Turn Allocation Research Articles

Turn taking in Ghanaian judicial discourse

Turn construction and turn allocation in social interactions have been studied from different theoretical and methodological perspectives, the most important and debated ones being conversation analysis and (critical) discourse analysis. Even though turn taking has been studied in informal conversations in Ghanaian languages, nothing has been done on turn taking in Ghanaian judicial discourse. This paper examines turn taking management in Ghanaian Western-based judicial interaction. Working within the conversational analytic framework and language and power, the paper investigated how speaker turns were managed, especially, how turn allocations were shaped by speaker roles and identities in judicial domains. Data for the study consisted of transcripts of nine hours of naturally occurring tape-recorded Ghanaian courtroom interactions comprising civil and criminal cases. The data were recorded in Accra and Koforidua between November 2018 and February 2019 and consisted of sixteen court proceedings and seventy-three speakers. Results indicated that turn allocation was managed mostly by the judges with the other court participants, especially the attorneys and interpreters, occasionally self-selecting or selecting others, mainly, the disputants. Also identified was that not all linguistic resources for turn taking were equally accessible to all participants. In conclusion, the identities and roles of the court actors determine and constrain the available linguistic and pragmatic tools needed for effective turn taking management.

The use of invitations to bid in classroom interaction

Abstract This study explores the interactional meaning of an invitation to bid in Korean elementary school EFL classroom interaction by adopting a conversation analytic perspective. The study argues that participants use invitations to bid to indicate that a question elicits knowledge worthy of public demonstration. The analysis of thirteen video-recorded EFL lessons revealed that teachers use invitations to bid, fulfilling instructional agenda or demands whether they are set up at the beginning of an activity or arise midway. Students similarly invite themselves to bid, showing their understanding of the meaning that the practice carries. While teachers overwhelmingly accept students’ self-invitations, they may reject them in light of the details of instructional here and now. It is argued that deciding which student population should reply is a matter of negotiation although teachers have the final say, oriented to consequences of turn allocation on the work of teaching in progress.

A Comparative Study of Managing Learning Opportunity in EFL Classroom

Learning opportunity plays a vital role in EFL classroom learning. Drawing on conversation analysis and comparison methods, focusing on correction activities in an experienced EFL teacher’s classroom and a novice EFL teacher’s classroom in China, this study aims to explore the differences in their practices of turn allocation for increasing learning opportunities. The study finds that the experienced teacher designs more rich turn allocation, that is, to add more turn allocation practices, to involve more students to participate in the classroom interaction, to lengthen the period for students’ involvement. In these ways, she creates more learning opportunities for students compared with novice EFL teacher. Although the result is pertinent, it might deepen understanding of high-quality EFL classroom interaction and promote EFL teachers to discover, create or maintain more learning opportunities for students.

How Teachers’ Perceptions of Learners’ Willingness to Communicate Affect Frequency and Method of Turn Allocation

Previous research on willingness to communicate (Henceforth WTC) has shown that several teacher factors can affect learners’ WTC. However, the effect of teachers’ perceptions of learners’ WTC on teachers’ communicative and instructional behavior has remained understudied. This study aimed to examine how teachers’ perceptions of learners’ WTC affected the frequency and method of their turn allocations. The in-depth study was conducted with three teachers in Iran over a period of one semester. Qualitative data were obtained from observations, audio and video recordings of classroom interaction, and interviews with teachers. Analysis revealed that teachers gave more voluntary turns to those whom they perceived to have a higher level of WTC. Also, the method of turn allocation was different for such students. These findings are important because they can raise awareness among teachers and enable them to ensure all learners are given opportunities to participate.

Talk Show Hosting Turn-Allocation Techniques in Jimmy Kimmel Live

Engaging in a conversation is crucial to people as social beings, in which turn-taking is one of its core elements. As a cooperative activity, it requires an orderly turn distribution, especially in TV talk shows where the host and the guests cooperate to distribute turns led by the host. This phenomenon can be observed in Jimmy Kimmel Live, a late-night talk show that highlights conversational activities to incorporate its entertainment bits. This study investigates turn-allocation techniques used by Jimmy Kimmel as the host of the talk show to manage a multiparty conversation with the Avengers: Endgame cast. The analysis is based on Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson’s theory concerning the systematics for turn-taking organization along with Lerner’s elaboration on Sacks et al.’s turn allocation. To extract the data, Jeffersonian conventions are used, then the descriptive qualitative method is exercised to analyze the data in two levels: providing context and theoretical elaboration. It is found that the host only uses current-selects-next techniques (i.e., gaze, addressing, context-tied), in which context-tied becomes the most common technique practiced creating an exclusive connection that effectively allocates turn to the prospective speaker. Other techniques: gaze and addressing are also used by mutual gaze and address term positioning. Meanwhile, self-selection techniques (i.e., starting first and overlapping talk) are absent because of the unequal share of power and role of the host compared with the guests.

Ujamaa and Religious Pluralism in Tanzania: What Divided-Subjectness Reveals about Christians and Muslims

This paper examines how Christian-Muslim debates are carried out from a linguistic point of view, to determine whether the presence or absence of unity in Tanzania could be attributed to the Ujamaa ideology. Therefore, the question this paper wishes to answer is how Christians and Muslims share discourse resources in these religious debates to show their closeness as friends. The study was conducted on two Christian- Muslim debate meetings in Mwanza and Tunduma. A Conversation Analysis focusing on turn allocation, amount of interruption, selection and change of topics, control of the agenda and how interactions are established and finished, coupled with interlocutors' word choice contradict the assertion that these debates are friendly conversations. The meetings exhibit a deep-seated suspicion, and they are more of a competition to win disciples from each other. It is in a competitive atmosphere such as this that divided subjectness shows, when the real register trumps the symbolic and the imaginary registers, that there is no love lost between interlocutors, and unification too distant to achieve.

Conversation Analysis of Turn Taking in the Political Interview between Luara Kuenssberg and Boris Johnson

The concentrate on political interview between Luara Kuenssberg and Boris Johnson. According to the researcher's knowledge a lot of interviews have been studied pragmatically, but no one has tackled them in a conversation analysis study. So, this field needs research because it is one of the scientific fields that was not previously studied.
 The study aims at 1- examining the dominant of the turn taking system between the participants in the interview. 2- The analysis is focused on the utterances said by speakers of the dialogue between Luara Kuenssberg and Boris Johnson. The study hypothesizes that 1- the textual structure of interview is organized in accordance with feature of the turn-taking system. 2- turn taking system dominants the participants in their interview. To achieve the aims of the present study and to validate its hypotheses, one script of political interviews is selected. The theoretical model used as the basis for the analytical work is a synthesis of theoretical views and practical procedures proposed and used by Sacks, H, Schegloff, E, and Jefferson, G, (1978). The present study employed a descriptive qualitative approach since the findings were presented in narrative or textual descriptions. The conclusions of the analysis confirm the two hypotheses of the present study. They are as follows :1- Structures of interviews are organized in accordance with specific features operating on the turn-taking system. Turn allocation process is controlled by the interviewer who is considered the main controller of the conversation. 2- Interviewers alone can maintain their turns by continuous speech causing temporal overlap in the display of turns.

Teachers’ embodied mitigation against allocating turns to unwilling students

ABSTRACT During teacher-centred classroom interaction, teachers often fail to solicit volunteer turn-takers. Even if students display their unwillingness to take a turn at the moment, teachers sometimes have no choice but to allocate them the turn, to move forward with the ongoing pedagogical activity. In such a moment, there can be a conflict between the students’ autonomy in securing private time and the teacher’s authority in forcing them to participate in the central activity. Paying special attention to such sensitive moments, this study explores how the teacher deals with them. The data for this study came from video recordings of English language classrooms in secondary education settings in Japan. Multimodal conversation analysis revealed that the teachers’ particular embodied practice involves directing the gaze not towards the students but the notebook in their hands prior to turn allocation to a student. The teachers implemented this embodied practice in a sequentially recognisable manner. This practice allowed the teachers to mitigate their act of violating the classroom’s social norm of ‘allocating a turn to a willing speaker’. Based on the findings, this study discusses the classroom teacher’s authority within the context of social relations with the students.

Children seeking the driver's attention in cars: Position and composition of children's summons turns and children's rights to engage

This paper explores the topic of children having restricted rights to engage in conversation with adults in multiparty interactions. Drawing on the principles of conversation analysis, and 7 h of video-recorded Finnish and English naturally occurring in-car family interactions, our focus is on moments when a child summons the driver while the driver is driving and having a conversation with another passenger. We suggest that the composition and position of the child's summons relative to other ongoing conversations play a crucial role in whether the child receives a response, or whether the summons will be ignored or suspended by the driver. Positioning and designing summonses in different ways is a resource for the child to exert agency and mobilize a response from the driver to different degrees, which affects the child's likelihood of entering in interaction with the driver at that moment. The analysis suggests that children cannot be a priori determined to have (or not to have) certain kinds of speaking rights; instead, the “right” to engage in a conversation is contingent and situated, (re)negotiated and accomplished in situ. Finally, summons-answer sequences provide adults a resource for socializing children into the regularities of turn allocation and turn distribution.

Is Conversation Built for Two? The Partitioning of Social Interaction

ABSTRACT Conversation is flexible enough to be conducted with varying numbers of individuals, but most conversation is dyadic. Is the prevalence of dyadic focal participation frameworks facilitated by structures of conversation? Using video recordings of spontaneous naturally occurring conversations, I explore multiperson interactions focusing on how structures of turn taking, sequence organization, storytelling, and speaker gaze facilitate or inhibit the inclusion of multiple individuals in conversation. As I show, because our system favors dyadic participation through turn allocation and sequence organization, sustaining focal triadic or multiparty participation frameworks requires more interactional work than sustaining a dyadic focal participation framework. However, serially dyadic participation, which keeps dyads shifting, and story- and joke telling facilitate the participation of multiple individuals. Although conversational structures can be adapted to partition focal participation as dyadic or multiparty on a moment-by-moment basis, the structures generally facilitate dyadic focal participation. Data are in American English.

Changing practices for connected discourse: Starting and developing topics in conversation

This paper investigates the actions and practices for connected discourse in English conversation. Three university students met weekly for 94 weeks to practice speaking and were video recorded. Each participant made a 10 min presentation about a topic of interest and then the three participants had a conversation. Using ethnomethodological conversation analysis (CA), we examined how participants moved from an orientation to one type of speech exchange system (the monologic presentation) to another (the ‘conversation’) and specifically, the actions and practices for getting the conversation started. We show how an orientation to an interview type of speech exchange system changes to something more conversation-like over the course of the 94 weeks and how changes in particular actions are concomitant with changes in turn allocation, turn construction, and turn taking practices. The findings provide further evidence for the co-constructed nature of language. Implications for understanding change or learning as a group enterprise are also considered.

Conversational Strategies in Ola Rotimi’s The gods Are Not to Blame

This paper examined the conversational features used by characters through talk in Ola Rotimi’s The gods Are not to Blame. Several studies have been carried out on Ola Rotimi’s works but this study was motivated by the scanty scholarly studies on the conversational strategies used in the text. In order to bring out the features of conversation in the text, the text was critically read, and salient conversational features were identified. The features were interpreted according to the messages they expressed in the text. The findings revealed that conversational features such as monologue, turn taking, turn allocation, speech overlap, error and repair mechanism, adjacency pairs, and insertion sequence were used to generate different effects in the text. The study concludes that the conversational features employed by the author create orderliness and regulate participants’ talk in the interaction towards actualising the thematic goals of the text. Thus, the study indicates that conversation analysis gives a deeper and better understanding of human utterances as portrayed through the characters in the text, thereby increasing the readers understanding of the text.

Creating a response space in multiparty classroom settings for students using eye-gaze accessed speech-generating devices

Conversation Analysis was used to explore how teachers, personal care assistants, and students organized inclusive multiparty classroom interaction when one of the students in the classroom used an eye-gaze accessed speech-generating device (SGD). Scaffolding and collaborative practices that created a response space for the construction of the eye-gaze accessed SGD-mediated turn were identified and analyzed. The participants were two adolescent students with severe cerebral palsy and intellectual disability who relied on eye-gaze accessed SGDs, and their teachers, personal care assistants, and classmates with intellectual disabilities. The data consisted of 2 hr and 40 min of video recordings collected in the participants’ classrooms. Three practices were identified (a) the practice of explicit turn allocation organization and the use of display questions, (b) the practice of locally contingent on-screen scaffolding activities, and (c) the practice of dealing with turn competition by classmates. Teacher and assistant practices differed with regard to the student’s access to the vocabulary relevant to answering the teacher’s question. The practices were found to create a response space for students using SGDs accessed via eye gaze, thereby ensuring their educational inclusion in the classroom.

“Che cos’è? Va e de”? Domande, risposte e commutazione di codice in due classi svedesi di italiano L2/LS

This conversation-analytic study investigates the use of code switching (henceforth CS) in three Italian L2 classrooms in Sweden. Specifically, when and why do teachers code switch in their questions? Is the language choice pedagogically motivated? Does the teachers’ language choice have an influence over the students’ language choice in their answers? The data were collected from three beginner-level Italian lessons in two Swedish High Schools. Transcripts of questions in which CS occurred were analyzed using a conversation analytic approach with a focus on sequentiality in relation to the organization of turn allocation, to understand when and why the CS occurs in both questions and answers. In our data teachers use CS when posing questions to the class in two major occasions, namely when the question is followed by a significant silence but also when no discernible silence follows a question. Furthermore, regardless of the language used by the teacher, the students answer in Italian when the questions are task-based, and in Swedish when the questions are off-task.

Teacher response pursuits in whole class post-task discussions

This paper explores teacher elicitation practices following a perceived absence of a response to an initial inquiry. Specifically, we focus on whole class post-task discussions where a teacher pursues responses in post-first position following students’ non-uptake, and thus makes her orientation toward the expectation of a response publicly available. The data for this study come from 30 h of video-recorded classroom interactions in an English as a medium of instruction university in Turkey. Using Conversation Analysis, this study demonstrates that when confronted with a non-response to her initial elicitation in whole class interaction, in addition to drawing on interactional resources (e.g., designedly incomplete utterances, increments) that have been described in earlier research on response pursuits, the teacher uses two additional strategies to secure an answer: (1) modeling a response by personalizing the task, and (2) drawing on a range of multimodal resources (i.e., pedagogical artifact, embodied behavior, vocalization) to elicit engagement. The study particularly focuses on how the teacher employs multimodal tools to promote engagement and to further the progress of the ongoing pedagogical activity (i.e., reflective discussions) when a response is due but not provided. The findings have implications for understanding the design and delivery of teacher response pursuits, and thus contribute to our understanding of turn allocation practices during the whole class sharing phase in content classrooms.

Developing interactional repertoires in the classroom through dynamic strategic interactio scenarios

In this article, we report on the implementation of Dynamic Strategic Interaction Scenario tasks as one approach to developing L2 learners’ interactional repertoires. The tasks involve pre-task planning, a performance, and immediate feedback during a whole-class debriefing discussion. We focus specifically on the appropriation of turn allocation devices within a single class meeting in which three small groups performed the same scenario. We show how the first group’s performance prompted a focus on turn allocation during their debriefing, and how the subsequent groups were able to build on the feedback in their own performances. We discuss our findings and their implications for research and pedagogy along three dimensions: 1) the role of feedback as mediation in the debriefing discussions; 2) the contribution of task repetition from a group-as-collective perspective; and 3) the documentation of interactional repertoire development over time.

Transparency and Embodied Action: Turn Organization and Fairness in Complex Institutional Environments

Institutional settings in which large numbers of participants have the right and in some cases the responsibility to contribute to the proceedings pose particular challenges to the order and allocation of turns. These challenges are organizational, how to enable and order participation between large numbers of people, as well as moral and political—the fair, transparent, and even distribution of access to the floor. In this paper, we address two very different institutional settings—one political and the other economic—and consider how participants are provided opportunities to contribute to the proceedings in a fair and transparent manner. Drawing on ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, we examine the systematic management of turn allocation and demonstrate how multimodality is critical to understanding how particular institutions achieve their principal aims and outcomes. This study is based on the analysis of a substantial corpus of video recordings of public consultations concerned with the discussion of major public and private sector initiatives and auctions of fine art and antiques.

Turn allocation within the medical-service-seeking party in Chinese accompanied medical consultations

Unlike micro-local studies on turn allocation, this study combines macro- and micro-local (Traverso, 2004) perspectives to explore turn allocation of the multi-participant medical-service-seeking1 (MSS) party composed of the patient and his/her companion in accompanied medical consultations in China. Through both qualitative and quantitative analyses of the transcription of 20 audio recorded consultations in China, the talk distribution within the MSS party is examined in terms of the structural organization of a medical visit. Features of the talk distribution in different phases of the medical consultation and factors influencing turn allocation are explored. It is found that talk is not equally distributed within the MSS party, and all phases other than the opening and the closing witness a significant or marginally significant difference in talk contribution by the patient and the companion. Factors influencing turn allocation within the MSS party vary from phase to phase: epistemic gradient, sick-role-triggered activity transfer and coalition to offset power asymmetry are among the most important. The paper sheds light on the study of polylogue, enables cross-cultural comparisons of medical consultations, and has methodological implications for further studies of medical conversations.

Vocal Turn-Taking in Meerkat Group Calling Sessions

Coordination is a fundamental aspect of social living, underlying processes ranging from the maintenance of group cohesion to the avoidance of competition. Coordination can manifest as synchronization, where individuals perform the same action at the same time but can also take the form of anti-synchronization or turn-taking. Turn-taking has mainly been studied in the context of the development of language [1] due to the fact that it is a universal feature in all languages and has been found to appear early in infancy [2, 3]. Recently, turn-taking has received attention in animal communication research [4-7] as a potential foundation on which social communication was formed [1,3]. In this study, we describe turn-taking in group-wide vocal interactions of meerkats (Suricata suricatta) during low-conflict sunning behavior, which is accompanied by the production of specific "sunning calls." We show that sunning-call production is socially stimulated and that at the group level, meerkats avoid overlap, thus fulfilling a key principle of turn-taking [8]. Through observational data and playback experiments, we show that these group-level patterns arise from two individual-level rules: call inhibition over short timescales, which prevents mutual interference, and call excitation over longer timescales, which stimulates further group calling. These simple rules suggest that hierarchy formation and turn allocation are not required for achieving group-wide coordination of communication. We also suggest that the potential bonding function of turn-taking shown in humans might have similar effects in animal interactions. VIDEO ABSTRACT.

The headset as an interactional resource in a video relay interpreting (VRI) setting

AbstractVideo relay interpreting (VRI) enables communication between a signed language user, remotely connected to an interpreter by videophone, and an interlocutor in spoken contact with the interpreter by telephone. Both users of the service are physically separated from each other and from the interpreter, who is in a studio. Essential technical components of the system include such items as videophones, telephones, computers, software, and a headset. This article explores how the interpreter orients towards the headset, turning it into an interactional resource. Examples of how this is done are identified in extracts from a corpus of VRI conversations between users of Swedish Sign Language (SSL) and spoken Swedish. Ethical approval and all participants’ consent were obtained. Three practices were identified: pointing towards the headset, orienting towards it in other ways (positioning, gesturing, direction of gaze), and holding it. All these practices have concrete pragmatic implications for the various steps in communication, such as establishing reference, repairs, and turn allocation. Enhancing VRI interpreters’ awareness of how equipment like a headset helps to organize the interaction is important, with a view to ensuring that the available technology is used to best effect for purposes of communication.