The Effect of Teacher’s Corrective Feedback Through Online Conferencing on Elementary Students’ English-Speaking Confidence

The purpose of this study is to investigate the effect of teacher's corrective feedback through online conferencing on elementary students' English-speaking confidence. This study was conducted for 4 months from August to December 2020. There were 6 participants, aged 8 to 13 enrolled in a private education institute where they attended English classes using mobile devices. During this case study, the students were asked to use English, learners’ target language when interacting with their teacher. When learners struggled to understand the teacher’s English instructions, the teacher guided them in Korean. All the classes were video-recorded and transcribed by the teacher. Data were analyzed in order to examine the progress of participants’ voluntary English production stimulated by having conversational interactions with the teacher. The findings were as follows. First, participants’ anxiety level was high in the beginning. Second, they were able to speak English words, give their opinions in English, and join the conversation in English with the teacher. Lastly, feedback from the teacher through conversational interactions helped learners understand how to speak in English better and build up confidence. As a result, it is necessary to interact with the teachers and peers using learners’ target language to improve English communication skills.

A Conversation Analysis on the Interview between Agnez Monica and Host in “Build Talk Show”

The aim of the study is to determine how the aspects of conversational interactions are realized in the conversation. The researcher collects and analyzes data by applied qualitative content analysis through documentation technique. The data of this study were the utterances while the source of data is a video of the interview between the interviewer (Kevan Kenney) and the interviewee (Agnez Monica a.k.a Agnez Mo) in Build Talk Show. The source of the data was downloaded from the official Youtube channel of Build Talk Show with a duration of 27:03 minutes. The data analysis is based on the theory of conversation analysis proposed by Paltridge. The results of this study show that the interviewer (Kevan Kenney) employed the aspects of conversational interactions in asking and responding to the questions of the interviewee. The aspects of conversational interactions such as opening conversation, adjacency pairs, preference organization, turn taking, and feedback were used. Where as, closing conversation and repair categories were not used by interviewer throughout the conversation. On the other hand, the interviewee used Turn Taking, Feedback and Repair, but Opening and Closing Conversation, Adjacency Pairs, and Preference Organization were not used by the interviewee throughout the conversation. So, five of seven aspects of conversational interactions in conversation are applied. Those aspects of conversational interactions are realized in this conversation because it is the standard in conversation, and the interviewer and interviewee applied the aspects of conversational interactions in order to seek the information from the interviewee, to give the clarification of the issues and make a good communication in that conversation.

Learning the probability of immediate interactional cues: Children’s acquisition of the discourse marker un in Japanese

How do children learn to use discourse markers in conversational interactions? This study focused on a Japanese discourse marker un, typically used as a positive response for yes-no questions and as a backchannel, and tested our prediction that children first learn to use un to respond to questions and then use it as backchannels after interlocutors signal the continuation of their discourse. To this end, we built generalised linear models on the longitudinal conversation data from seven children aged between 1 and 5 years and their caregivers. Our model revealed that children not only increase the general probability of un to reach adults’ rates, but also learn to use un in response to yes-no questions as we predicted. Children also tend to produce un as a backchannel after the interlocutor’s final modal particle ne, which is typically used to set a common ground. Our results show that children gradually learn different interactional contexts for the use of un from local probabilistic coherence between turns in conversations.

Report on the future conversations workshop at CHIIR 2021

The Future Conversations workshop at CHIIR'21 looked to the future of search, recommendation, and information interaction to ask: where are the opportunities for conversational interactions? What do we need to do to get there? Furthermore, who stands to benefit? The workshop was hands-on and interactive. Rather than a series of technical talks, we solicited position statements on opportunities, problems, and solutions in conversational search in all modalities (written, spoken, or multimodal). This paper -co-authored by the organisers and participants of the workshop- summarises the submitted statements and the discussions we had during the two sessions of the workshop. Statements discussed during the workshop are available at https://bit.ly/FutureConversations2021Statements.

Critique Generation to Increase Diversity in Conversational Recipe Recommender System

Conversational recommender systems help to guide users in exploring the search space in order to discover items of interest. During the exploration process, the user provides feedback on recommended items to refine subsequent recommendations. Critiquing as a way of feedback has proven effective for conversational interactions. In addition, diversifying the recommended items during exploration can help to increase user understanding of the search space, which critiquing alone will not achieve. Both aspects are important elements for recommender applications in the food domain. Diversity in diet has been shown to predict nutritional health, and conversational exploration can help to introduce new food items. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach that brings together critique and diversity to support conversational recommendation in the recipe domain. Initial evaluation in comparison to a baseline similarity-based recommender shows that the proposed approach increases diversity during the exploration process.

A Conversation Analysis on Interview with Prime Minister Julia Gillard in Sky News Australia Channel

<em>The aims of this research are to identify and analyze how the aspects of conversational interactions are realized in the conversation. In collecting and analyzing the data, the researcher uses documentation method and qualitative content analysis. The utterances which used by the interviewer and interviewees are as the data of this research, while the video of the interview which downloaded from Youtube with 29:44 minutes is as the source of data in this research. The data are analyzed by using Paltridge theory. This research results are, five aspects of conversational interactions are used by the interviewer (Peter Vanillin) such as, Opening Conversation, Adjacency Pairs, Preference Organization, Turn Taking and Closing Conversation, while the interviewer does not use Feedback and Repair. However, five of seven aspects are used by the interviewees (Paul Kelly and Julia Gillard) such as, Adjacency Pairs, Preference Organization, Turn Taking, Feedback and Repair, while the interviewees do not use Opening and Closing Conversation. Thus, all of seven aspects of conversational interactions are used with different realization. The realization of those aspects of conversational interactions used by the interviewer and interviewees are different. The interviewer does not use Feedback and Repair, while the interviewees do not use Opening and Closing Conversation.</em>