Analysis of Conversational Interaction in the Listening Discourse of Test for English Majors-8

Conversational interaction analysis is a method of analyzing the content and structure of the words spoken by both parties in a conversation. The listening discourse of TEM-8 has not only the basic characteristics of daily conversation discourse, but also its special features as a selective examination. This paper applies a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods, encompassing the perspectives of the construction and transformation of turn, the sequential organization of the conversation, and the repair of conversation, to carry out conversational interaction analysis on listening discourse materials of the TEM-8 in 2011, 2015 and 2019. The results revealed that candidates need to grasp the topic, match questions with answers, capture details, and pay attention to the role change, tone and repair of the conversation, as well as strengthen listening training, so that they can do well in TEM-8 exams.

Linguists and language workers

In this paper, I address two connected topics: firstly, the relationships between linguists working in academia and language professionals, such as communication managers and consultants, in other sectors; and secondly, how a strong emphasis on knowledge exchange and impact in British higher education policy has led to increased collaboration between academic and non-academic language workers, but also to a realignment of traditional academic values with the interests of practitioners. The investigation is partly based on published reflections – mostly by linguists – on collaborating with (language) professionals in other sectors, and partly on insights from 13 interviews with language workers in consulting, communications and campaigning. The interviews are manually analysed for thematic categories and, where relevant, for pragmatic meanings in the context of the interview situation and conversational interaction. Findings suggest conflicts around registers and timescales, along with concerns over data and the relevance of academic interests. Crucially, language professionals show little concern about collaborating with academics, leading to an imbalance in interests. I supplement the evidence with personal observations on the opportunities and obstacles that are present when straddling academic and non-academic work, as well as with a discussion of how a unidirectional realignment of values changes the nature of academic work.

Interaction

This Element in the Cambridge Elements in Second Language Acquisition series examines the role of interaction in Second Language Acquisition research, with a focus on the cognitive interactionist approach. The Element describes the major branches of the field, considering the importance of conversational interaction in both the cognitive interactionist framework as well as in sociocultural approaches to second language learning. The authors discuss the key concepts of the framework, including input, negotiation for meaning, corrective feedback, and output. The key readings in the field and the emphases of current and future research are explained. Finally, the authors describe the pedagogical implications that the cognitive interactionist approach has had on the teaching of second languages.

The Kinematics of Social Action: Visual Signals Provide Cues for What Interlocutors Do in Conversation

During natural conversation, people must quickly understand the meaning of what the other speaker is saying. This concerns not just the semantic content of an utterance, but also the social action (i.e., what the utterance is doing—requesting information, offering, evaluating, checking mutual understanding, etc.) that the utterance is performing. The multimodal nature of human language raises the question of whether visual signals may contribute to the rapid processing of such social actions. However, while previous research has shown that how we move reveals the intentions underlying instrumental actions, we do not know whether the intentions underlying fine-grained social actions in conversation are also revealed in our bodily movements. Using a corpus of dyadic conversations combined with manual annotation and motion tracking, we analyzed the kinematics of the torso, head, and hands during the asking of questions. Manual annotation categorized these questions into six more fine-grained social action types (i.e., request for information, other-initiated repair, understanding check, stance or sentiment, self-directed, active participation). We demonstrate, for the first time, that the kinematics of the torso, head and hands differ between some of these different social action categories based on a 900 ms time window that captures movements starting slightly prior to or within 600 ms after utterance onset. These results provide novel insights into the extent to which our intentions shape the way that we move, and provide new avenues for understanding how this phenomenon may facilitate the fast communication of meaning in conversational interaction, social action, and conversation.

Three decades in the field of gender and language

This essay provides an account of one scholar’s thirty-five-year immersion in language and gender research. I included a chapter on conversations between women and men in That’s Not What I Meant!, my first book for general audiences, as part of an overview of interactional sociolinguistics. Disproportionate interest in that chapter led me to write You Just Don’t Understand, which I assumed would be my last word on the topic. Then insights into gendered patterns turned out to be crucial in all my subsequent books, each of which grew out of the one before. Writing about gendered patterns in conversational interaction raised my own consciousness, illuminating aspects of a previous study that I had overlooked. It also brought me face to face with agonistic conventions in academic discourse, and the distortions and misrepresentations that result from them.

Conversational Interaction and Second Language Development: Recasts, Responses and Red Herrings? Alison Mackey and Jennifer Philip, The Modern Language Journal (1998), pp. 339-356.

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Offering a Candidate Answer: An Information Seeking Strategy

Candidate answer queries (also referred to as polar or yes-no questions) are used massively in conversational interaction. Although such queries seem simple and straightforward, analysis reveals several kinds of complexities associated with these types of questions. Candidate answer queries carry claims about the speaker’s knowledge. They are understood as the speaker’s best guess and hence display the speaker’s knowledge about the matter at hand. They also have a moral dimension. Candidate answers may reference a normal, legitimate possibility versus an abnormal, illegitimate one. The moral status of the incorporated candidate answer may be read as reflecting the speaker’s attitude and sympathies about the matter at hand. Finally, by incorporating a candidate answer in a query, a questioner provides a model of what would satisfy the questioner’s purpose in asking.