The developmental outcomes of interaction in conversation groups

International Journal of Educational Research, 2002

The introduction of the Malaysian University English Test (MUET) has led teachers to try new methods and strategies to improve students' speaking skills. However, students are still unable to play an effective role in group discussions as they lack the necessary vocabulary and interaction strategies. This paper examines how interaction strategy training affects group interaction and task performance. For this purpose ten groups of students were introduced to and trained in the use of selected interaction strategies. The analysis indicated that training resulted in a significant use of interaction strategies, and in more effective interaction between group members.

Hello-Teen Society, 2022

This article aims at discussing issues related to spoken skills in order to make a connection between the functions of conversation and the development of speaking skills. It also relates that language is used to establish and maintain social relationships with the purpose of negotiating role-relationships, peer-solidarity, the exchange of turns in a conversation and the saving of face of both speaker and hearer. In this article, the features of conversation, factors that influence conversation, and the strategies of conversation are also discussed briefly.

This article focuses on the use of conversation analysis (CA) to help teaching interactional competence in English to adult second language learners from lower to intermediate levels.

Many children are taught in school in a language that is not the language spoken in their home, resulting in serious learning problems when this issue is ignored. Adjustments to such language differences can entail teaching the children in their language or dialect or helping them acquire proficiency in the school language, depending upon the educational goal. This study is concerned with children who speak Hawaiian English, but are taught in standard English, resulting in, among other things, delay in learning to read. It is a follow-up to earlier study (Speidel 1981, 1982), in which the effects of a conversational (or natural context) approach to language development was clearly superior to an approach emphasizing pattern drill, repetition, and nursery rhymes. The present study expanded our knowledge of how grammar and vocabulary development occurs during conversations between a teacher and a small group of first-grade students about their comprehension of stories they were reading. Such conversations are a central feature of the Kamehameha Early Education Program (KEEP), a successful reading program for students. The data are of two types: transcripts of the conversations were analyzed word-for-word to pinpoint whether and how language learning was occurring. The fine-grained analyses of the transcripts showed that the teacher provided linguistic information much like parents do in talking with their young children: refining, rephrasing, extending, and expanding the children’s talk. In turn, the children used this input, picking up grammatical structures and vocabulary from the teacher, thereby elaborating and refining their talk. Comparisons of standardized tests at the beginning and end of the school year showed that the children participating in the small-group reading conversations gained significantly more grammatical skills than a control group.

Social Development, 1992

Differences associated with age and with language background were assessed in performance on a task that taps conversational skill, a 'TV talk show' interview task administered to 98 second through fifth graders, including many nonnative speakers of English. Surprisingly, holistic ratings ofthe children's skills as conversationalists were not related at all to gender, and only moderately to age or status as a native speaker of English. A set of 29 specific interactive and language behaviors were analyzed, to determine which of these were related to holistic ratings of conversational skill. Variables reflected strategies for eliciting information and for maintaining topic, indicators of disfluency, and indicators of how the adult was contributing to the conversation. Children who had received higher ratings on conversational skill produced more topic continuations, a higher proportion of more sophisticated noncontingent responses, and fewer simple yes/no topic initiations and continuations. Age, gender, and language status related only minimally to the specific interactive or language behaviors associated with success as a conversationalist, although children from homes where English was spoken did tend to receive higher holistic ratings of conversational skill.

Journal of Pragmatics, 1996

The observation has been made that speech in contacts between native and non-native speakers may be modified and simplified to the point of ungrammaticality (the me Tarzan, you Jane phenomenon). Since the early 1980s, a number of studies in Second Language Acquisition have carried the notion of modification into the analysis of the interaction itself. The goal was to learn about interactional modifications and about how they relate to processes of language acquisition. In these analyses, a number of concepts from Conversation Analysis (CA) have been applied. This paper discusses a number of methodological problems in this research, of which especially the model of communication assumed and the type of data analyzed are the most prominent. Finally the paper discusses problems related to the introduction of core CA concepts into research on native-nonnative speaker communication.

Eurasian Journal of Applied Linguistics, 2015

Second Language Studies, 2004

The following research involves the use of Conversation Analysis (CA) in the analysis of classroom discourse within a year-long university level Chinese as a Foreign Language (CFL) course. The goals of the research were: (a) to look at how a specific, two-part activity within a CFL classroom is bounded by a pre-allocated instructor turn, (b) how the turn-taking structure of the activity is organized in terms of question/answer adjacency pairs, (c) how repair occurs within the data and whether, as well as in what form, uptake exists, and (d) how students orient to the on-going speech in general by incorporating the lexical and grammatical elements of the conversation within their turn-taking strategy. Findings show that though the instructor provided little repair, learners were generally receptive to it and produced uptake, and that the on-going classroom interaction provided linguistic input rich enough that participants were able to incorporate lexical items from it for use in their own talk.

2008

Mackey, A. (Ed.). (2007). Conversational interaction in second language acquisition: A collection of empirical studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-019-4422249-9. 496pp. Applied linguists working within the mainstream of Second Language Acquisition (SLA) research owe a considerable debt to Stephen Krashen. His bold claim that comprehensible input and a low affective filter were necessary and sufficient condition for language acquisition gave rise to a rich research agenda that is still alive and kicking. Among those who challenged his "hypotheses" can be numbered Merrill Swain, who has for twenty years developed her argument for the importance of comprehensible output, Manfred Peinemann whose Teachability Hypothesis has led to some interesting studies, and Michael Long, who over the years has refined his Interaction Hypothesis, which, in its current version, includes elements of a hypothesis (an idea that needs to be tested about a single phenomenon), elements ofa model (a description of processes or a set of processes of a phenomenon), as well as elements of a theory (a set of statements about natural phenomena that explains why these phenomena occur the way they do (Gass & Mackey, 2006, p. 174, cited in the present book, p. 5). Certainly, Long's Interaction Hypothesis has generated a very large number of published reports and many more unpublished theses and dissertations.