Jaja in spoken German: Managing Knowledge Expectations

Abstract

In line with the other contributions to this issue on teaching pragmatics, this paper provides teachers of German with a two‐day lesson plan for integrating authentic spoken language and its associated cultural background into their teaching. Specifically, the paper discusses how jaja and its phonetic variants are systematically used at the beginning of utterances to indicate that a prior speaker's talk was not designed with the knowledge of the audience in mind or with what has been said before. The paper will begin with a literature review on how speakers orient to the knowledge states of their fellow conversationalists, and on the resources that conversationalists use to indicate whether a prior speaker was successful in judging the knowledge state of their audience. The paper then discusses the prior research on the phonetic variants of jaja. In its final section, the paper presents a lesson designed for intermediate level learners of German.