1 has long shown the prevalence of LP in both the language data available to the learner and learner language production (e.g. Garvey 1984, [1977] 1990), and recent research in L2 has shown that LP is also a prominent characteristic of the language production of both child and adult L2 learners (Kramsch and Sullivan 1996; Cook 1997, 2000, 2001; Lantolf 1997; Sullivan 2000; Tarone 2000; Broner and Tarone 2001; Belz 2002a, 2002b; Bell 2005; Cekaite and Aronsson 2005; Kim and Kellog 2007). Adopting Cook’s (2000) definition of LP, I use conversation analysis to examine instances of LP in the participants’ interactions. Analysis focuses specifically on the ways in which LP functions within the context of the language learning classroom to provide ‘affordances’ (van Lier 2000, 2004) for language learning, and to become a resource for sequenceorganization. The analysis shows that by and through the fictional world of LP, the participants were able to engage in the teacher-assigned pedagogical activities on their own terms. In the discussion, I argue that LP is potentially of great benefit to the linguistic development of second language learners— echoing Cekaite and Aronsson’s argument in favor of a ludic model of language learning, in which they contend that ‘we need to take non-serious language more seriously’ (2005: 169).
INTRODUCTION Cook (2000: 5) argues that play is highly beneficial to human development, and that language play (henceforth LP) in particular is important not only in child language acquisition, but in adult language learning as well. However, as Cook noted, a serious examination of LP had at that time ‘on the whole been neglected, or at least sidelined, in the study of language and language learning’ (2000: 4) and until the 2000s, second language researchers had paid relatively little attention to LP, a notable exception being Kramsch and Sullivan (1996). In the field of second language acquisition (SLA), where the dominant theoretical frameworks have tended to emphasize interaction
50
LANGUAGE PLAY IN A BEGINNING JAPANESE FL CLASSROOM
focusing on referential meaning (e.g. ‘task-based’ instruction; Long 1983, 1996; Doughty and Pica 1986; Skehan 1998; Pica 2005; but see, e.g., Block 2003, 2007a, 2007b on the recent ‘social turn’ in SLA research), this is not a surprising fact. However, research in L1 has long shown the prevalence of LP in both language data available to the child language learner, as well as learner language production (e.g. Garvey 1984, [1977] 1990). LP is also a salient feature of child L2 acquisition (Tarone 2000; Broner and Tarone 2001; Cekaite and Aronsson 2005; Kim and Kellogg 2007) and recent research on adult L2 acquisition has unequivocally shown it to be in no way a ‘childish’ activity (Kramsch and Sullivan 1996; Cook 1997, 2000, 2001; Lantolf 1997; Belz 2000a, 2000b; Sullivan 2000; Bell 2005). While previous research has often focused on the intrinsic features of LP (e.g. Cook 1997, 2000), or the possible effects of LP on interlanguage structures and second language acquisition (e.g. Tarone 2000), the present study will examine several of the socially situated functions of LP. Using conversation analysis, I examine naturally occurring linguistic data collected from a beginning Japanese as a foreign language classroom. In the analysis, I will show that the participants co-construct and use the fictional worlds of LP as a resource by which to organize the pedagogical-task-as-social-interaction. Moreover, I will argue that LP functions to offer ‘affordances’ (van Lier 2000, 2004) for the development of sociolinguistic competence (Tarone 2000), and for encoding the target language in a highly internalizable and ‘deeply processed’ (Craik and Lockhart 1972; Craik and Tulving 1975) fashion.
Functions of language play in second language acquisition Tarone (2000) argues that LP may be an important facilitator to SLA in at least the following ways. First, LP may lower affective barriers to SLA by providing a means of assuaging anxiety, thus allowing linguistic data to pass through the ‘affective filter’ (Krashen 1981) and become ‘intake’ (Chaudron 1988; Schmidt 1990). Second, LP may increase the memorizability of the discourse engaged in by the learner. Craik and Lockhart (1972), and Craik and Tulving (1975) suggest that retrieval from the long-term memory is facilitated by the creation of a ‘trace’, or triggering association. Craik and Lockhart (1972) also argue that ‘depth of analysis’ or ‘elaborative encoding’ will promote the creation of a strong trace. They define ‘depth’ as ‘involving a greater degree of semantic or cognitive analysis (1972: 675)’ and argue that this semantic enrichment can be achieved through an accumulation of ‘associations, images or stories on the basis of the subject’s past experience with the word’ (ibid.). In this vein, Cook (2001: 381–3) provides concrete examples of the mnemonic efficacy of LP, and suggests that LP may produce such lasting impressions on the memories of learners that, even after years of disuse, they will still be able to vividly recall the language encoded via LP.
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51
Third, LP may provide the learner with opportunities for incorporating other ‘voices’ (see Bakhtin 1981) into their L2—possibly fostering sociolinguistic competence. Sociolinguistic competence requires the appropriation of not just one register, but of ‘several voices or varieties appropriate to the speech communities to which the learner belongs, or wishes to belong’ (Tarone 2000: 46). Bakhtin (1981, 1984) emphasizes that we do not learn our languages from a dictionary, but rather that we weave together a patchwork of voices appropriated from the speech of others. LP gives learners an opportunity to experiment with other voices without concern for adverse social consequences. This process may enable learners to gain ownership of the voices and construct their own complex identities, allowing them to participate in their speech communities with a greater range of resources for and freedom of self-expression (Tarone 2000). Fourth, because LP may entail production of alternative linguistic forms, it could play a crucial role in the destabilization and restructuring of the learner’s interlanguage (IL) (Tarone 2000; Broner and Tarone 2001; Bell 2005; Kim and Kellogg 2007). Tarone (2000) argues that IL development requires both centripetal and centrifugal (see Bakhtin 1981) forces, which are manifest in the push of the demand for accuracy and the pull of creativity and innovation, respectively. She suggests that LP creates just such a situation for learners as they engage in the act of noticing linguistic forms in the course of LP and gradually replace incorrect productions with correct L2 forms. Cekaite and Aronsson (2005: 170) touch upon two additional functions of LP. The first is that of a ‘face-saving device’ which allows participants to commit face-threatening acts (FTAs) (Brown and Levinson 1987) while effectively avoiding social repercussions by remaining ‘off-record’ in the context of play (see also Zajdman 1995; van Dam 2002). Second, they suggest that LP may function as a venue for extended multiparty interaction. They note that ‘[i]n ordinary conversations speech errors and overt corrections frequently trigger play episodes’ (Cekaite and Aronsson 2005: 176). In the case of L2 learners, such instances may provide an opportunity to engage in a ‘language related episode’ (LRE) where the focus of the interaction shifts from conveying a message to attending to the linguistic form of the message itself (Swain 2000). LP may thus contribute to the creation of a space for continued collaborative attention to form. It is arguable that all of the functions mentioned above (i.e. affective, mnemonic, sociolinguistic, IL destabilizing, FTA mitigating, and interactional) may have considerable impact on SLA. In the analysis presented below, however, special attention is given to the ways in which LP functions to provide affordances for learners to internalize interactional episodes, and to develop greater levels of sociolinguistic competence. Additionally, I will also emphasize another important function of LP, which, to the best of my knowledge, has not been directly touched upon by previous research: LP as a resource for organizing and engaging in social interaction.
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LANGUAGE PLAY IN A BEGINNING JAPANESE FL CLASSROOM
Research questions and methodology I will employ the methodology of conversation analysis (CA) in considering the following research questions:
In what ways do the participants of this study use LP? How does this use of LP function as a resource for engaging in social interaction? What affordances (van Lier 2000, 2004) for language development are made available through the LP?
CA is an extremely robust tool by which to examine social interaction. It is especially useful in helping the researcher to understand, from the participants’ perspective, how they (the participants) co-achieve social order and intersubjectivity within their interaction (Sacks et al. 1974; see also Tanaka 1999 for Japanese). Much of the previous research has tended to view LP through the lens of the individual learner. LP has been seen as a social phenomenon only insofar as it ‘occur[s] as part of a process in which learners appropriate the L2 speech of others in interaction and internalize it’ (Broner and Tarone 2001: 497). Furthermore, the relationship between LP and social action has often been de-emphasized in order to focus on its intrinsic features (see, e.g., Cook 1997). By using CA, however, the present study seeks to give careful consideration to the ways in which the participants orient to and use LP as a resource for engaging in and organizing their social interaction in the context of the pedagogical task.
SETTING AND DATA Classroom setting Data were collected from two second semester Japanese as a foreign language (JFL) classrooms at an American university. Signed consent was obtained from all participants prior to data collection. The data used in this study come from a subset of the data collected from one of these two classes. Ten of the fifteen students in the JFL class examined here had been together in the same class taught by the same teacher from the previous semester. None of the five new students were known to the other ten prior to the beginning of the data collection period. This fact served to create a classroom in which the intra-group interactions of one group of students were characterized by a familiarity and solidarity that reflected their shared social history from the previous semester. Such familiarity/solidarity was generally absent in the other group of students in both inter- and intra-group interactions (though some of the students from the ‘new group’ had developed associations within their own group prior to data collection). Class met four days a week for 50 minutes per session. The typical pedagogical flow began with a teacher-fronted presentation followed by whole class, teacher-fronted practice. The students would then be asked to
CADE BUSHNELL
53
form pairs or groups and be given various tasks related to the pedagogical focus (often involving some variation of role play) as the teacher circled the room providing assistance. The teacher then usually led the students in discussing any highlights, problems, etc. they experienced while engaging in the task. Occasionally, several pairs or groups of students would be asked to perform the task in front of the whole class.
Participants and data collection procedures Approximately 25 hours of audio data were collected from the class in question. In the present study, I analyze data from a ‘whole-class’ interaction (Excerpt 1), and data from the interactions of two individuals (Excerpts 2 and 3) from the JFL class described above. These two participants, Sal and Hal, were representative of the average to above average students in the class. Data collection was accomplished by having one participant, Sal, wear a lapel microphone for the entire class period during every day of the data collection period. This procedure was followed from the week prior to collection of the data used in this study. Additional data were also gathered via several informal interviews with Sal. According to Sal, at the time of data collection he and Hal were already well acquainted with each other as a result of extensive prior interaction.
Types of language play: ‘rehearsal’ vs. ‘fun’ Generally speaking, two distinct categories of LP have been discussed in the literature (Broner and Tarone 2001). The first type has been referred to as ‘rehearsal’ (Bell 2005; Broner and Tarone 2001) and is marked by such characteristics as a lower vocal volume, the absence of laughter, manipulation of phonological and morphosyntactic elements new to the learner, and lack of overt reference to a fictional world. Additionally, this type of LP is typically addressed to the self in the form of private speech (Broner and Tarone 2001; see also Lantolf 1997, 2000; Ohta 2001). The second type of LP, which most resembles the type examined in the current study, has been referred to as ‘fun’ LP (Broner and Tarone 2001). According to Broner and Tarone (2001), this type of LP contrasts with LP as rehearsal in that it may typically feature smiles or laughter, marked shifts in vocal pitch and quality, use of linguistic forms already known to the learner, reference to fictional worlds, and unlike the typically private rehearsal LP, fun LP often appears to be addressed to an other. In this article, I shall assume that the type of LP discussed by Cook (2000) falls under the heading of ‘fun’ rather than ‘rehearsal’ LP, though he does not use these terms himself. Cook notes that fun LP is ubiquitous in everyday interactions and that it may take on different functions according to the contexts within which its various features are deployed. Furthermore, he analyzes fun LP into three levels (formal, semantic, and pragmatic) and identifies several defining features for each level
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LANGUAGE PLAY IN A BEGINNING JAPANESE FL CLASSROOM
(e.g., repetition and patterning [formal]; separation from ‘real-world’ reference [semantic]; and social inclusion and or exclusion [pragmatic]). Importantly, however, Cook also maintains that it is not necessary that all features exhibit equal prominence, nor that all features be present in every instance. Thus, for the purposes of this study, the presence of one or more of Cook’s features will be acknowledged as an instantiation of LP.
ANALYSIS Playing together: features of language play in ‘whole-class’ interaction Excerpt 1 shows a segment of talk involving ‘whole-class’ interaction where the teacher (T) is working to create a transition to a new pedagogical focus by asking the students (Ss) to recall the topic of the previous week’s lesson: keego ‘honorific language’. While consideration is also given to the function(s) (offering affordances for language learning, and sequence-organizational) of the LP, for illustrative purposes, the analysis will foreground the various features of the LP as they are evident in the excerpt. In this regard, Excerpt 1 is an especially perspicuous example because features from all three of Cook’s (2000) levels are identifiable within this one excerpt. (See the Appendix for a list of transcription conventions and grammatical terms.) Excerpt 1: ‘Lego my keego’1
1
T:
ii good
2
desu ka? minasan. keego C
simasita did
Q
everyone
(.) o benkyoo
honorifics
O
study
ne.= IP
Ok? Everyone, we studied (.) honorifics right? 3
S1:
=keego. honorifics
Honorifics. 4
T:
((nodding to S1))keego. keego wa nan desu ka? honorifics
honorifics T
what
C
Q
((nodding to S1)) Honorifics. What are honorifics? 5 6
(2) S2:
keego? honorifics
kego (.) kaimasita? KEG. [KEEGO.= kego
bought
keg
honorifics
=Honorifics? (You) bought a kego? Keg! Honorifics! 7
Ss:
[KEG. KEGO.=
CADE BUSHNELL
KEG
KEGO
Keg! Kego! 8
S2:
=KE::GO:::hehehehehehehe KE::GO:::hehehehehehehe
Kego! hehehehehehe 9
Ss:
=hehehehehehehe hehehehehehehe
=hehehehehehe 10 T:
hai, DAME::. [hehehehehehe yes
no good
hehehehehehe
Yeah right! hehehehehehe 11 S2:
[AH::: ((disappointed tone)) AH:::
12
AH. KE:GO [hehehehehe OO]KI BIIRU. AH
KE:GO
hehehehehe
big
beer
Aaah! ((disappointed tone)) Ah! Kego hehehehehe big beer! 13 S3:
[OOKII BIIRU. hehehe] big
beer
hehehe
Big beer! hehehe 14 Ss: 15 T:
HEHEHEHEHEHEHE sore wa ke:ggu. ke:ggu. (.4) [ke:ggu kore that
T
keg
keg
keg
this
That’s keg. Keg. Keg this 16 S2:
[kegu? keg
Keg? 17 T:
keego. [hehehehehe honorifics
hehehehehe
is keego. hehehehehe 18 S2:
[KE:GO KEGU KE:GO. (1) KE:GO KEGU KE:GO.
19
20 21 22 23
DON'T PLAY WITH MY KE:GO= Kego kegu kego! (1) Don’t play with my ke:go!= S3: S2: T: Ss:
=LEGO MY KEGO. [HEHEHEHEHEHE] [LEGO MY KE:GO. HEHEHEHEHE] [HEHEHEHEHEHE] [HEHEHEHEHEHE]
55
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LANGUAGE PLAY IN A BEGINNING JAPANESE FL CLASSROOM
S2’s utterance in line 6 corresponds with the second feature of LP noted above: a separation from ‘real-world’ reference. Here, after a 2 second pause following T’s redirection to the previously studied topic of keego ‘honorifics’ (lines 1–5), S2 repeats the word keego with a rising intonation and immediately follows with the question ‘kego (.) kaimasita?’ ((you) bought a keg?) (line 6). By using the verb kaimasita ‘bought’, S2 ‘re-semiotizes’ (Belz 2002a) the Japanese word keego based on its phonological similarity with the English word ‘keg’ (i.e. keg of beer). This re-semiotization signifies a segment boundary between talk oriented to the real world and a new orientation to a ‘non-real’ world in which T has purchased a keg of beer. In lines 12 and 13, S2 and S3 co-clarify this re-semiotization by the addition of ookii biiru ‘big beer’. The fact that the interactional frame has been shifted to one of LP is further evidenced by the extended loud laughter from the other Ss in line 14: they are now in on the joke, having entered into an intersubjective state with the authors of this LP segment. The second instance of LP in Excerpt 1 corresponds with the linguistic patterning and/or repetition feature of LP. The Ss foreground the phonological features of their play via manipulations and repetitions (lines 6, 7, 8, 12, and especially 18–21). In lines 15 and 17, we see T making a repair of S2’s utterance by emphasizing the phonological differences between keggu ‘keg’ (foreign loan word: cf. native Japanese sakadaru ‘sake cask; keg’) and keego ‘honorifics’. T’s contribution, notably accompanied by laughter (line 17), triggers a further expansion of the LP by juxtaposing the two pronunciations, which S2 immediately incorporates into the play in a ‘sing-songy’ manner (lines 16 and 18). S2 also incorporates the phonological material ‘ke:go’ into the L1 clause ‘don’t play with my ke:go’ (line 19). The third feature of LP mentioned above—the pragmatic function of social inclusion and or exclusion—is especially salient in line 20 where S3 latches onto S2’s substitution play utterance with ‘lego my kego’ (echoing the catch phrase ‘lego my EggoÕ ’ from a well-known television commercial for Kellogg’s ‘EggoÕ waffles’). By couching ‘kego’ in a highly idiomatic chunk of culturally charged language, this move again results in the re-semiotization of the Japanese word keego. This triggers widespread and extended laughter— evidence of the socially inclusive nature of the collaboratively constructed LP frame (note the references to shared social experience among American college students, i.e. beer that comes in a keg and instant breakfast food).2 LP in the case of whole-classroom interaction makes salient a complex web of orientations to talk. We see instances of T constructing his default identity (Richards 2006) as teacher through his use of organizational talk (line 4) and his repair (lines 15 and 17). However, while the initial exchange between T and S1 orients towards classroom management as an interactionally accomplished activity, the orientation of the talk quickly changes as S2 reorients to T’s talk not as a student, but as a speaker (Shimazu 2000; Richards 2006). Other Ss subsequently orient to S2’s move as a potential initiation of an LP round and use the LP as a resource by which to extend and engage in the interaction via collaborative participation and laughter (lines 7, 9, 13, 14, 20, and 23).
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57
Playing being ‘sensee’: Engaging in the task as play In Excerpts 2 and 3 below, I turn to a consideration of LP in dyadic interactions between learners. An examination of the data revealed many instances of language play. LP activities such as joking, story telling and verbal dueling were common—in spite of the fact that the participants of this study were beginning learners of Japanese. Though I continue to make note of instances in the data that correspond to the features of LP as identified by Cook (2000), I shift the analytic emphasis to the function(s) (sociolinguistic, mnemonic and sequence-organizational) of the LP. In Excerpt 2, Sal and Hal are negotiating a task in which they are required to talk about what they did over the weekend. Just prior to this sequence, whole class practice had focused on talking about weekend activities using the question shuumatu wa nani o simasita ka (what did you do during the weekend?) and the response pattern X o simasita (I did X), or X o 5verb4-ta (I 5verb4-ed). Excerpt 2: ‘repooto o kakimasita’
1
H:
S-san, nani o (.) er shuma:tu wa (.) nani o S-title
2
what
O
er
weekend
T
what
O
simasita ka? did
Q
Mr. S, what did you do over the weekend? 3
S:
AI::::::uh:: (5) watasi wa (2) ukagai (2) ai
4
uh
I
T
MASU.
i ask you dude=
DS marker
I ask
you
HU-ask
dude
Ai, uuh I’ll ask. I ask you dude 5
H:
=uh:::
6
S:
shumatu ni nani o simasita ka, (.)H-san. weekend
DA
what
O
did
Q
H-title
What did you do on the weekend, Mr.H. 7 8
(3) H:
{repooto o}kaki:masit [a, it's right there= report
O
wrote
it's
right
(I) wrote (my) report, it’s right there 9
S:
10 H:
[hehehehe =you know. {repooto o
kakimasita},
there
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LANGUAGE PLAY IN A BEGINNING JAPANESE FL CLASSROOM
you
know
report
O
wrote
you know. (I) wrote my report 11 S:
AH. so AH
that
desu ka:: hehe C
Q
hehe
Ah. Is that right? hehe ((lines 8 and 10: {words}= ‘regal’ tone))
The interaction begins with both Sal and Hal orienting to the task-at-hand as directed by the teacher. Hal asks Sal about his weekend using the model provided by T in the prior activity, forming the first pair part of a Question/ Answer adjacency pair. However, Sal hesitates to respond to Hal’s question by deploying a greatly lengthened first word followed by the hesitation token ‘uh’, followed by a 5 second pause (line 3). At this point, Sal informs Hal that he (Sal) will do the asking. Though Sal’s turns in lines 3, 4, and 6 ignore the adjacency pair initiated by Hal, Sal formulates his utterance in line 4 by using highly colloquial language accompanied by contextualization cues (Gumperz 1982; Ostermann 2003) that are subsequently oriented to by Hal as a potential initiation of LP: the alignment marker, ‘dude’, a code-switch into English, and finally, use of the voice of Teacher by referring to Hal in the same manner that T does (e.g. by attaching of ‘Hal-san’ to the end of his question in line 6; a possible ‘inversion of reality’, one feature of LP (Cook 2000: 123)).3 In line 8, following a 3 second pause, Hal orients to Sal’s actions by deploying a highly marked tone of voice (an apparent imitation of a British accent), which serves the function of aligning his interactional frame with the ‘non-real world’ orientation (one of Cook’s (2000) features) initiated by Sal. Hal’s actions simultaneously become a preferred response to Sal’s invitation to engage in LP and the first pair part of a Joke/Laughter adjacency pair (Schegloff 1987; Sacks 1989). Sal unhesitatingly responds (note the overlap in lines 8 and 9) with the second pair part of laughter (line 9). Upon experiencing favorable reception from Sal, Hal recycles his laughter-evoking utterance to which Sal responds in line 11 with further laughter and an acknowledgment token, ‘so desu ka::’, with an affected elongation on the final syllable. In Excerpt 2, although Sal and Hal chose to orient to the task as friends-at-play rather than students-at-work, they have been able to skillfully merge the requirements of the task with their LP. They are collaboratively using and creating with the target language. Additionally, line 6 shows Sal experimenting with the use of a different voice (i.e. the voice of ‘teacher’) as he initiates this round of LP. Such experimentation has been argued to be beneficial to the development of sociolinguistic competence of both child and adult L1 and L2 learners (Tarone 2000) and is a common feature of the LP in my data. Finally, Excerpt 2 shows Hal and Sal collaboratively co-constructing their LP; I suggest that this co-construction and use of ludic activity becomes a resource by which learners may organize the deployment of ‘on-task’ target language forms.
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59
Making ‘sensee’ sick: Interactionally (re)organizing the task through play During the portion of class directly preceding Excerpt 3, T has modeled the interaction for the Ss by calling on a volunteer and working through the pattern of interaction with him, and has also offered a brief explanation in English and Japanese regarding the proper use of keego ‘honorific language’ for referring to the actions of one’s superiors. Excerpt 3 shows Sal and Hal enacting a role play in which one of them is to play the part of a sick student seeking audience with his busy teacher in order to reschedule an appointment, and the other to play the part of the teacher. In their interaction, however, Hal and Sal (re)organize and transform the task by, through, and for their play, while simultaneously displaying an orientation to the use of ‘on-task’ language. Excerpt 3: ‘siroi bi:nzu’
1
S:
so, you’re gonna be the sensee. so
you’re
gonna
be the
professor
alright? alright
So, you’re gonna be the professor. Alright? 2
[at least on this one.(.) so, a, sensee.= at
least
on
this
one
so
a
professor
At least on this one. (.) So, a, professor.= 3
H:
[yeah, i can live with that Yeah, I can live with that
4
S:
=konnichi wa. today
T
=hello. 5
H:
{a:::. S-sa:n}.= a
S-title
{Ah. Mr. S}.= 6
S:
7
H:
=heheh koni(h)ti
wa(h).
today
T
He(h)llo(h). 8
S:
ano::, uh:::(.) um
uh
Um. uh 9
H:
{S-sensee. [S-sensee} S-teacher
S-teacher.
{Professor S. Professor S} ((lines 5 and 9: {words}=‘East Asian sage’ tone)) 10 S:
[° is this kon? (is this) kon?° =
60
LANGUAGE PLAY IN A BEGINNING JAPANESE FL CLASSROOM
is this
this
is
this
this
Is this this’ ? (is this) this’? 11 H:
=it’s ima. it’s now
It’s ‘now’. ((lines 10 and 11: talking about how to read a certain Chinese character)) 12 S: 13
ima, ah::. ima wa. ano:, ima:: wa:
chotto
now
little
ah
now
yorosii desu good
T
um
now
T
ka?
C
Q
Now, ah. Do you. uum, do (you) have a minute now? 14 H:
hai. yes
mo:: mochiron. of c-
of course
nan
deshoo?
what
C
Yes. of c-, of course. What seems to be the matter? 15 S:
ano:: (1) uh (2) ki- ki:noo:, ki:noo:, uh um
16
uh
ye-
yesterday
uh
(.) ki:noo, nani o (.) mesiagari (.) yesterday
17
ye:sterday
masita
what
O
H-eat
ka?
DS marker
Q
Um uh ye- yester, yester, uh what did you eat yesterday? 18
ah, hiru go:han. hiru. (1) ((to T)) uh, how Ah
19
noon
food
noon.
uh
how
would you say eat something for lunch? would
you
say
eat
something
for
lunch
Ah, lunch. noonÕ. ((to T)) Uh, how would you say eat something for lunch? 20 T:
hiru gohan de. noon
food
DA
For lunch. 21 S:
ok. we're good. uh, thank yo- uh, domo ok
22
we're
good
uh
thank
yo-
uh
very
arigatto:: gozaimasita, a: thank you
HU-exist
a
Ok. we’re good. uh, thank yo- uh, ‘thank you’. 23
((reorienting to H)) ok, so ano(H)O(H)O:, ok
24
kino(.)
so
um
hiru- hiru gohan DE(.)
yesterday
noon
noon
food
DA
((reorienting to H)) Ok, so u:(h)m(h), yesterday lun- for lunch (.) 25
uh, nani o(.) uh, uh
what
O
uh,
mesiagarimasita ka? H-eat
Q
CADE BUSHNELL
uh, what (.) did you eat? 26 27 H:
(2) uh::, Wahoo’s sando (1) o tabemasita, uh
28
Wahoo’s
sandwich
O
ate
sosite, (3.2) uh (.) {siroi BI:NZU} o (4) and then
uh
white
bean(s)
O
Uh, (I) ate a Wahoo’s sandwich and then, (3.2) uh white beans (4) 29 S:
>SENSEE SENSEE.< {HANBAAGAA O professor professor
30
hamburger
O
[MESIAGARIMAS-}MASEN >MAS [EN DESITA KA
