Self-Selection in Turn-Taking: An Approach to Teaching Spanish

Abstract

One of the recurring observations in the literature about turn-taking structure in the language has been that there is generally a low incidence of self-selected turns by students. term originally coined by Sacks, Schlegloff and Jefferson (1974), was modified by Allwright (1980: 168) to fit his description of behavior, where he distinguishes between getting and giving. In speaking here of self-selection, I adopt one of Allwright's subcategories of getting: Take: Take an unsolicited turn, when a is available'discourse maintenance.' author presents a case study of one student's performance in an ESL classroom. This student took twice as many of the above described turns as the other students combined. He also scored twice as high as all of his classmates together as a user of general topics (i. e., other than responding in drills, information or pedagogical/procedural matters). But he was an isolated case in a class that was confronted with an overwhelming domination by the teacher. Orletti (1981), in her study on Classroom verbal interaction based on the Sacks, Schlegloff and Jefferson model, also notes the lack of self-selection by students. Authors such as Allington (1980) and Eder (1982) attribute this to management activities and outright interruptions by the teacher who thereby obviously inhibits the students' performance and spontaneity. McHoul (1978) makes the formality of the situation responsible for the state of affairs that teachers can direct speakership in any creative ways (188). Lorscher (1982) also discusses the problem of independent student self-selection. He explains that since utterance structures are mostly language-specific, their identification and anticipation should be practiced in the language classroom. This, however, is done, if at all, only in exceptional cases. participation in the teacher-student communication in a foreign language fails to give the student the possibility to learn those forms of turn-taking that are necessary in order to be able to function with the foreign language in most conversational situations outside the classroom (214). The commonly found structure of turn-taking [in the classroom] could be, at least temporarily, modified to allow self-selection by the student... Thus the student would have a chance to learn to anticipate foreign language utterances in their structure, to locate transitionally relevant points in the conversation and consequently, as in most everyday conversational situations, to self-select his turn (217, both quotes my translation from German). Thus it seems that we, as teachers, have not made much progress in developing the students' ability to communicate spontaneously and without turn-allocation by the teacher. Apparently we are afraid to 'lose control' if we let the students digress from the proposed topic; we often fear that we may not be able to cover all the material imposed by the syllabus; and finally, we do not let the students speak freely because we are afraid that they will learn ungrammatical structures if we don't correct them on the spot when they make mistakes. It is a matter of the delicate balance between the requirements of the situation, its formality, the position of the teacher as guide and transmitter of knowledge, and the students' need to be able to participate in 'normal' everyday conversations, which includes being able to selfselect a turn.