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English Pages 242 [243] Year 2021
STORYTELLING IN MULTILINGUAL INTERACTION
Integral to the tapestry of social interaction, storytelling is the focus of interest for scholars from a diverse range of academic disciplines. This volume combines the study of conversation analysis (CA) with storytelling in multilingual contexts to examine how multilingual speakers converse and manage various aspects of storytelling and how they accomplish a wide range of actions through storytelling in classroom and everyday settings. An original, book-length endeavor devoted exclusively to storytelling in multilingual contexts, this book contributes to broadening the scope of the foundational conversation analytic literature on storytelling and to further specifying the nature of second language (L2) interactional competence. Designed for pre-service and in-service second or foreign language teachers, students of applied linguistics, as well as scholars interested in storytelling, this volume explores the cross-linguistic nature of generic interactional practices, sheds light on the nature of translanguaging and learner language, and provides insights into teacher practices on managing classroom storytelling. Jean Wong is Associate Professor in the Department of Special Education, Language, and Literacy at The College of New Jersey, USA. Hansun Zhang Waring is Associate Professor of Applied Linguistics and TESOL at Teachers College, Columbia University, USA.
ESL & Applied Linguistics Professional Series Eli Hinkel, Series Editor
English Morphology for the Language Teaching Profession Laurie Bauer with I.S.P. Nation Conversation Analysis and Second Language Pedagogy A Guide for ESL/EFL Teachers, 2 Edition Jean Wong, Hansun Zhang Waring English L2 Reading Getting to the Bottom, 4th Edition Barbara M. Birch and Sean Fulop Teaching ESL/EFL Reading and Writing, 2nd Edition I.S.P. Nation and John Macalister Reconciling Translingualism and Second Language Writing Tony Silva and Zhaozhe Wang Teaching ESL/EFL Listening and Speaking, 2nd Edition Jonathan M. Newton and I.S.P. Nation Storytelling in Multilingual Interaction A Conversation Analysis Perspective Edited by Jean Wong and Hansun Zhang Waring For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/ESLApplied-Linguistics-Professional-Series/book-series/LEAESLALP
STORYTELLING IN MULTILINGUAL INTERACTION A Conversation Analysis Perspective
Edited by Jean Wong and Hansun Zhang Waring
First published 2021 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 Taylor & Francis The right of Jean Wong and Hansun Zhang Waring to be identifed as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identifcation and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-0-367-13921-6 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-13924-7 (pbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-02924-0 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Apex CoVantage, LLC
CONTENTS
PART I
Overview 1 Multilingual Storytelling and Conversation Analysis Hansun Zhang Waring
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PART II
Multilingual Storytelling in Ordinary Conversations
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2 Our Storied Lives: Doing and Finding Friendship I Jean Wong
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3 Our Storied Lives: Doing and Finding Friendship II Jean Wong
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4 Managing Peripheral Recipiency in Triadic Multilingual Storytelling Tim Greer and Yosuke Ogawa 5 Nanun-prefacing in Korean Story-telling Gahye Song and Hansun Zhang Waring 6 Toward Progressivity Through Repairs in Multilingual Storytelling Yo-An Lee and Ye Ji Lee
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Contents
PART III
Multilingual Storytelling in the Classroom
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7 Storytelling as Instructional Practice in Persian Language Classrooms Gabriele Kasper and Elham Monfaredi
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8 Storytelling in a Meaning-and-fuency Task in the Second Language Classroom Emma Greenhalgh and Ray Wilkinson
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9 Managing a Delicate Telling in an Adult ESL Classroom: A Single Case Analysis Carol Hoi Yee Lo and Nadja Tadic
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10 Language Learning in Repeated Storytellings: The Case of Repair Practices Kelly Katherine Frantz
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Appendix: Transcription Notations Contributor Biographies Index
225 227 230
PART I
Overview
1 MULTILINGUAL STORYTELLING AND CONVERSATION ANALYSIS Hansun Zhang Waring
Introduction We live in a world where multilingual speakers are now the norm and no longer – and perhaps have never been – an exception (e.g., Akbar, 2013, Cook, 1992; Grosjean, 2010), and eforts within applied linguistics to problematize the monolingual bias – which treats monolingualism as the default that features the native speaker ideal – have been epitomized in a series of successive arguments for the social turn (Block, 2003), the bilingual turn (Ortega, 2010), and the multilingual turn (May, 2013). Cook (1991), for example, considers multicompetence – “the compound state of a mind with two grammars” – as “the norm for the human race” (p. 103). As such, Cenoz and Gorter (2011) argue that adopting a multilingual approach would aford the possibility of examining language practices in context and gaining greater insights into how languages are acquired and used. Ortega (2013), in particular, advocates for adopting usage-based linguistics (UBL) as a way to move the feld “away from explaining why bilinguals are not native speakers (i.e., monolinguals) and towards understanding the psycholinguistic mechanisms and consequences of becoming bi/ multilingual later in life” (p. 46). Various concepts and theoretical frameworks such as “translanguaging” (Li, 2018) and “translingual practice,” where “people shuttle in and out of languages to borrow resources from diferent communities to communicate meaningfully at the contact zone through strategic communicative practices” (Canagarajah, 2013, p. 79), have also been proposed to adequately account for the multilingual reality. Conversation analysts within the feld of applied linguistics have likewise expressed dissatisfaction with the monolingual bias – by problematizing the treatment of the language learner as the defective communicator and the
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only relevant identity in applied linguistics research (Firth & Wagner, 1997). Second language (L2) users, as have been shown, demonstrate great sophistication and versatility in managing various interactional contingencies, and L2 conversations exhibit a display of achievements rather than defciencies (Gardner & Wagner, 2004). Rather than using a monolingual standard to gauge L2 competence, for example, Lee and Hellermann (2014) argue for “a close analytic account of how L2 speakers come to terms with contingent constraints and contextual resources in order to carry out their interactional tasks” despite the presence or absence of a story preface (e.g., You want to hear what happened today?) in managing their telling (p. 774). In working with multilingual data, the authors advocate for an approach that assumes participants’ competence and proceeds to evaluate that competence in a “situated and genre-specifc manner” (Hellermann & Lee, 2014, p. 63). In a relatively recent endeavor, Waring and Hellermann (2017) issue an explicit call for conversation analysts to consider ways of problematizing the monolingual standard. In one answer to that call, two audio recordings – one presumably with monolingual speakers and one with multilingual speakers – are compared to demonstrate how remarkably similar resources are deployed across the board to seek assistance, pursue uptake, and signal delicacy, which again calls into question the designation of L2 speakers as defcient language users (Wong & Waring, 2017). One area in which the monolingual bias may be further problematized is storytelling. Integral to the tapestry of social interaction, storytelling has been the focus of interest for scholars from a diverse array of academic disciplines. While great insights have been gained from inquiries into storytelling in monolingual contexts, we have yet to see any concerted efort to explore storytelling in multilingual interaction. As the frst collection of conversation analytic (CA) studies on multilingual storytelling (i.e., storytelling conducted in second/additional languages and in languages other than English), the chapters in this volume investigate how participants with a variety of frst language (L1) backgrounds converse in a language that may or may not be their L1, manage various aspects of storytelling, and accomplish myriad interactional tasks through storytelling in a range of everyday and classroom contexts. As such, the volume bolsters the argument against the monolingual bias on the one hand and pushes CA work on storytelling beyond its monolingual focus on the other. In the remainder of this introductory chapter, I trace Harvey Sacks’ (1992) initial observations on stories and storytelling, ofer a synthesis of CA fndings on how stories may be launched, told, and responded to, and provide a brief review of the existing literature on multilingual storytelling. I conclude with an overview of the chapters in this volume, highlighting their contributions to advancing our understandings of multilingual storytelling. But frst, a brief explication of conversation analysis as a method of analysis that unifes the chapters of this volume is in order.
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Conversation Analysis Founded by sociologists Harvey Sacks, Emanuel Scheglof, and Gail Jeferson in the 1960s, conversation analysis (CA) is the study of social interaction as it actually happens in its natural habitat. As conversation analysts, we are interested in excavating the tacit methods and procedures participants deploy to get things done in social interaction, be that getting the foor to tell a story, launching a complaint, or exiting a conversation. For the past fve decades, CA has been efectively deployed to yield in-depth understandings of social interaction in a wide variety of ordinary conversations and institutional interactions (Sidnell & Stivers, 2013). Informed by Garfnkel’s (1967) ethnomethodology and Gofman’s (1967) theory of interactional order, CA rests on a set of assumptions that prioritize analytic induction (ten Have, 2007) and participant orientations (Scheglof & Sacks, 1973): (1) social interaction is orderly at all points, i.e., no detail can be dismissed a priori; (2) order is constituted by the participants, not conceptualized by the analysts; (3) such order is discoverable and describable through close scrutiny of the details of interaction. These assumptions are materialized in various aspects of CA’s methodology. The beginning of a CA project, for example, is characterized by “unmotivated looking” (Psathas, 1995, p. 45) rather than driven by a specifc research question that might prime us to dismiss certain details a priori. This does not mean that we cannot begin with a broad question such as how multiple demands are managed in the language classroom (Reddington, 2020), where neither the types of demands nor the methods of management are predetermined (or speculated about via hypotheses) but emerge as a result of discovery through detailed, line-by-line, and frame-by-frame inspection of the video-recorded classroom interaction. Analysts work with what Sacks (1984) calls “actual occurrences in their actual sequence” as opposed to “hypotheticalized, proposedly typicalized versions of the world” (p. 25). Analysis begins with transcribing audio/video recordings of naturally occurring interaction using a technical system originally developed by Gail Jeferson (2004) and has become increasingly sophisticated over the years to capture a full range of interactional features such as volume, pitch, pace, intonation, overlap, inbreath, smiley voice, and the length of silence as well as the complexities of multimodality (Hepburn & Bolden, 2017). These minute details of everyday life grant us a close look at the world and see things that “we could not, by imagination, assert were there” (Sacks, 1984, p. 25). With the transcript and its recording, we “make a bunch of observations, and see where they will go” (Sacks, 1984, p. 27). We do so by asking the central CA analytical question “Why that now?” (Scheglof & Sacks, 1973), i.e., why a particular bit of talk is produced in that particular format at that particular time: What is it accomplishing? It is in these minute details that evidence is located for how social actions such as requesting or complaining are accomplished by the participants themselves. For conversation analysts, making observations is
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often done not in isolation but in data sessions with fellow analysts (for data sessions worldwide, see https://rolsi.net/data-sessions/), where we reach for greater accuracy of the transcripts and hold each other accountable for the various analyses we ofer. As our initial observations accumulate, candidate topics of interest can emerge. In some cases, these initial observations become a basis for a “single case analysis” (Hutchby & Wooftt, 1998), as epitomized in Harvey Sack’s (1992) work that constitutes the beginning of many CA discoveries to come. Also in single case analyses, “the resources of past work on a range of phenomena and organizational domains in talk-in-interaction are brought to bear on the analytic explication of a single fragment of talk” (Scheglof, 1987, p. 101). Many CA studies, however, are collection-based, where our initial observations of single instances provide us a basis for pursuing a candidate phenomenon of interest (i.e., discovering a new practice). We start by building a collection (Sidnell, 2013) of instances to describe that “single phenomenon or single domain of phenomenon” (Scheglof, 1987, p. 101), using a “search criterion” (Bolden, 2019, LANSI Guest Lecture) developed from our initial analyses of single instances. Each instance in the collection then is again subject to a line-by-line analysis to unveil how it is indeed an instance of a particular practice. A practice, according to Heritage (2011), is “any feature of the design of a turn in a sequence” that has “a distinctive character,” occupies “specifc locations within a turn or sequence,” and makes a distinct contribution to the action the turn implements (p. 212). When encountering cases that do not ft our initial claim about a particular practice, instead of dismissing these “deviant cases” (Scheglof, 1968), we strive to determine, upon closer examination, whether they ft the claim after all, whether our initial claim needs to be revised, or whether they belong to an entirely diferent phenomenon or domain of phenomena. In presenting and publishing our fndings, we carefully curate our collection to identify data segments that can be shown with the greatest clarity while capturing the widest range of variations, including deviant cases when applicable. (For issues of validity, reliability, and generalizability of a CA study, see Waring, 2016.)
Harvey Sacks and Storytelling CA discussions on stories and storytelling may be traced back to Harvey Sacks’ lectures in the mid-1960s (later published as part of Lectures on Conversation in Sacks, 1992), in which both what counts as a story and what constitutes telling are addressed. In what follows, I outline Sacks’ take on these two aspects. For Sacks (1992), a story is a possible description of a tellable experience or event with a proper beginning and a proper ending that takes more than one utterance to produce. I will unpack each of these elements in the following paragraphs. First, a story is a possible description, i.e., a description that aligns with common sense – that is “ordinary” (v2, pp. 215–212). Working with
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the children’s story The baby cried. The mommy picked it up, Sacks (1992) ofers a detailed analysis of how the two sentences work as a “recognizably correct description” or “a possible description” and, by extension, a “possible story” (v1, p. 261). To wit, according to the “viewer’s maxim,” if someone sees an activity such as crying being done by a member of a category (i.e., baby) to which the activity is bound, see it that way. In this case then, the maxim allows us to see the baby as reasonably doing the crying, as opposed to, for example, the “male” (p. 259) or the “catholic” (p. 589) and the mom doing the picking up. What also provides for this particular “seeing,” according to Sacks (1992), is a second viewer’s maxim that hinges on the norm of a mother soothing her crying baby; in other words, if a pair of actions such as “crying” and “picking it up” can be related given a particular norm and the doers can be seen as members of the categories related to those actions, see the doers as these members (e.g., baby and mommy) and, more importantly, the second action “pick it up” as “done in conformity with the norm” (i.e., soothing one’s child) (v1, p. 260). Moreover, according to the “maxim for hearers,” if two categories used (i.e., baby and mommy) can be found to belong to the same collection (i.e., family), hear it that way (Sacks, 1992, v1, p. 236). Both the second viewer’s maxim and the hearer’s maxim then explain how we have no trouble understanding “the mommy” as this baby’s mommy. Second, the two sentences The baby cried. The mommy picked it up form up a story not only because they constitute a possible description but also because they contain, in Sack’s (1992) words, “a proper beginning and a proper end” (v1, p. 265) (i.e., a problem and a solution). Given that children have limited rights to talk, remarks that indicates trouble such as The baby cried constitute “a frst item which is generative,” thereby doing the brilliant job of providing them with the right to continue (Sacks, 1992, v1, p. 230). In this very miniature of a story, then, we also see that a story takes more than utterance to tell. Sacks (1992) does, however, refer to the existence of “a bunch of stories that take only one utterance to tell” but alludes to the possibility of them being specifcally second stories that feature similarities with frst stories (see some examples in Song & Waring, Chapter 5), thereby not contradicting or “raising trouble with” the argument that stories take more than one utterance to produce (v2, p. 250). Finally, with regard to what may warrantably form up a story, Sacks emphasizes its features as a tellable experience. With the automobile “wreck” story, for example, Sacks shows how, given the “storyability” (Sacks, 1992, v2, p. 234) of the wreck rather than the wreck aftermath, even though what was witnessed was the aftermath of the wreck, what ended up being the tellable was the wreck itself, i.e., the teller “fnds” the story of the wreck in the wreck aftermath (pp. 242–248). In other words, not everything in the world is “storyable”; as Sacks (1992) humorously points out: The way Elizabeth Taylor turned around is storyable, and the way one’s mother did is not (v2, p. 220).
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Since a story would occupy the space of more than one utterance, a key task for its telling is making an attempt to control the foor for extended turns (Sacks, v2, p. 18). One may accomplish this with a story preface such as You want to hear a story? or I have something terrible to tell you. that may be responded to with either a go-ahead or a block (Sacks, 1992, v2, p. 227). A story preface is designed to establish that the recipient does not already know the story, and it is characterized by three features (Sacks, 1974, p. 340): (1) ofer or request to tell; (2) initial characterization of the story; (3) reference to time or source of the story. These features allow the recipients to assess whether this is a story they have already heard. The initial characterization of the story as, for example, incredible also makes it possible for recipients to recognize its completion. One will have to wait for something “incredible” to know that the story is complete. A telling may also be launched with a request format such as Did you see anything in the paper last night?, where a story must be told for the recipient to answer the question (Sacks, 1992, v2, p. 231). As for the telling itself, it can feature “some course-of-action report of the teller’s circumstances” or “a series of teller actions” that describe how the teller comes to fnd the story; an utterance such as Ruth Henderson and I drove to Ventura . . . for example, can perform the job of scene-setting (Sacks, 1992, v2, pp. 231, 236). A great deal of the work of telling goes into designing the story for the recipient and producing the story as recognizably correct or plausible via possible descriptions (see previous remarks) (pp. 230–235). As someone with the entitled experience of having witnessed the wreck then, the teller is obliged to “form up his wreck story as an ordinary wreck story” or just “another accident” to avoid the impression of making too much of a big deal out of “just an accident” (Sacks, v2, p. 247). Finally, Sacks (1992) observes a “massive economy” in storytelling: Certain terminologies of the telling such as at frst I thought and then I realized can be reused in diferent stories, and “nothing is just mentioned” since any bit of the telling can be used by the recipient to “fnd what further is going to happen” (v2, pp. 236–238).
CA Account of Storytelling Much of CA research on storytelling builds and expands upon Harvey Sack’s pioneering work with a focus on three broad areas: Launching the story, telling the story, and responding to the story – and does so almost exclusively in the English monolingual context (see Wong & Waring, 2021 for a more extended summary of CA work on storytelling practices).
Launching the Story Stories may be launched from the frst (initiating) or second (responding) position (Mandelbaum, 2013). Scheglof (1997), for example, distinguishes between “storytellings that have to ‘make their own way’ and those that are responsive
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to inquiry, to invitation, to solicitation, or can be introduced under that guise” (p. 103). Sidnell (2010) also makes the distinction between “stories that embody frst actions and make relevant particular seconds and those that are occasioned as responses to frst actions” (p. 174). First-position launching may be accomplished with a single turn or a sequence (Jeferson, 1978; Lerner, 1992; Sacks, 1974). When stories are launched in a single turn, they are often triggered by prior talk, and such triggering may be signaled by disjunctive markers (e.g., incidentally, that reminds me of or speaking of X) and/or embedded repetitions. One may also use a conventional story-prefaced phrase as a topically coherent next utterance (e.g., One day, As a matter of fact (I know) the guy . . . I heard X) or simply begin (Jeferson, 1978; Mandelbaum, 2013). Some conventional ways of beginning a story, according to Sidnell (2010), include introducing characters (we), providing a temporal (a week before my birthday) or spatial setting (It was in Santa Monica.), or using phrasing such as What happened was X (pp. 181–182). Besides a single turn, three types of sequences can be used to launch a story (Lerner, 1992; Mandelbaum, 1987; Sacks, 1974): (1) preface sequence (see previous explanation); (2) assisted story preface; (3) three-part series of turns. Couper-Kuhlen and Selting (2018) also note that story prefaces typically contain “a descriptive or indexical expression to hint at some tellable (we could’ve used a little marijuana to get through the weekend) that is situated in the past and invokes the character (we, she, he) the story will be about (p. 5). Assisted story preface is a way of launching a story collaboratively by using: (1) story prompt (e.g., Oh you have to tell them about X.); (2) story provocation (e.g., mention this irrelevant fellow to provoke another into the telling); (3) reminiscent solicit + recognition (e.g., Remember when we used to. . . ?) (Lerner, 1992, pp. 250–254). Two potential co-tellers can also begin a story by employing a three-part series of turns: A “remote” approach (e.g., I was getting really tense.) gets “forwarded” (You know what he did?) by the co-participant, which is in turn ratifed by the frst person (e.g., went out of my (curse) mind . . .), who began with the remote approach (Mandelbaum, 1987). With second-position launching, on the other hand, stories are produced in response to inquiries as “answers to questions” (Sidnell, 2010, p. 181). Other familiar environments for second-position launching would perhaps include parents responding to children’s requests or students responding to teachers’ requests for stories. In those cases, second-position stories are produced as requested, not under the guise of responses to some other inquiries that do not explicitly solicit stories.
Telling the Story Telling the story can include providing background detailing, delivering the focus (climax) of the telling, and formulating the upshot of the telling (Mandelbaum, 2013; Holt, 2017). Couper-Kuhlen and Selting (2018) note that
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possible story completions are conveyed through a summary of some sort (p. 27) or what Jeferson (1978) calls a “return ‘home’” (and were back at the pizza joint we started from) (p. 231). As Holt (2017) reminds us, however, not all stories are “neatly constructed,” and “stories can include asides, sections can be recycled, etc.” (p. 175). After launching the story, the telling of the story can be done by (1) a single party in a single or multiple turn(s) (Sacks, 1974) or (2) multiple parties jointly (Lerner, 1992; Mandelbaum, 1987). In single-party telling, the teller is the only one that has the story. Beyond the preface sequence, the main story segments may include background, parenthesis, and climax (Goodwin, 1984), which is true for multi-party telling as well. The focal telling of the story can also be marked by direct or indirect reported speech. Holt (2017) shows that in contrast to direct reported speech (DRS) that “commonly constitutes the peak or focus of the telling,” indirect reported speech (IRS) typically occurs “in background detailing, in introducing DRS, in breaks from DRS, and within DRS to report a reported interaction” (p. 185) (also see Griswold, 2016). Niemelä (2010) also speaks of a “reporting space” where the teller and recipient produce multimodal enactments (including direct reported speech) as they “assign a stance to and take a stance on the reported speaker and event” (p. 3258). Oh (2006) shows how zero anaphora (i.e., pronoun drop) is used in the climax segment of the story to create a sense of tight continuity between actions – and thereby excitement. When the story involves a delicate topic, the focus of the telling, according to Hutchby (2019), may include two versions of self-enactment (frst “straight” and then “performed”), where the second version is “occasioned by skeptical or dubious responses” to the frst version and dramatized through exaggerated verbal and paraverbal (facial expression and head movement) practices (p. 12). Finally, a routine challenge for tellers is to resume telling after some intervening course of action. Helisten (2017) shows that such resumption can be done through the form of But/anyway (+recycle) + next component of telling along with the teller’s brief gaze withdrawal and disjunctive prosody (also see Wong, 2000). In multi-party telling, on the other hand, more than one person has the story, and the story is jointly told (Lerner, 1992; Mandelbaum, 1987). Those who know the story participate in both its delivery with collaborative telling techniques (e.g., verify details, monitor for errors, repair trouble, render own part, and engage in complementary telling) and its response with “anticipatory laughter” or confrming continuers addressed to the recipient (Lerner, 1992, p. 259).
Responding to the Story Story recipients can respond to the story both during and upon the completion of its telling. According to Couper-Kuhlen and Selting (2018), responses may range from passive (nodding) to active (e.g., asking questions), and afliative responses are preferred over disafliative ones (p. 28). One kind of response
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story recipients can produce during its telling is alignment or afliation (Stivers, 2008): An aligning response displays the understanding that a story is in progress by yielding the foor to the teller while an afliative response supports the teller’s stance with agreement or upgrades. Story recipients can also redirect a story during its telling (Mandelbaum, 1989). Upon the completion of a story, three tasks become relevant for the recipient (Jeferson, 1978; Sacks, 1974: Scheglof, 1992) and the joint tellers or what Lerner (1992) refers to as the “story consociates”: (1) display understanding of the completion; (2) show appreciation of the point of the story; (3) demonstrate the story’s potential to generate subsequent talk. As Mandelbaum (2013) writes, “storytelling recipients must monitor for the possible climax of the story so they can produce a proper response” (p. 499). Laughing upon the completion of another’s telling of a joke is one example. Recipients can also resist the point of the story the teller is trying to convey (Mandelbaum, 1991). In exploring afliation in the reception of conversational complaint stories typically in the form of anger and/or indignation, Couper-Kuhlen (2012) shows that afliation is conveyed through claims of understanding, negative assessments that align with the teller’s stance, and justifcations on behalf of the teller with prosodic matching or upgrading, and non-afliation through factual follow-up questions, minimal responses, and withholdings with prosodic downgrading (p. 113). One way to demonstrate a story’s potential to generate subsequent talk is by providing a second story (Ryave, 1978; Sacks, 1992, v2, p. 250) or what Scheglof (1997) refers to as a “subsequent story” (p. 103). Second stories may also be produced to convey agreement or disagreement with the frst stories (Sacks, 1992, v2, p. 256). In the absence of any story response upon its completion, the teller may add various expansions to seek recipient responses (Jeferson, 1978). (Insofar as much of storytelling involves troubles telling and its responses, interested readers should also consult Jeferson (2015) on talking about troubles in conversation.)
Multilingual Storytelling Despite the fact that CA scholarship in storytelling has mostly been conducted in the English monolingual context, a small body of research has been addressed to storytelling in languages other than English (e.g., Cantonese, French, German, Greek, Japanese, and Swedish) or featuring tellings conducted in one’s second language (e.g., French, Japanese, and English). In studies of storytelling in languages other than English, story launching is done quickly and straightforwardly among a group of Greek female adolescents (Georgakopoulou, 2010) but with a much longer preamble among Japanese speakers to build rapport and trust, where the story is insinuated in subtle ways (Fujii, 2007). And while the same Greek adolescents tend to produce counter stories at story completions, the recipients in Selting’s (2017) study of German conversations afliate with the teller’s afect by telling a second complaint
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story. The theme of afect also takes the center stage in Evaldsson and Svahn’s (2017) study of gossip telling among Swedish ffth-grade girls – where afect displays are mobilized to take up oppositional stances and strengthen in-group alignments – and in Selting’s (2010) examination of how afect is negotiated in situ in German storytelling situations. Finally, not surprisingly, storytelling is occasioned to accomplish various social actions such as supporting one’s point in Cantonese (Luke, 2016). More specifcally, the use of direct reported speech (DRS) has been found in French to present events as non-routine and newsworthy during handover interactions in nursing care units (Bangerter et al., 2011) and to depict one’s own adequate conduct compared to the “deviant” conduct of a third party during dinner table conversations (Berger & Pekarek Doehler, 2015). Studies of storytelling in L2, on the other hand, have placed a great deal of emphasis on documenting development – mostly longitudinally. A Japanese L2 speaker of English is shown to produce more complex narratives with multiunit turns during conversations-for-practicing-English over a period of fve months (Barraja-Rohan, 2015). Over a period of three-week homestay in Australian, another Japanese L2 speaker displays increasing participation in the news-of-theday tellings, moving from brief responses to elicitations that incur post expansions to extended story-like tellings (Greer, 2019). The development of story recipiency is captured in Ishida’s (2011) report of how an L1 English speaker of L2 Japanese demonstrates increasing engagement with assessments, commentaries, and second stories over a nine-month study-abroad period. Similarly, the Korean L2 speaker of English in Kim’s (2016) study becomes more active and resourceful in being a story recipient by providing timely responses and eliciting recipient-centered questions over a period of six months during conversationfor-learning. Based on their study of a German speaker of L2 French during her nine-month stay as an au pair with a French-speaking host family, Pekarek Doehler and Berger (2018) demonstrate the participant’s increasing ability for context-sensitive conduct during storytelling. The development of storytelling abilities has also been explored with crosssectional data, where higher-profciency students tell more and longer stories with more framing and pre-sequences than their lower-profciency counterparts although the latter are able to contingently deploy available resources to launch stories without the story prefaces (Hellermann, 2008; Lee & Hellermann, 2014). Finally, without focusing on documenting development, in a series of single case studies, researchers have shown how a Chinese L2 speaker of Japanese exhibits stance displays with varying emotional intensities during the telling of a disaster story over cofee (Burch & Kasper, 2016); how a Vietnamese L2 speaker of English participates in launching, producing, and ending a story in ways that further the purpose of a TESOL autobiographical research interview (Kasper & Prior, 2015); and how an Australian English speaker of L2 French engages an interplay of multimodal resources in recounting a personal anecdote during a university French class (Tabensky, 2008).
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Overview of the Chapters As noted earlier, all the studies in this volume are conducted within the conversation analytic framework, which involves representing audio-video recordings in detail transcriptions (see Appendix for the book). In cases where the authors use notations diferent from or in addition to those listed in the volume appendix, these diferent or additional markings (e.g., with regard to embodiment or foreign language) are described in the data section or the appendix of the respective chapters. Readers may also note that not all storytelling data in this volume bear the appearance of a conventional story. The “exception” includes instances of second stories (Song & Waring, Chapter 5) and specimens of potential storyables (Greer & Ogawa, Chapter 4), which may be considered by some as mere tellings rather than storytellings per se. Collectively, the chapters in this volume push the existing CA work on storytelling beyond its largely monolingual focus by profling multilingual storytelling competence in a variety of contexts (e.g., on the phone, in the hair salon, during in-person chitchat, among learners in and outside the language classroom). The analyses showcase how the multilingual speakers (1) launch stories in response to teacher questions (Chapter 8), organize parallel tellings (Chapter 5), maintain progressivity (Chapter 6), produce (delicate) tellings with limited linguistic resources (Chapter 9), and manage recipiency and intersubjectivity in three-person tellings (Chapter 4), and how they exploit storytelling as a resource for “doing” friendship (Chapters 2–3) or accomplishing teaching (Chapters 7–8) and learning (Chapter 10). As the frst book-length conversation analytic endeavor devoted exclusively to storytelling in multilingual contexts, the volume contributes to broadening the scope of the foundational conversation analytic literature on storytelling on the one hand and to further specifying the nature of second language (L2) interactional competence on the other. As such, the ensuring chapters will appeal to students and scholars of social interaction with a broad interest in storytelling, to conversation analysts with a penchant for exploring the cross-linguistic nature of generic interactional practices, and fnally to applied linguists seeking to understand issues of translanguaging, the nature of learner language, and teacher practices in managing classroom storytelling. Many of the insights into multilingual storytelling produced by this volume extend our existing knowledge of how telling and responding can be managed. The classic CA notion of recipient design is further explored in Wong’s (Chapter 2) analysis of a Chinese L2 English speaker’s telling of the same story on two diferent occasions over the phone addressed to two diferent L1 English speakers although the same L2 speaker is not quite agile as a story recipient (Chapter 3). The organization of “clumped stories” (Sacks, 1992, v2, p. 249) is examined by Song and Waring (Chapter 5) with a focus on how nanun-prefacing in Korean conversations is used to launch a similar type of telling to that of the previous talk in terms of topic, action, and format. Managing the progressivity
14 Hansun Zhang Waring
of telling is the focus of Lee and Lee (Chapter 6), who detail how L2 tellers manage repairs while maintaining the topical coherence required in their story. Repair is also featured in Greer and Ogawa’s (Chapter 4) analysis of managing peripheral recipiency in triadic L2 storytelling, where a third person aids either the primary speaker or the intended recipient when the participants have limited access to linguistic resources. Clearly, practices such as managing progressivity or mediating triadic telling, despite their pronounced presence in L2 interactions, are not unique to such interactions. To a certain extent then, while furthering our understanding of what constitutes the competence of multilingual storytelling, these fndings also play an important role in carving out new territories of exploration on the broader landscape of (cross-linguistic) storytelling research. Chapters in this volume also expand our understandings of storytelling in the L2 classroom. Monfaredi and Kasper (Chapter 7) show how teacher tellings are occasioned in the Persian L2 classroom to support their pedagogy, i.e., as real-life examples of abstract teaching objects such as “divorce” or grammar rules. As opposed to occasioned teacher tellings, occasioned student tellings is the focus of Lo and Tadic’s (Chapter 9) analysis of a student’s unexpected disclosure of a troubling experience (i.e., domestic abuse) in an adult ESL classroom and the challenges faced by the teacher for responding to such a telling. Also situated within an adult ESL classroom, when student stories are elicited rather than occasioned, Greenhalgh and Wilkinson (Chapter 8) show how such elicited tellings in a meaning-and-fuency task and their subsequent teacher responses exhibit a hybridity that mixes conversation with pedagogy. Shifting the focus from teaching to learning, Frantz (Chapter 10) documents one learner’s move toward more independent repair practices with greater phonological accuracy and fewer disfuency markers in repeated storytellings in an adult ESL classroom. What has been made abundantly clear in these chapters then is the power of both occasioned and elicited storytelling as a resource for teaching and learning in the language classroom. Finally, on occasions, the L2 speakers appear to display greater competence than their L1 counterparts in managing certain contingencies of the momentto-moment interactions. Huang in Wong’s (Chapter 2) analysis of phone conversations, for example, comes of as more competent as a storyteller than her L1-speaking addressee Vera as a story recipient. The ESL students in Lo and Tadic’s (Chapter 9) study are also shown to be more adept at ofering afliative responses to their fellow classmate’s delicate telling than their L1-speaking teacher. Both cases force us to yet again confront the native speaker ideal with direct evidence that questions its very basis. In brief, there is an immense amount of richness and depth in multilingual storytelling that the current volume has only begun to unveil. The time is ripe for us to stage such storytelling as an important object of inquiry in its own right, and we hope this volume paves the way for many more expeditions to come. After all, understanding multilingual storytelling is a gateway through
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which we gain greater insights into what it means to be a multilingual speaker, to be interactionally competent, and to be a fully engaged participant in the language classroom, all of which are central concerns for applied linguists and conversation/discourse analysts alike.
References Akbar, F. S. (2013). The case against monolingual bias in multilingualism. Working Papers in TESOL and Applied Linguistics, 13(2), 42–44. Bangerter, A., Mayor, E., & Pekarek Doehler, S. (2011). Reported speech in conversational storytelling during nursing shift handover meetings. Discourse Processes, 48, 183–214. Barraja-Rohan, A.-M. (2015). “I told you”: Storytelling development of a Japanese learning English as a second language. In T. Cadierno & S. W. Eskildsen (Eds.), Usage-based perspectives on second language learning (pp. 271–304). Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. Berger, E., & Pekarek Doehler, S. (2015). Direct reported speech in storytellings: Enacting and negotiating epistemic entitlements. Text & Talk, 35(6), 789–813. Block, D. (2003). The social turn in language acquisition. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. Burch, A. R., & Kasper, G. (2016). Like Godzilla: Enactments and formulations in telling a disaster story in Japanese. In M. T. Prior & G. Kasper (Eds.), Emotion in multilingual interaction (pp. 57–85). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Canagarajah, S. (2013). Theorizing a competence for translingual practice at the contact zone. In S. May (Ed.), The multilingual turn: Implications for SLA, TESOL, and Bilingual education (pp. 78–102). New York: Routledge. Cenoz, J., & Gorter, D. (2011). A holistic approach to multilingual education: Introduction. The Modern Language Journal, 95(3), 339–343. Cook, V. (1991). The poverty-of-the-stimulus argument and multi-competence. Second Language Research, 7(2), 103–117. Cook, V. (1992). Evidence for multicompetence. Language Learning, 42(4), 557–591. Couper-Kuhlen, E. (2012). Exploring afliation in the reception of conversational complaint stories. In M.-L. Sorjonen & A. Peräkylä (Eds.), Emotion in interaction (pp. 113– 146). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Couper-Kuhlen, E., & Selting, M. (2018). A “big package”: Storytelling (Online-Chapter D). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Evaldsson, A.-C., & Svahn, J. (2017). Staging social aggression: Afective stances and moral character work in girls’ gossip telling. Research on Children and Social Interaction, 1(1), 77–104. Firth, A., & Wagner, J. (1997). On discourse, communication, and (some) fundamental concepts in SLA research. Modern Language Journal, 81, 285–300. Fujii, Y. (2007). “Tell me about when you were hitchhiking”: The organization of story initiation by Australian and Japanese speakers. Language in Society, 36(2), 183–211. Gardner, R., & Wagner, J. (Eds.). (2004). Second language conversations. New York, NY: Continuum. Garfnkel, H. (1967). Studies in ethnomethodology. Englewood Clifs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Georgakopoulou, A. (2010). Closing in on story openings and closings: Evidence from conversational stories in Greek. Journal of Greek Linguistics, 10, 345–361.
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Gofman, E. (1967). Interactional ritual. New York: Anchor Books. Goodwin, C. (1984). Notes on story structure and the organization of participation. In J. M. Atkinson & J. Heritage (Eds.), Structures of social action (pp. 225–246). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Greer, T. (2019). Initiating and delivering news of the day: Interactional competence as joint-development. Journal of Pragmatics, 146, 150–164. Griswold, O. (2016). Center stage: Direct and Indirect reported speech in conversational storytelling. Issues in Applied Linguistics, 20(10), 73–90. Grosjean, F. (2010). Bilingual: Life and reality. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Helisten, M. (2017). Resumptions as multimodal achievements in conversational (story) tellings. Journal of Pragmatics, 112, 1–19. Hellermann, J. (2008). Social actions for classroom language learning. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Hellermann, J., & Lee, Y.-A. (2014). Members and their competencies: Contributions of ethnomethodological conversation analysis to a multilingual turn in second language acquisition. System, 44, 54–65. Hepburn, A., & Bolden, G. (2017). Transcribing for social research. London: Sage Publications. Heritage, J. (2011). Conversation analysis: Practices and methods. In D. Silverman (Ed.), Qualitative research: Theory, method and practice (3rd ed., pp. 208–230). London: Sage Publications. Holt, E. (2017). Indirect reported speech in storytelling: Its position, design, and uses. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 50(2), 171–187. Hutchby, I. (2019). Performed retelling; Self-enactment and the dramatisation of narrative on a television talk show. Journal of Pragmatics, 149, 1–13. Hutchby, I., & Wooftt, R. (1998). Conversation analysis. Cambridge: Polity Press. Ishida, M. (2011). Engaging in another person’s telling as recipient in L2 Japanese: Development of interactional competence during one-year study abroad. In G. Pallotti & J. Wagner (Eds.), L2 learning as social practice: Conversation-analytic perspectives (pp. 45–85). Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii national Foreign Language Resource Center. Jeferson, G. (1978). Sequential aspects of storytelling in conversation. In J. Schenkein (Ed.), Studies in the organization of conversational interaction (pp. 219–248). New York: Academic Press. Jeferson, G. (2004). Glossary of transcript symbols with an introduction. In G. Lerner (Ed.), Conversation analysis: Studies from the frst generation (pp. 13–34). Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company. Jeferson, G. (2015). Talking about troubles in conversation (P. Drew, J. Heritage, G. Lerner, & A. Pomerantz, Eds.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kasper, G., & Prior, M. T. (2015). Analyzing storytelling in TESOL interview research. TESOL Quarterly, 49(2), 226–255. Kim, Y. (2016). Development of L2 interactional competence: Being a story recipient in L2 English conversation. Discourse and Cognition, 23(1), 1–28. Lee, Y.-A., & Hellermann, J. (2014). Tracing developmental changes through conversation analysis: Cross-sectional and longitudinal analysis. TESOL Quarterly, 48(4), 763–788. Lerner, G. H. (1992). Assisted storytelling: Deploying shared knowledge as a practical matter. Qualitative Sociology, 15, 247–271.
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Li, W. (2018). Translanguaging as a practical theory of language. Applied Linguistics, 39(1), 9–30. Luke, K. K. (2016). Storytelling in multiple contexts. Chinese Language and Discourse, 7(2), 297–340. Mandelbaum, J. (1987). Couples sharing stories. Communication Quarterly, 35(2), 144–170. Mandelbaum, J. (1989). Interpersonal activities in conversational storytelling. Western Journal of Speech Communication, 53, 114–126. Mandelbaum, J. (1991). Conversational non-cooperation: An exploration of disattended complaints. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 25(1–4), 97–138. Mandelbaum, J. (2013). Storytelling in conversation. In J. Sidnell & T. Stivers (Eds.), The handbook of conversation analysis (pp. 492–507). Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. May, S. (Ed.). (2013). The multilingual turn: Implications for SLA, TESOL, and Bilingual education. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. Niemelä, M. (2010). The reporting space in conversational storytelling: Orchestrating all semiotic channels for taking a stance. Journal of Pragmatics, 42, 3258–3270. Oh, S.-Y. (2006). English zero anaphora as an interactional resource II. Discourse Studies, 8(6), 817–846. Ortega, L. (2010, March 6–9). The Bilingual turn in SLA. Plenary delivered at the Annual Conference of the American Association for Applied Linguistics, Atlanta, GA. Ortega, L. (2013). Ways forward for a bi/multilingual turn in SLA. In S. May (Ed.), The multilingual turn: Implications for SLA, TESOL, and Bilingual education (pp. 32–53). New York: Routledge. Pekarek Doehler, S., & Berger, E. (2018). L2 interactional competence as increased ability for context-sensitive conduct: A longitudinal study of story-openings. Applied Linguistics, 39(4), 555–578. Psathas, G. (1995). Conversation analysis: The study of talk-in-interaction. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Reddington, E. (2020). Managing multiple demands in the adult ESL classroom. Unpublished doctoral dissertation. Teachers College, Columbia University. Ryave, A. (1978). On the achievement of a series of stories. In J. Schenkein (Ed.), Studies in the organization of conversational interaction (pp. 113–132). New York: Academic Press. Sacks, H. (1974). An analysis of the course of a joke’s telling in conversation. In R. Bauman & J. Sherzer (Eds.), Explorations in the ethnography of speaking (pp. 337–353). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sacks, H. (1984). Notes on methodology. In J. M. Atkinson & J. Heritage (Eds.), Structures of social action: Studies in conversation analysis (pp. 2–27). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sacks, H. (1992). Lectures on conversation. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Scheglof, E. A. (1968). Sequencing in conversational openings. American Anthropologist, 70(6), 1075–1095. Scheglof, E. A. (1987). Analyzing single episodes of interaction: An exercise in conversation analysis. Social Psychology Quarterly, 50, 101–114. Scheglof, E. A. (1992). In another context. In A. Duranti & C. Goodwin (Eds.), Rethinking context: Language as an interactive phenomenon (pp. 193–227). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Scheglof, E. A. (1997). “Narrative analysis” thirty years later. Journal of Narrative and Life History, 7(1–4), 97–106.
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Scheglof, E. A., & Sacks, H. (1973). Opening up closings. Semiotica, 7, 289–327. Selting, M. (2010). Afectivity in conversational storytelling: An analysis of displays of anger or indignation in complaint stories. Pragmatics, 20(2), 229–277. Selting, M. (2017). Complaint stories and subsequent complaint stories with afect displays. Journal of Pragmatics, 44, 387–415. Sidnell, J. (2010). Conversation analysis: An introduction. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. Sidnell, J. (2013). Basic conversation analytic methods. In J. Sidnell & T. Stivers (Eds.), Handbook of conversation analysis (pp. 77–100). Boston, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. Sidnell, J., & Stivers, T. (2013). The handbook of conversation analysis. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. Stivers, T. (2008). Stance, alignment, and afliation during storytelling: When nodding is a token of afliation. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 41(1), 31–57. Tabensky, A. (2008). Non-verbal resources and storytelling in second language classroom interaction. Journal of Applied Linguistics, 5(3), 321–348. ten Have, P. (2007). Doing conversation analysis: A practical guide (2nd ed.). London: Sage. Waring, H. Z. (2016). Theorizing pedagogical interaction: Insights from conversation analysis. New York: Routledge. Waring, H. Z., & Hellermann, J. (2017, March). Applied linguistics and conversation analysis: Ways of problematizing the monolingual standard. Invited colloquium presented at the Annual Conference of the American Association for Applied Linguistics, Portland, OR. Wong, J. (2000). Repetition in conversation: A look at “frst and second sayings”. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 33(4), 407–424. Wong, J., & Waring, H. Z. (2017, March). Pause and preference in second language talk. Paper presented at the Annual Conference of the American Association for Applied Linguistics (AAAL), Portland, OR. Wong, J., & Waring, H. Z. (2021). Conversation analysis and second language pedagogy: A guide for ESL/EFL learners. New York: Routledge.
PART II
Multilingual Storytelling in Ordinary Conversations
2 OUR STORIED LIVES Doing and Finding Friendship I1 Jean Wong
Introduction In the United States, National Public Radio used to have a program called “Voices in the Family,” hosted by Dr. Dan Gottlieb, who is a clinical psychologist. A number of years ago, one of his programs concerned the topic of interpersonal relationships and the importance of making friends. His invited guest was Dr. Barbara Frederickson, an evolutionary psychologist from the University of North Carolina, who spoke about love from a scientifc lens, or Love 2.0. She emphasized that “micro-moments of creation and connection” are central in helping us to lead fulflling and satisfying lives. At one point in the program, Dr. Gottlieb asked, “What does a micro-moment of creation and connection look like?” Now, as a conversation analyst with an appetite for data transcripts, my knee-jerk reaction was, “You want to see a micro-moment of creation and connection? I’ll show you!” Thereupon, I experienced a feeting moment of euphoria, bordering on a temptation to call into the radio program, but I hesitated for fear of straddling Dr. Gottlieb and his audience with a perennial knotty question of “why that now” (Scheglof & Sacks, 1973). Okay, jocularity aside, we know that friendships do not just happen, particularly those that are deep and abiding. Doing and fnding friendship take no trivial amount of interactional work as shown in this chapter and the next one (see Wong, this volume). In this chapter, I address: (1) What do “micro-moments of creation and connection” in multilingual talk look like on transcript? (2) What does it take to do storytelling as exhibited in details of the interaction? (3) How can single-case analyses of storytelling advance our knowledge and understanding of “micro-moments of creation and connection” that underwrite how we do and fnd friendship with others? By analyzing the same story that emerged
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in two diferent multilingual phone conversations in which the less profcient speaker remains constant, I aim to fll a void given that CA work on storytelling in multilingual interaction is relatively scarce.
Background Telling is a generic activity of social interaction (Sacks, 1992; Scheglof, 2007) with stories told in scenarios ranging from everyday conversation to interview settings to therapy talk to doctor–patient interaction and so on. We store and later recount our experiences as stories, with small stories sometimes even occupying a single utterance (Sacks, 1992), while long ones (re)play across turns that reveal aspects of sequential structure and storytelling organization (Jeferson,1988; Mandelbaum, 2013). Stories represent “oral versions of personal experience” (Scheglof, 1997, p. 98). The stuf of our stories typically evokes experiences that we have suffered or witnessed (Sacks, 1992) and tend to be in the nature of unexpected or dramatic circumstances (Ochs & Capps, 2001). While we bundle our experiences as stories in order to do something, whether it be to talk about our troubles (Jeferson, 1988), to give advice, to make requests, or to pre-frame the telling of a joke (Sacks, 1974, 1992), at other times, we ofer a story just for the telling of it. And although stories are pervasive in our everyday lives, originating from a stockpile of “talkables” (Scheglof, 1986, p. 116), they are not a conglomerate of facts or information to be delivered as “stories get occasioned by a current course of conversation” (Sacks, 1992, v2, p. 441). We, as conversation analysts, fnd them, there all along, in their unassuming sparkle and brilliance. For a story to develop seemingly out of the blue, there is usually an event or an experience for which the parties do not have equal access. One might think that would give a teller a license to produce the story, which begins with various means for holding the foor across an extended series of turns (Sacks et al., 1974). But having such a license does not necessarily yield a green light, i.e., for the story to be told, or even if it does get told, that it will succeed in the way that the teller anticipates because the recipient can block the story from surfacing as in complaint sequences (Mandelbaum, 1992). For stories to come to life, tellers and recipients must initially align with storytelling as a next interactional activity. Along these lines, tellers produce various features that comprise a story preface, which include adverbials of time and/or location, past tense reference, or assessment utterances (e.g., the worst thing just happened). They also convey their stance toward the experience or the event(s) being described. Stance refers to the “teller’s afective treatment of the events she is describing whether that is communicated explicitly or implicitly” (Stivers, 2008, p. 37). When tellers fnish their stories, a next action for recipients is to display orientation to story completion and to understanding of the story (Sacks, 1992; Scheglof, 1997). For example, recipients can display understanding that the story
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is fnished and show story appreciation by ofering assessment responses, e.g., Oh, isn’t that terrible/wonderful (Sacks, 1992, v2, p. 10). Sequential alignment along with empathic and afliative responses, which are preferred, reveal recipients’ understanding of what a story set out to achieve from an interactional standpoint (Scheglof, 1997; Stivers, 2008). In short, at story inception and throughout a telling, recipients display listenership, i.e., how they hear the story (Sacks, 1992). Although CA research that uses data from multilingual interaction in examining storytelling practices is still relatively scarce, scholars are making headway, using data from L2 Japanese (Ishida, 2011), L2 French (Tabensky, 2008; Pekarek Doehler & Berger, 2018), and L2 English (Barraja-Rohan, 2015; Hellermann, 2008; Lee & Hellermann, 2014). (Also see Chapter 1.) Overall, fndings reveal that multilingual language learners are capable of producing stories in classroom group work activities, in conversation-for-practice settings, and in family dinner conversations – and that they develop storytelling competence gradually over time (Barraja-Rohan, 2015; Hellermann, 2008; Lee & Hellermann, 2014; Pekarek Doehler & Berger, 2018). With respect to learning English, Hellermann (2008) and Lee and Hellermann (2014) examine stories told by ESL learners in the context of group work activities. They report that beginning learners of English struggled more with story openings than intermediate and upper-intermediate level English learners did – but that the beginners improved over time. Barraja-Rohan’s (2015) study utilizes longitudinal data from conversation-for-practice sessions, tracking one L2 learner of English over a span of fve months. Her multilingual language learner, whose L1 was Japanese, displayed progress in storytelling competence as she simultaneously developed greater awareness and understanding of the turntaking system in English. This study contributes to prior CA work on storytelling, using ordinary phone conversation between L1 and L2 dyads who speak in English and in which one party talks about her troubles. Troubles-telling is one kind of storytelling for which we have a fair amount of early classic CA work, i.e., studies done using L1/monolingual speakers of English (e.g., Jeferson, 1988), but there is scant CA research that examines troubles-telling in multilingual interaction, moreover, in ordinary settings outside the classroom.
Data The data used in this study originate from a larger corpus of fourteen hours of phone conversations between twelve dyads (L1-L2 or L2-L2) speaking in English. The recordings were made in a city on the West Coast of the United States. Almost all of the conversations took place between friends, but a few conversations involved one party calling an institution (school or business). The participants in the two stories analyzed are friends who call on the phone to catch up with each other’s news (Drew & Chilton, 2000). Huang, the teller
24 Jean Wong
of the two stories, is a multilingual individual who speaks Mandarin as a frst language and English as an additional language. In the stories examined, she recounts her experience of childbirth with two diferent story-recipients who speak American English as their frst language. The data are transcribed according to the transcription system originally developed by Gail Jeferson (2004) (see Appendix).
Analyses Story 1: Huang Tells Vera In the frst story, sub-divided into the three following extracts, Vera, the caller, phones her friend Huang to fnd out about whether she has given birth. Huang’s husband Sun Pei is not part of the conversation, but he is referenced later in the unfolding story. The conversation is in progress prior to the line shown below labeled as line 01. Extract 1a HV Baby Story 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24
VERA: HUANG: VERA: HUANG: VERA: HUANG:
VERA: HUANG: VERA: HUANG: VERA: HUANG: VERA: HUANG:
VERA: HUANG:
I’m so glad God took care of you and the baby I’ve been praying for you. .h hih-hih thank you. .h an’ h I- I’m jus’ glad that everything went we:ll, yeah it’s- [everything issa fne [both of you are very (0.2) strong an’ healthy yeah he- he(.) uh really good he really yih know .h .h an:: an:: how can I say (°yah°-) I:: I- I got uh haw- hospital issa may: seventeenth. (0.2) [mm hm. [that day issa my due da↑y, mm hm. .h uh- that- that- that day Sun Pei got thuh eh- big- ehqualify big examination. oh::↑, yeah: [so [uh huh, eh- eh- when- when he (0.2) pas- passedte yih know eheh- eh- when .h yih know he .h his um (0.2) te- test at uh two c-clock. uh huh? mm and duh .h I- I got pointmentment is uh two f-
Our Storied Lives
25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66
VERA: HUANG: VERA: HUANG: VERA: HUANG:
VERA: HUANG: VERA: HUANG:
VERA: HUANG: HUANG: VERA: HUANG: VERA: HUANG: VERA: HUANG: VERA: HUANG: VERA: HUANG: VERA: HUANG: VERA: HUANG: VERA:
25
forty fve. ((inhalation through nose)) when I eh see docdoctor=doctor says said you- you will have baby today or tomorrow [so you have(h) to(h)stay h(h)ere(h). [hoh-hoh-hoh-hoh [huh(h) .h huh(h) [hoh-hoh-hoh-hoh so they said uh where’s your husband(h)? I said the in thuh school=he got te↑st ehuh (h)-huh(h) ehuh huh hih(h).h yih know so eh when- when he- when he f- eh fn- fnished((inbreath through nose)) he- got a phone call said a uh I- I- I- I was in the labor(h) (0.2) .h so he so surprise(h)(h), =oh::: hih-hih .h but uh everything is fne I mean =uh huh he- he-he: (.) passedte and uh ((inhalation through nose)) then we-yih know that’s get bet- better because uh (0.2) now (y-) very busy didn’t he- have time to take care everything. mm hm. so: (I thought) that’s good thing(h)(h). (0.4) mm(h)h)h)h) ((fatigued, sigh-like quality)) so is- so Sun is fnished with school for thuh (.) summer? ((Sun is Huang’s husband)) mm I think so(h)h). goo:d. yeah because he:: .h he have to work (h)(h). uh huh. yeah .h and uh (0.7) [is he happy? [(but-) (h)(h)(h) (0.6) is Sun happy? (h)(h) SURE↑ why not(h)(h) hee hee hee hee [hee hee [huh huh (h) yeah .h we are so happy for the boy uh [huh. [for the- for the kid because yih know he- .h he- he looks so h-ealthy anda everything is going (0.2) going well. oh goo::d. ((talk continues))
26 Jean Wong
The telling begins at lines 8–10 when Huang produces a self-initiated repair, i.e., a word search, at the repeated words an followed by an announcement of the search, how can I say (yah). She may be searching for the next word due or even for a story launch as the outcome of her search is a frst-positioned story (Scheglof, 1997). Reciprocally, Vera, as recipient, produces continuers and other minimal responses (lines 12, 14, and 17) that relinquish the foor, aligning with storytelling as a next interactional activity. Aside from regarding lines 8–10 as a story preface, the subsequent lines 13, 15, and 16 encapsulate a larger story opening because those lines collectively address the location and date of the event Huang reports. Orientation to location and date is a feature of story-prefacing work in the sequential organization of storytelling (Jeferson, 1978; Sacks, 1992). As we see at story inception, Huang targets a complicating factor, something in the nature of an unexpected event. Storytellers regularly initiate tellings about unexpected happenings to reconcile what they expected with what they experienced (Ochs & Capps, 2001). Thus, at the story opening Vera learns that Huang’s entry into the hospital was unexpected and conficted with the day of her husband’s doctoral qualifying examination. Indeed, Huang’s capacity to construct the story launch in this manner, early on, by shining the spotlight on complications relating to labor and delivery, projects more story to come. Aside from the previously noted story-prefacing work, Huang deploys other storytelling resources such as reported speech and context of the situation, i.e., the hospital, for advancing the telling-so-far, while casting a shadow on her stance toward the unexpected turn of events as seen in the following extract. Extract 2a HV Delivery 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33
HUANG:
mm and duh .h I- I got pointmentment is uh two fforty fve. ((inhalation through nose)) when I eh see docdoctor=doctor says said you- you will have baby today or tomorrow [so you have(h) to(h)stay h(h)ere(h). VERA: [hoh hoh hoh hoh HUANG: [huh(h) .h huh(h) VERA: [hoh-hoh-hoh-hoh HUANG: so they said uh where’s your husband(h)? I said thuh in thuh school=he got te↑st ehuh (h)-huh(h) VERA: ehuh huh
Notice that Huang seamlessly glides back and forth between the reporting world and the story world while adopting other personas. In lines 26–27, she quotes and becomes the obstetrician (you will have baby today or tomorrow so you have(h) to stay here) She also injects an indirect complaint voiced through the hospital staf, the institutional authority fgures, who inquire about Sun Pei’s whereabouts:
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Where’s your husband? (line 31). With her use of direct reported speech, we can almost hear the support and sympathy of the hospital staf, whose inquiry into the whereabouts of her husband might have been complaint-oriented on Huang’s behalf, i.e., “Where’s your husband? Why isn’t he here?” Tellers often use reported speech not only to perform a story but to authenticate the experience or the event, providing recipient with a kind of independent access to teller’s stance, which facilitates recipient’s afliation with it (Holt, 1996, 2000). Indeed, Huang’s use of direct reported speech enlivens and dramatizes her experience and stance, possibly magnifying her husband’s status of being missing-in-action all the more. In response to Huang’s emerging story, Vera’s responses are minimal (lines 12, 14, 17, 19, 23, 29, 33, 36, 41, 43, and 48). Her utterances, in the nature of continuers, acknowledgment tokens, and laugh particles, exhibit minimal engagement with the emerging troubles-telling. Vera aligns with storytelling as an interactional activity in terms of story-progression, but she does not ofer afliation nor empathy for Huang’s pain and difculties. Given the lack of support and afliation, Huang begins to draw her telling to a close as shown in the following extract. Extract 3a Husband’s Exam 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62
HUANG:
VERA: HUANG: HUANG: VERA: HUANG: VERA: HUANG: VERA: HUANG: VERA: HUANG: VERA: HUANG: VERA: HUANG:
he- he-he: (.) passedte and uh ((inhalation through nose)) then we-yih know that’s get bet- better because uh (0.2) now (y-) very busy didn’t he- have time to take care everything. mm hm. so: (I thought) that’s good thing(h)(h) (0.4) mm(h)h)h)h) ((fatigued, sigh-like quality)) so is- so Sun is fnished with school for thuh (.) summer? ((Sun is Huang’s husband)) mm I think so(h)h). goo:d. yeah because he:: .h he have to work (h)(h). uh huh. yeah .h and uh (0.7) [is he happy? [(but-) (h)(h)(h) (0.6) is Sun happy? (h)(h) SURE↑ why not(h)(h) hee hee hee hee [hee hee [huh huh (h) yeah .h we are so happy for the boy
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63 64 65 66
VERA: HUANG: VERA:
uh [huh. [for the- for the kid because yih know he- .h he- he looks so h-ealthy anda everything is going (0.2) going well. oh goo::d. ((talk continues))
In the previous segment, notice that after Huang completes her story (line 43), Vera responds with a minimal acknowledgment token mm hm (line 44). But three interactional tasks are typically relevant for recipient at story completion: (1) show understanding of story completion; (2) display appreciation and afliation with the telling; (3) demonstrate the story’s potential to generate subsequent talk or to lead to a second story (Ryave, 1978; Sacks, 1992; Stivers, 2008). Vera neither displays orientation to story completion nor to a larger project of afliation and empathy with Huang’s troubles and stance toward her excruciating events. In fact, when story appreciation and afliation do not appear on the sequential horizon, Huang delivers a topic-closing assessment herself (So I thought that’s good thing) (line 45), which begins to end the story. In response, Vera produces silence (line 46) to which Huang orients with a seemingly fatigued response cry mm (line 47). After the silence, Vera changes the topic (line 48), asking whether Huang’s husband Sun Pei is fnished with school for the summer. The ancillary question may be taken as a demonstrable sign of her declining or withholding of afliation and support for Huang’s troubles-telling. What is more, Vera adds another ancillary question, inquiring about whether Sun Pei is happy. But why would he not be happy? To that puzzling question, Huang seems shocked beyond words as displayed in the pregnant pause of six-tenths of a second (line 57). She seems taken aback (line 59) as she expresses dismay with a loud-pitched retort (Sure why not) in responding to the question about her husband’s happiness. Her retort, possibly built as a challenge (Koshik, 2003), seems to target the absurdity of Vera’s stepwise and of-topical shifts particularly since the questions demonstrate a concern for Sun Pei’s stance and afect at the expense of hers. Subsequent to that, Vera produces laugh particles (line 60), i.e., attempts to make light of the situation or to detoxify or to neutralize the possible faux pas. Furthermore, Huang seems to display orientation to the faux pas when she redirects the focus, changing or replacing he (Sun Pei) with we when she utters: Yeah we are so happy for the boy (line 61). So throughout Huang’s telling and at story completion, Vera displays orientation to alignment, i.e., story progressivity, as an interactional activity. Yet when it comes to matters of afliation, support, and empathy, she overlooks or ignores Huang’s troubles talk; she does not afliate with Huang’s pain and distress in anything that comes across as warm or heartfelt. Not only does Vera disafliate with Huang, but in asking questions about her husband, she seems to care more about him, which suggests that she may be aware that afliative and appreciative responses are warranted particularly as the story draws to a
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closing juncture. In L1 storytelling, alignment and afliation regularly come together with afliation being a preferred response and action (Lindström & Sorjonen, 2013; Stivers, 2008). But in the storytelling episode here, alignment and afliation are separate interactional matters, actions that are kept apart and distinct. As between Huang and Vera, who seems to be the more interactionally attuned? In this particular story, teller and recipient do not appear to occupy a shared mental space (Kramsch, 1986; Lee, 2006). Intersubjectivity seems fragile beneath a surface veneer, which may bespeak an observed faltering friendship. Also, if we were to entertain the possibility that Huang may bear some responsibility in how the story ends with a greater focus on her husband given that she focuses on him in her telling as well, one might counter that stance need not be stated explicitly but may be implied (Stivers, 2008). As Mandelbaum (1991/1992) commented: You may “fsh” for sympathy by hinting at troubles and allowing the other to draw out of you an account of the troubles. . . . A method for being insensitive or perhaps of not engaging in the work of friendship is to disattend another’s attempt to complain (p. 134).
Story 2: Huang Tells Jane Chronologically speaking, the next story, also spliced into segments, took place before the phone conversation between Vera and Huang discussed previously. This time, Huang talks about her labor and delivery in a conversation with Jane, a multilingual individual who speaks English as a frst language and Mandarin as an additional language. As will be seen, the next story is an assisted, recipient-driven telling, eminently a product of co-construction. Extract 2a Baby’s Face 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103
JANE:
so (.) how was your (.) um delivery. .h an:: actually (0.4) issa (0.2) it’s okay I thinkuh=you know but you know (.) ba-baby’s (.) head is uh down but duh the face is uh up(h). (0.4) HUANG: do you know? the fa[ce? JANE: [baby’s head was down but the face was forward. (0.2) HUANG: yeah the- the fa-fa-face is up so it’s very hard to .h JANE: push? HUANG:
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104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118
HUANG: JANE: HUANG: JANE: HUANG:
JANE: HUANG: JANE: HUANG:
yeah. didit hurt? (0.2) yyes er:: it’s ne:ver: (.) ((prosody refects doing terribleness)) you know it’sreal[ly p(h)a(h)in(h).(h)u(h) [(h) u (h) .h waw:: .h it’s- sun pei said it- (0.2) deep-↑ deep-↑ e- he said (.) just try .h try relax he: he told me but uh I forget you know jus’ it’s really (h) pain(h)i h)(h)u h) .h $So what did you do$? .h oh:: I don’t know (h)i h)(h)i(h).h I said oh::::: its uh hurt me (h)u(h) (h)i(h) e(h)uh haw::: .h .h yeah you know I’m:: .h I- you know I’ve:: I- I:: get in hospital issa mmay seventeenth.
Unlike the story between Huang and Vera, which is in frst position in that it is initiated by the teller, this next story is in second position in that Huang responds to Jane’s question (so how was your um delivery) (line 93), which afords Huang a prime opportunity to launch a story, which, as we will see, she exploits. Bear in mind that the mere fact that Jane asks Huang how her delivery went does not necessarily mean that a story was specifcally called for (Sacks, 1992). Notably, Huang designs her answer to Jane’s question as a story launch, a place for doing slow disclosure of her laborious ordeal. Huang’s story preface (lines 94–96) hones in on a complicating factor, something in the nature of an unexpected event. She begins her answer to Jane’s inquiry about the delivery by stating that the baby’s head was down but the face was up, which in medical parlance is back labor or a sunnyside up delivery. In doing answering of Jane’s question in this manner while simultaneously fnding her story launch, Huang immediately seizes upon a climactic element, something non-chronological in the sequence of story events. Her answer to Jane’s question is also pragmatically incomplete, projecting a specifc kind of story, i.e., troubles-telling (Jeferson & Lee, 1981; Jeferson, 2015). As story-recipient, Jane closely monitors and tracks the story throughout its development. Her ability to co-construct the story, which includes scafolded utterances, may be partially due to the fact that she has prior knowledge of back labor deliveries as exhibited in her other-correction (line 99), saying that the baby’s face was forward rather than up, and her targeted anticipatory completion (line 103) of the word push, trailed by her question, did it hurt? (line 105). Early on, then, we see Jane’s proactive role in inviting the story (line 93), in repairing and anticipating Huang’s utterances (lines 99 and 103), and in advancing the story trajectory by fxating on Huang’s pain (line 105). Jane manifests keen interest
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and active engagement. She assists and co-constructs the telling, which may be taken as a display of understanding and support for Huang’s dire circumstances. For Huang’s part, after she secures Jane’s attention, she restarts the story by ofering story background or context of the situation. That is, after she already produces a gripping story launch by saying that the baby’s head was down but the face was up, she then retreats or repositions the story to ofer a chronological prelude when she provides the date and location of the story event (lines 117–118). So at the immediate and rapid pace of utterance time (Sacks, 1992), she deftly moves backward in time in order to move forward, creating a generous swath of interactional opportunity and delivery space for doing slow disclosure, for explicating how it came about that the baby cometh forth sunny-side up. In proceeding from the non-chronological to the chronological, she sketches (and hatches) occasions of interactional consequence, specifcally of anticipation, drama, and intensity right from the start and restart as well. In conjunction with highlighting location or the hospital as an interactional resource, Huang weaves in place and person references, i.e., the hospital and its staf, while providing vivid scenes from her experience that reveal her accompanying stance to the unexpected ordeal as well. Extract 2b Water Bag 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150 151 152 153 154 155 156
HUANG: JANE: HUANG: JANE: HUANG: JANE:
E:
HUANG: JANE: HUANG:
JANE: HUANG:
.h andda then doctor said uh yourb (.) your (.) water bag is break(h). it did break? mm hm. [uh huh [yeah and then doctor said where is your husband(h)(h)? (H)E(H) (h)e h) [(h)e(h) [(h)i(h) (h)i h) .h I said the- .h he:: .h he:: he:: he= =he’s at school? yeah he’s school (.) the- take a test (hu(h)(h)i(h) .h I- I- I- I said uh the test will be done about duh:: one hour or two(.) two hour .h then:: an:: doctor said uh you:: you have to: you know (0.2) stay here (h)(0.2) don’t (.) you know w-ill will have baby (.) today or tomorrow. (h)ih) [(h)i(h) (h)i(h) [e h)u(h (h) aw: you know a liddle bit(.)scare me(h)(h).
In the previous segment, notice that Huang transitions between the reporting world and the story world, adopting four personas: Narrator, protagonist,
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physician, and husband Sun Pei. For example, she becomes the obstetrician at lines 138–139 (your water bag is break) and at lines 143–144 (where is your husband?). Also in the next segment, we continue to hear from the hospital staf. Extract 2c Husband’s Exam 156 HUANG: aw: you know a liddle bit(.)scare me(h)(h). 157 JANE: an’ so then what? 158 HUANG: yeah because uh you know I- I- 0.3) you know I don’t know 159 issa they- they- water bags(.)uh break, 160 JANE: [uh huh, 161 HUANG: [an’ you know .h so doctor said uh mm (0.2) uh then- I 162 call Sun Pei(0.2) after:: fve clock .h he: he-= 163 JANE: =he was at home? 164 HUANG: n-no:: at school 165 JANE: uh[huh 166 HUANG: [he pa-pa: : pa- pass his exam .h theen then the (.) 167 à doctor said uh your wife in the hospital in the labor= he said 168 à WHA:::T? in la[bor 169 JANE: [ehh-hih 170 HUANG: (h)i(h) .h in labor? .h uh yeah doctor said yeah: 171 but uh don’t hurry just come. (h)u h)(h)i(h) In line 167, we hear the obstetrician speaking to Huang’s husband (your wife in the hospital in the labor. Subsequent to that, Huang mimics her husband’s utter surprise (what? in labor) at line 168. Also note that in contrast with the earlier Extract 2a in which we hear the cry of the protagonist saying Oh its uh hurt me (lines 114–115) in a high-pitched voice in answering Jane’s question So what did you do? (line 113), later (Extract 2c) Huang states her stance bluntly and straightforwardly: Aw you know a liddle bit scare me (line 156). Like “body quotes” (Streeck, 2002, p. 591), teller’s skillful deployment of direct reported speech stirs the story pot with a rich and savory array of “reanimated words and reanimated actions that will keep her audience engrossed” (Streeck, 2002, p. 591). Thus, there is no question that Huang is able to work her story so that the impact of her unexpected sufered experience reverberates loud and clear not only in her distinct voice but in a medley from others that reinforces the trauma and the drama. Now let us consider Jane as the story-recipient. She assists and scafolds Huang’s telling by asking questions, initiating repairs, and flling out Huang’s anticipatory completions and word searches. For instance, in the following excerpt, notice that in response to Huang’s word search (line 193), Jane provides the pharmaceutical term pitocin (line 194).
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Extract 2e Pitocin 191 192 193 194 195 196 197
HUANG:
à JANE: à HUANG: JANE: HUANG:
so they::(0.2) they: you know when I got uh hospital mean .h en:: not not eh mm very hard contraction so (.) eh doctor give(.) tch give= =pitocin? tch mm hm .h so that that’s [work [an’ it hurt bad huh? hhh:: it’s really (.) WAW:::
In another word search, however, Jane’s eagerness to assist almost disaligns and runs the risk of leading Huang astray. But Huang manages to do resumption of the story, maintaining her story trajectory. Extract 2f Conficting Schedules 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147
HUANG: JANE: HUANG: JANE: HUANG: JANE: HUANG: JANE: HUANG: JANE: HUANG:
JANE: HUANG: JANE: HUANG: JANE: HUANG: JANE: HUANG:
=that’s a due day(h)i h) [(h)i(h) [an’ so $whatdid$ (.) sun pei do::?$ about his [test?$ [you know yeah .h an- he- he was in:: (0.2) in:: school uh huh, his teskid- uh start: at two: (0.2) two clock (h) uh huh, anda I ha- I got a appointment ment is uh two:: (0.2) uh forty fve [.h [uh huh, so (.) I: I went to hos- hospital (0.2) anddum I- I found uh some(.) wa-water come out(h). uh huh. so I’m:: I told my doctor he said dum he wantid(.) tch get some samples .h eh- sam-samples to make sure (.) e-eef the(.) wa wa-water bag break(h). right, .h andda then doctor said uh yourb (.) your (.) water bag is break(h). it did break? mm hm. [uh huh [yeah and then doctor said where is your husband(h)(h)? E: (H)E(H) (h)e h) [(h)e(h) [(h)i(h) (h)i h) .h I said the- .h
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148 149 150 151 152 153 154
he:: .h he:: he:: he= =he’s at school? HUANG: yeah he’s school (.) the- take a test (hu(h)(h)i(h) .h I- I- I- I said uh the test will be done about duh:: one hour or two(.) two hour .h then:: an:: doctor said uh you: :you have to: you know (0.2) stay here (h) (0.2) don’t (.) you know w-ill will have baby (.) today or tomorrow. (h)ih) JANE:
In the previous extract, Jane asks Huang what Sun Pei did about his doctoral examination (lines 122–123). Huang registers the question but does not answer it in the next turn (line 124). She maintains her story trajectory, enfolding the answer to Jane’s question into the ongoing sequence of story events. Jane does not get the answer to her question until many lines later when Huang says, he’s school the take a test (line 150). That is, despite story-recipient’s scafolding and co-construction of the story, the teller remains in the driver’s seat with the story’s line of development overriding sequential progressivity. Another instance of Jane’s over-assistance or zealousness in tracking of the story events is found in lines 162–164. Extract 2g Labor 159 160 161 162 163 164 165 166
HUANG:
à JANE: à HUANG: à JANE: à HUANG: à
[an’ you know .h so doctor said uh mm (0.2) uh then- I call sun pei (0.2) after:: fve clock .h he: he-= =he was at home? n-no:: at school. uh[huh. [he pa-pa: : pa- pass his exam .h theen then the (.) doctor said uh “your wife in the hospital in the labor=” he said WHA:::T? in labor
Huang does a word search at the repeated, stretched and cut-of items he (line 160). In assisting and ofering a solution to the search, Jane profers, he was at home? (line 161). Huang answers Jane in the negative and resumes the story’s progressivity by reattaching the he that was at the end of line 160 to line 164 (he pa pa pa pass his exam theen then the). She continues with the story trajectory after the brief interruption by saying that her husband passed his examination, which was, more likely, the object of her search at line 160. Again, despite Jane’s eagerness to scafold or to assist in flling in the blank to a word search, Huang remains the driver of her story in her (re)enactment of the unfolding dramatic events. As the story continues, Huang’s adeptness in remaining in the driver’s seat is crystallized in the next segment in which Jane learns that the doctor tried multiple turns to rotate the baby but without success.
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Extract 2h Rotating Baby 196 197 198 199 200 201 202 204 205 206 208 209 210 211 212 213 214 215 216 217 218 219 220 221 222 223 224 225 226 227 228 229 230 231 232 233 234 235
JANE: HUANG: JANE: HUANG: JANE: HUANG: JANE: HUANG: HUANG: JANE: HUANG: JANE: HUANG: JANE: HUANG: JANE: HUANG: JANE: HUANG:
JANE: HUANG: JANE: HUANG: JANE: HUANG: JANE:
e (h)u (h) [(h)i h)i(h) it’s [terrible right? .h waw I don’t know how can (.) do it you know just ehewhew it’s uh hurt me .(h)then(h)i(h) (h) oh h(h)uang (h)zhou (h). yeah:: but the- theen the doc- you know because thee baby face is up(h) so doctor try turn the face (.)down. uh huh, just (.) turn turn you know (.) try many times but it doesn’t work(h)h). really? uh huh. (0.2) so he reached up inside you? (0.4) yeah. an’ tried to turn the ba[by? [mm hm. (0.2) turned it (.) an’ the baby didn’t turn? mm hm. (0.2) wo:::w.↓ so (.) I push uh about uh three .h three an’ a half hour. h (H)HAW::: huang zhou ((surprised tone)) it’s not (h) yeah it’s a long time so .h (I-) so:: doctor said uh mm let’s try ifu you know ifu (.) baby can come out but it’s really tch .h (0.2) really you know it’s really work(h)i(h) (h)u(h). (h)aw h)aw and: the baby:: weight about tuh (eh) baby weight is eight point three pound(h). wo::w↑ it’s big baby(h)h). (0.2) $wo::w↑ $huang zhou↑$ .h yeah::: [so [$I wanna come see(h)$$↑
In the previous extract, consider the frst saying of so (line 210), its later repeat in turn-initial position (line 221), and the talk sandwiched in between. What
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comes between the frst saying of so at line 210 and a second saying of it at line 221 (Wong, 2000a) are three other-initiations of repair by Jane at lines 211, 214, and 216. The repair initiations build to a climax (a climax in the labor and delivery as well): Line 211, he reached up inside you; line 214, an’ tried to turn the baby; line 217, turned it an’ the baby didn’t turn?. Those repair-initiations are striking on two accounts: (1) they are not immediately adjacent to their respective trouble sources, which are situated in the earlier lines 202–203, and 205–206; (2) they are delayed from next turn position (Scheglof et al., 1977; Scheglof, 2000; Wong, 2000b). But these repair-initiations difer from those reported in Wong (2000b), which display delayed understanding. Here, Jane’s three repair initiations possibly scafold or break down Huang’s trouble source into smaller, more manageable bites particularly for an individual who is not entirely profcient in the English language. That is, in a co-operative manner, the recipient’s repairinitiations not only reformulate the trouble source utterance but redramatize it, perhaps, on the teller’s behalf. Put another way, what Jane now hears as the real climax or upshot of the story, as compared with the earlier climax, which she heard at the story beginning (lines 95–96), bears highlighting and repeating. The set of consecutive repair-initiations recall children’s repetition or build-ups (Sacks, 1992), but here they may refect a culminating, reenacted, or even exaggerated afliative stance, done as a way of demonstrating story appreciation particularly as the telling is headed toward closure at this juncture in the telling-so-far. From Story 2, we see that Huang is desperate to tell her story particularly since she labored well over twenty-four hours and the worst part was when the obstetrician tried multiple times to rotate the baby. If anything, that is the centerpiece of her story, which readily explains the need for a supportive and sympathetic friend. Fortunately, Jane gets it (as compared with Vera, who did not). Not shown in the extracts but as the story moves toward closure, Huang and Jane “boundary of” (Jeferson, 1988, p. 437), making arrangements to get together so that Jane can meet the newborn. They may have moved a step or two closer in their friendship given the kind of detailing that Huang ofers in deliverance. (It’s a girl, by the way.)
Discussion and Conclusion Arguably, Huang is an interactionally competent, lively, and engaging storyteller. In the conversation with Jane, she knows how to begin and how to end her story and how to maintain the story’s development and progressivity throughout the numerous extended turns, while building and rebuilding climax, drama, and stance. Among the resources that she employs are: story preface, context of the situation, and direct reported speech, along with a cast of characters (one of whom gives intermittent shrieks of pain). We can see that when she does not elaborate on her story with Vera, it was not because she did not have the language nor the interactional resources at her command. Recall that the conversation between
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Jane and Huang took place before the one between Huang and Vera, so it was not that Huang’s story with Jane refected a more polished version after an initial run-through with Vera. As a multilingual individual, doing recipient-design was well within Huang’s capabilities and reach (Scheglof, 2006). The kind of fnesse and adaptability that a teller demonstrates in doing storytelling is a local gauge or assessment measure, if you will, of just how interactionally competent a teller can be with the right co-participant and the right sequential plays and measures in place (Wong & Waring, 2021). Put another way, participants in interaction are the frst analysts on the social scene (Macbeth, 2011), and their work both instructs and is instructive of how interaction takes place (Garfnkel, 1967, 2002). By juxtaposing two same but diferent stories, we see that L2 interactional competence is a variable phenomenon, at least, with respect to stories told to diferent recipients at the same point in time. Thus, cross-sectional data go hand-in-hand with longitudinal data that track the L2 user’s development of interactional competence over specifed time periods. Storytelling difers from a linear array of “story grammar” elements, e.g., who, what, when, why, and how, which is what learners may be exposed to in classrooms but be more ftting of written narratives or of retellings of storybooks, e.g., in the form of directed reading assessments (DRAs), which teachers use to assess learners’ reading comprehension (Beaver & Carter, 2019). In executing a DRA, a teacher is given instructions to refrain from helping learners retell stories or to refrain from asking questions during the learner’s retelling since providing help would incur a decrease in the learner’s score. But that is not how real stories get occasioned and constructed outside the classroom. Learners need to be able to tell locally situated and spontaneous stories like the ones displayed in this chapter. (Also see Chapter 3.) A challenge for language educators is how to (re)shape a language curriculum so that stories emerge spontaneously and authentically. This kind of re-envisioning of the classroom might bring about new kinds of learning opportunities, which may be key to developing L2 interactional competence in storytelling. But the classroom is more restrictive than what occurs outside its walls in terms of richness, nuance, contingencies, possibilities, and occasions for interaction. One suggestion might be for teachers to use open-ended discussion questions in group work activities (see Chapter 8), which would provide ripe occasions for stories from students’ personal experience. A teacher might ask students, “What is a fun fact about yourself?” A question like that provides an opportunity for a story to arise and for peers to ask questions in wanting to fnd out more. That said, no amount of pre-planning can replace what must happen when parties meet head on in particular moments of interaction. If we only had the story between Huang and Vera, we might not have realized just how interactionally competent Huang can be as a user of a language that is not her dominant one. Imagine if a classroom teacher were to evaluate Huang’s language competence based on a single story like the one she recounted with
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Vera. The classroom teacher might come away with an impression that Huang is not capable of producing longer, extensive turns in doing story-telling. This point is underscored given that some studies in second language acquisition operate, or have done so in the past, from a defcit model, looking at what, where, and how a language learner is a defective communicator (Firth & Wagner, 2007). In the data presented in this chapter, the two stories by the same L2 user lead to two diferent outcomes and bespeak two starkly contrasting friendships. Arguably, the friendship between Huang and Jane is deeper and more genuine than the one between Huang and Vera. Returning to Dan Gottlieb’s question of “what does a micro-moment of creation and connection look like,” I have put on the delivery table two micro-moments of creation, procreation, connection, and disconnection. I have examined how parties achieve and do friendship when engaged in storytelling in the midst of catching up with each other’s lives. If we are to mimic a real world with storied lives for multilingual learners as well, we might begin by appreciating, if we have not done so already, that at the heart of storytelling is co-construction with recipient-design on an equal plane as well. A story, long or short, is a sequentially occasioned object, tailored for the one to whom it is addressed. A story is neither pre-packaged nor just waiting for delivery even in the case of same-day deliveries that arrive sunny-side up. Our stories are marinated, if not re-marinated, in local contexts that include sequential structures and strictures that inform social interaction. That provides us with a room with a view (from the hospital), a sequential perch from which to steady our gaze in frst understanding and then appreciating how friendships fower cross-sectionally as well longitudinally and how micro-moments of multilingual creation and connection have just as much potential to ofer rich and rewarding opportunities for friendship and growth, even self-growth, if we so allow. We have caught a glimpse of how participants generate and regenerate the closeness or distance between them in the midst of telling stories in catching up with each other’s news.
Note 1 The work of this chapter was frst presented in 2013 at the Third Annual Meeting of The Language and Social Interaction Working Group (LANSI), Teachers College, Columbia University. I am grateful to Hansun Waring for the opportunity to initially present the data at LANSI data sessions. Subsequent revised drafts of this paper were presented at the International Conference on Conversation Analysis at University of California, Los Angeles (2014), The International Pragmatics Association conference (Antwerp, Belgium, 2015), and The International Institute for Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis conference (Kolding, Denmark, 2015). The chapter was also delivered as an invited talk at Waikato Institute for Technology (Wintec), Centre for Languages (Hamilton, New Zealand, 2018). A special thanks is extended to Jonathon Ryan for the invitation to serve as Research Fellow at Wintec. I am grateful for comments received from those who heard earlier versions of this chapter at the conference venues, but all remaining errors are mine.
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References Barraja-Rohan, A.-M. (2015). “I told you”: Storytelling development of a Japanese learning English as a second language. In T. Cadierno & S. W. Eskildsen (Eds.), Usage-based perspectives on second language learning (pp. 271–304). Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. Beaver, J., & Carter, M. (2019). Directed reading assessment (3rd ed.). New York: Pearson Education. Drew, P., & Chilton, K. (2000). Calling just to keep in touch: Regular and habitualised telephone calls as an environment for small talk. In J. Coupland (Ed.), Small talk (pp. 137–162). Harlow, UK: Pearson Education. Firth, A., & Wagner, J. (2007). Second/foreign language as a social accomplishment: Elaboration on a reconceptualized SLA. Modern Language Journal, 9, 798–817. Garfnkel, H. (1967). Studies in ethnomethodology. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Garfnkel, H. (2002). Ethnomethodology’s program: Working out Durkheim’s aphorism. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefeld. Greenhalgh, E., & Wilkinson, R. Storytelling in a meaning- and- fuency task in the second language classroom. Hellermann, J. (2008). Social actions for classroom language learning. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. N A.W. Ra. Holt, E. (1996). Reporting on talk: The use of direct reported speech in conversation. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 29(3), 219–245. Holt, E. (2000). Reporting and reacting: Concurrent responses to reported speech. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 33(4), 425–454. Ishida, M. (2011). Engaging in another person’s telling as recipient in L2 Japanese: Development of interactional competence during one-year study abroad. In G. Pallotti & J. Wagner (Eds.), L2 learning as social practice: Conversation-analytic perspectives (pp. 45–85). Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii, National Foreign Language Resource Center. Jeferson, G. (1978). Sequential aspects of storytelling in conversation. In J. Schenkein (Ed.), Studies in the organization of conversational interaction (pp. 219–248). New York: Academic Press. Jeferson, G. (1988). On the sequential organization of troubles-talk in ordinary conversation. Social Problems, 35(4), 418–441. Jeferson, G. (2004). Glossary of transcript symbols with an introduction. In G. Lerner (Ed.), Conversation analysis: Studies from the frst generation (pp. 13–31). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Jeferson, G. (2015). In P. Drew, J. Heritage, G. Lerner, & A. Pomerantz (Eds.), Talking about troubles in conversation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jeferson, G., & Lee, J. R. E. (1981). The rejection of advice: Managing the problematic convergence of a “troubles-telling” and a “service encounter”. Journal of Pragmatics, 5, 399–422. Koshik, I. (2003). Wh-questions as challenges. Discourse Studies, 5(1), 51–77. Kramsch, C. (1986). From language profciency to interactional competence. The Modern Language Journal, 70, 366–372. Lee, Y.-A., & Hellermann, J. (2014). Tracing developmental changes through conversation analysis: Cross-sectional and longitudinal analysis. TESOL Quarterly, 48(4), 763–788. Lee, Y. (2006). Towards a respecifcation of communicative competence: Condition of L2 instruction or its objective? Applied Linguistics, 27, 349–376.
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Lindström, A., & Sorjonen, M. (2013). Alignment and afliation. In J. Sidnell & T. Stivers (Eds.), The conversation analysis handbook (pp. 350–369). Malden: Wiley-Blackwell. Macbeth, D. (2011). Understanding as an instructional matter. Journal of Pragmatics, 43, 438–451. Mandelbaum, J. (1992). Conversational non-cooperation: An exploration of disattended complaints. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 25, 97–138. Mandelbaum, J. (2013). Storytelling in conversation. In J. Sidnell & T. Stivers (Eds.), The handbook of conversation analysis (pp. 492–508). Malden: Wiley-Blackwell. Ochs, E., & Capps, L. (2001). Living narrative: Creating lives in everyday storytelling. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Pekarek Doehler, S., & Berger, B. (2018). L2 interactional competence as increased ability for context-sensitive conduct: A longitudinal study of story-openings. Applied Linguistics, 39(4), 555–578. Ryave, A. L. (1978). On the achievement of a series of stories. In J. Schenkein (Ed.), Studies in the organization of conversational interaction (pp. 113–132). New York: Academic Press. Sacks, H. (1974). An analysis of the course of a joke’s telling in conversation. In R. Bauman & J. Sherzer (Eds.), Explorations in the ethnography of speaking (pp. 337–353). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sacks, H. (1992). Lectures in conversation (Vols. 1 & 2). Malden: Wiley-Blackwell. Sacks, H., Scheglof, E. A., & Jeferson, G. (1974). A simplest systematics for the organization of turn-taking for conversation. Language, 50(4), 696–735. Scheglof, E. A. (1986). The routine as achievement. Human Studies, 9, 111–151. Scheglof, E. A. (1997). “Narrative analysis” thirty years later. Journal of Narrative and Life History, 7(1–4), 97–106. Scheglof, E. A. (2000). When “others” initiate repair. Applied Linguistics, 21(2), 205–243. Scheglof, E. A. (2006). Interaction: The infrastructure for social institutions, the natural ecological niche for language, and the arena in which culture is enacted. In N. J. Enfeld & S. C. Levinson (Eds.), Roots of human sociality: Culture, cognition and interaction (pp. 70–96). Oxford: Berg. Scheglof, E. A. (2007). Sequence organization in interaction: A primer in conversation analysis (Vol. 1). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Scheglof, E. A., & Sacks, H. (1973). Opening up closings. Semiotica, 8(4), 289–327. Scheglof, E. A., Sacks, H., & Jeferson, G. (1977). The preference for self-correction in the organization of repair in conversation. Language, 53(2), 361–382. Stivers, T. (2008). Stance, alignment and afliation during storytelling: When nodding is a token of afliation. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 41(1), 31–57. Streeck, J. (2002). Grammars, words, and embodied meanings: On the uses and evolution of so and like. Journal of Communication, 52(3), 581–596. Tabensky, A. (2008). Non-verbal resources and storytelling in second language classroom interaction. Journal of Applied Linguistics, 5(3), 321–348. Wong, J. (2000a). Repetition in conversation. A look at “frst and second sayings”. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 33(4), 407–424. Wong, J. (2000b). Delayed next turn repair initiation. Applied Linguistics, 21(2), 244–267. Wong, J. (this volume). Our storied lives: Doing and fnding friendship II. Wong, J., & Waring, H. Z. (2021). Conversation analysis and second language pedagogy: A guide for ESL/EFL teachers (2nd ed.). New York: Routledge.
3 OUR STORIED LIVES Doing and Finding Friendship II1 Jean Wong
Introduction In Chapter 2, I mentioned that several years ago Dr. Dan Gottlieb, a psychologist and former host of the National Public Radio program called Voices in the Family, interviewed Dr. Barbara Frederickson of the University of North Carolina in which their topic of discussion was love from a scientifc perspective or Love 2.0. In that program, Dr. Frederickson emphasized that “micro-moments of creation and connection” are key to our development of long-lasting and deep social relationships. At one point, Dr. Gottlieb asked, “What does a micromoment of creation and connection look like?” In Part I of this two-part sequel, I stated that my knee-jerk reaction was to call into the program and exclaim, “You want to see a micro-moment of creation and connection? I’ll show you one!” In this chapter, I showcase yet another micro-moment from multilingual interaction, this time between two L2 users, one of whom is highly profcient in English as an additional language (EAL). The single-case analysis showcased here casts a shadow or a diferent light on the L2 interactional competence of the same speaker who was a focal point in the previous chapter. Whereas emphasis in the previous chapter was placed on how the L2 user (Huang) tells two same but diferent stories, here the emphasis resides in how she responds to a story. Findings pull into view, again, that L2 interactional competence is to be regarded, more so than it has been in the past, as a variable phenomenon. Within the domain of storytelling, for instance, an L2 user can be more competent in one area (e.g., telling) than she is in another (e.g., responding). Taken together, the two-part sequel ofers complementary but also competing “narratives” of the L2 user’s interactional competence when it comes to storytelling.
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Background When one party proposes to tell a story and another party accepts, two categories become relevant for co-participants: Storyteller and story-recipient (Sacks, 1992). Interactional tasks for tellers include developing the resources or story parts such as: preface or beginning, climax, and completion – and all that comes betwixt and between (Goodwin, 1984, 1986; Jeferson, 1978; Sacks, 1992). On the fip side of the coin from story-recipients’ perspective, the set of interactional tasks are diferent and interlocking, beginning with accepting the proposed story, i.e., allowing the story to launch, which yields “long stretches of talk” (Scheglof, 1990, p. 53) or “big packages” (Sacks, 1992, v2, p. 354). Simply put, coparticipants respond to a proposed story in active ways; it is not a passive enterprise, by any means, as terms such as listening, listening behavior, or listening skills, which are typically used in language teaching, may conjure up. Listening and responding to occasioned stories (Sacks, 1992) in life outside the classroom entails, among its tasks, orienting to and understanding the story’s beginning, its climax, and its completion, among other possible stopping points. Along this path, it is critical to keep front and center that doing storytelling is a project because stories need not occur in a conversation even among friends. As noted in Chapter 2, having a license to recount a story does not guarantee that teller gets an opportunity to do so. Even if the teller does obtain the opportunity, the story may not succeed in the way the teller anticipates because the recipient can block the telling from emerging as in complaint sequences (Mandelbaum, 1991/1992). In responding to a story, the recipient produces continuers, acknowledgment tokens, and/or agreement tokens, i.e., response tokens, which yield the foor to the teller and display alignment with storytelling as a next activity (Mandelbaum, 2013; Sacks, 1992; Sacks et al., 1974; Stivers, 2008). Alignment responses span a continuum from passive to active ones; for instance, head nodding and single-word utterances (e.g., continuers, acknowledgment tokens) occupy the passive end, while asking a question or making a comment about the story or ofering an assessment lie on the (more) active end (Couper-Kuhlen & Selting, 2018; Mandelbaum, 2013). The recipient also typically demonstrates afliation with the teller’s stance toward the story or toward the story events, typically done as a preferred response and action, e.g., at story completion (Lindstrom & Sorjonen, 2013; Mandelbaum, 2013; Sacks, 1987, 1992; Stiver, 2008). Engaging in storytelling implicates praxeological work for participants, i.e., doing understanding (Macbeth, 2011; Sacks, 1992). As Sacks (1992) indicated, understanding is a phenomenon, and the story completion point is an “understanding position” (Sacks, 1992, v2, p. 426), a place in which the recipient demonstrates appreciation of the story and an understanding that the story is fnished. Thus, “the story is a puzzle, the understanding is an explanation” (Sacks, 1992, v2, p. 423). If the recipient fails to understand that the story is fnished
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or fails to understand the story’s action, which does happen, the teller can make attempts to address the failed understanding (Jeferson, 1978; Sacks, 1992). Regarding studies of storytelling that involve multilingual interaction, work is steadily increasing but relatively sparse. Prior L2 literature hones in on the telling of stories, not on responding to them, although, of course, we cannot discuss storytelling and leave out story recipiency entirely (e.g., Barraja-Rohan, 2015; Hellermann, 2008; Pekarek Doehler & Berger, 2018). Some of the L2 studies rely on data gathered from institutional talk, while others rely on ordinary conversation. Moreover, scholars have adopted a longitudinal approach, working with L2 English (Hellermann, 2008; Lee & Hellermann, 2014), L2 Japanese (Ishida, 2011), and L2 French (Pekarek Doehler & Berger, 2018; Tabensky, 2008). Findings reveal that storytelling is an integral component of L2 interactional competence, which develops over time. For instance, novice speakers of English as a second language are able to tell stories though they do not include story openings (Hellermann, 2008), while intermediate level learners do include story prefaces in their stories (Lee & Hellermann, 2014). Also, utterances such as continuers, acknowledgment tokens, or the like appear in earlier stages, while assessment utterances, commentaries, and second stories show up in in later stages, indicative of learners’ increasing awareness of the practices and resources deployed in doing interaction (Barraja-Rohan, 2015; Hellermann, 2008; Pekarek Doehler & Berger, 2018). (See Chapter 1, for an overview of storytelling practices and multilingual storytelling.)
Data The data extract to be discussed originates from a larger corpus of fourteen hours of phone conversations recorded in the late 1980s in a city on the West Coast. The recordings were of twelve multilingual dyads (L1-L1 or L2-L2). Almost all of the conversations took place between friends who called each other at home, but a few conversations involved one party calling an institution (school or business). With the exception of one phone call, which is the data extract investigated in this study, one member of the dyad is an L1 speaker of English while the other is an L2 speaker of the same. In the single-case analysis showcased momentarily, the parties speak English as a lingua franca, one originally from China (L1/Mandarin) and the other originally from Switzerland (L1/Swiss-German). The extract is six and a half minutes into an eight-minute conversation in which Sally returns a phone call to Huang, who had phoned earlier but only reached her husband.
Analysis In the opening of the phone call, Sally initiates a “how are you” inquiry, asking Huang how she is faring as a new mother with her newborn (see Chapter 2, for the first part of the two-part sequel). In answering Sally’s question,
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Huang tells a story about her infant’s erratic feeding schedule. She is anxietyridden, worrying that the infant is sleeping too much (fve hours) during the night. Her story is recognizably produced as a troubles-telling as recipient Sally ofers warmth, encouragement, and advice (Jeferson, 1984). Sally, a seasoned mother well-qualifed for the job of addressing Huang’s worries given that her ofspring are now adults, also appends a second story with an “achieved similarity” (Sacks, 1992, v2, p. 256) with Huang’s frst story when she discusses her situation as a neophyte dealing with her frstborn in an earlier era in Switzerland when newborns were not fed at all during the night and slept for eight hours. She tells Huang that if babies cried during the night, they were allowed to do so, as mothers got their much-needed rest and recovery. In telling Huang how fortunate she is that her newborn is learning to sleep through the night, Sally’s second story (Ryave, 1978) lends further support and encouragement, i.e., afliation, with Huang’s plight. Indeed, it is Huang who needs to rest at ease, i.e., not the baby, who is doing fne. Subsequent to these frst and second stories, Sally maintains warmth, enthusiasm, and afliation, e.g., inquiring about when Huang’s father and sister will visit, and whether Huang has taken numerous photograph. Huang is not only talkative but ebullient. As these stories and the topic of the newborn wind down and close, Sally ofers the utterance shown at line 01 below. Extract 1 Doctor’s Visit 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20
SALLY: HUANG: SALLY: HUANG: SALLY: HUANG: SALLY: HUANG: SALLY: HUANG: SALLY: HUANG: SALLY: HUANG: SALLY: HUANG:
o::kay very good I’m ve::ry happy I’m- I’m glad you call me >so how about< you(h), o::h I’m f::ne= =uh huh,= =I went to the doctor tuhday=[an they-said-everything seems fne. [uh ↑huh oh really? next week probably the radiation will start=I have to::= =uh huh. because its ca:ncer (.) they want to do:: radiation for fve weeks. oh really(h)? yeah. right. but= =but- b(h)ut everything going we::ll now(h), (0.2) hm? I mean (0.2) but everything is izza get- get better an duh(h) well I fee::l much ↑better= =oh: really?=
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21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 58 59
SALLY: HUANG: SALLY: HUANG: SALLY: HUANG: SALLY: HUANG: SALLY: HUANG: SALLY: HUANG: SALLY: HUANG: SALLY: HUANG: SALLY: HUANG: SALLY: HUANG: SALLY: HUANG: SALLY: HUANG: SALLY: HUANG: SALLY: HUANG: SALLY: HUANG: SALLY: HUANG:
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=you know my- I have a big incision and but that is healing we::ll and I have much more strength. mm hm, and my: my blood was very bad. yeah [(°I understand°) [( ) all from >the hospital< and toda::y a blood test was ta::ken and my blood is much better.= =oh really? so:: um= =oh that’s good= and every day I walk for several mi:les= =mm hm, a::nd you know I’m u::p a large part of the da:y= =mm hm, an I just fee::l much stronger= =°okay°= =so:: I- everythi:ng you know- I’m not happy to have can(h)cer(h) but huh. =(mm)= =everythi:ng (0.2)you know is as good as it can be. uh huh. that’s goo:d.= =so I- no::w I don’t kno:w some people get sick from the radiation.= =mm hm. an:d I just hafto wai:t. (h)hih (h)huh. you know what (.)[that is [I see well- it’s just one of those things=but anyway I- I feel okay= mm hm that’s good. ↑o:kay good talkin’ to you an’ I hope everything keeps (.) going(.) well. yeah okay. okay? tha::nk you. good luck=bye bye. bye bye.
At line 01, Sally ofers a topic-closing assessment (okay very good) and a solicitude (I’m very happy), responses and actions that possibly gear up for closing the conversation (Button, 1990). Returning to a prior topic from the opening is one method by which participants initiate preclosing of the interaction (Button,
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1990). In response, Huang aligns with the action with a reciprocal preclosing (I’m- I’m glad that you called me). Expressions of appreciation and gratitude are among members’ methods in shifting toward closings (Button, 1990, 1991). That said, when a second “how are you” exchange is not done after a frst one has been, another place for its occurrence is at the preclosing. Interestingly, a reciprocal “how are you” exchange emerges when Huang adds how about you? (line 02). As will be seen later, this later sequential moment generates a place and a space for a last topic (Scheglof, 2007) when Sally opens up closings (Scheglof & Sacks, 1973). In answering how about you (line 02), Sally produces a neutral non-expansive response, oh I’m fne (Sacks, 1975), but there is something about its tone and stretched contours that seem to prefgure something else, perhaps, a hint of troubles ahead (Jeferson, 2015). In reply, Huang produces a continuer (line 04), i.e., a minimal response. Immediately after that, Sally mentions that she had a doctor’s appointment but that everything seems fne (lines 05–06). But proceeding from an exchange of solicitude and appreciation with idiomatic expressions, i.e., what anyone can produce and recognizably produce in a preclosing environment, to a sudden mention of a doctor’s visit that took place tuhday, indeed, raises an eyebrow or a red fag. The incongruity of the “nextness” of lines 01–08 is gradually unleashed or undone (Button, 1990; Sacks, 1987), as we see in the ensuing conversation. Sally delivers bad news: Next week probably the radiation will start (lines 08–09). After she delivers it, she produces a word search (I have to) in the same turn. She may have been on the verge of self-repairing the next turn-constructionalunit to something along the lines of “I have to have radiation next week” and with the stretched turn-fnal element (to) ofering Huang a place to chime in, but she does not do so. Instead, Huang produces a continuer that passes up the opportunity to say more (Scheglof, 1982). That is, in immediate juxtaposition to Sally’s mention of the need for and urgency of radiation next week, Huang’s response is a mere uh huh. While Huang’s steady minimal responses (e.g., lines 07 and 09) display alignment in allowing the story to progress, another alternative is for the recipient to deliver or say aloud frst the bad news even though the teller knows it frst (Scheglof, 1988a). In other words, in expanding on the topic of her doctor’s visit, Sally already mentioned the need for radiation next week (line 08). Conceivably, this frst mention might have been produced in an expectation that Huang would ask Sally about – or seek confrmation – that she has cancer, which, arguably, is the most difcult piece of Sally’s bad news delivery. A guess, or even a saying of the word “cancer” by Huang, i.e., an ofer being done and preferred over a request (Scheglof, 2007), would lighten Sally’s load in not having to deliver all of the bad news herself. Such an “ofer” from Huang would indicate close monitoring (Scheglof & Sacks, 1973) or proper tracking of Sally’s emerging talk as a troubles-telling (Jeferson, 2015). However, based on Huang’s minimal responses, it is unclear whether or how she understands Sally’s telling-so-far.
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Notably, at line 10, it should be clear where the story is headed. Sally states, it’s cancer (line 10). In conjunction, notice as well that she did not say “I have cancer,” which may require a deeper sense of ownership, something with which she may still need to reckon. As for recognitional resources, in saying it’s cancer, she produces a reference to an object (it) rather than to a person, i.e., “I” as in “I have cancer.” Although this is conjecture, her lack of ownership of the cancer might be found in that she was about to say “I have to have radiation” (line 08), but she aborts the ongoing turn-constructional unit in favor of saying, they want to do radiation, i.e., with a pronoun shift from I to they doing distancing iconically as well. Moreover, Sally calls and informs Huang of the bad news on the same day of her doctor’s visit, and that bespeaks something of the comfort level and of the intimacy with which she regards Huang as a friend, given the grave circumstances. Strikingly, after Sally delivers the bad news that she has cancer and needs radiation treatment, Huang produces only a news receipt oh really (line 12). She does not provide any supportive nor comforting remarks. Subsequent to that, Sally’s response to Huang’s news receipt is yeah. right. but (line 13). In that utterance, the turn-fnal latched but suggests disagreement or disjunction. Sally seems unsure as to how to proceed with the telling given Huang’s lack of adequate uptake to an announcement of cancer. In the hemming and hawing of yeah. right. but, Sally creates more interactional space for Huang to chime in, which she does, but she produces a latched collaborative completion (but- but everything going going well now) at line 14 that steers and veers in an opposite polar direction, ofering a positive stance in response to Sally’s negative one (lines 08, 10, and 11). Sally is taken aback and surprised as displayed in the pause of two-tenths of a second that precedes her repair initiator hm, which ends in rising prosodic contour (Wilkinson & Kitzinger, 2006). The repair-initiator leaves the tasks of fnding and repairing the trouble source to the recipient (Drew, 1997); in this case, Huang produces a third-position repair (line 17–18) in which she exhibits that she misunderstood (Scheglof, 1996). But in repairing the misunderstanding, she maintains a positive stance when she replaces the trouble source utterance everything going going well with everything is izza getget better. Thus, while Sally casts a negative stance on her story, Huang displays orientation to a positive one, but the source of that is unclear. Following Huang’s remark that everything is getting better, which seems to be produced to solicit confrmation, Sally disagrees (line 19), marking it with a well-prefaced utterance (Scheglof & Lerner, 2009) that modifes Huang’s prior lexical item better to bracket that she only feels much better, i.e., she is not actually doing much better health-wise. Her elongated item feel possibly locates Huang’s previous utterance everything is izza get- get better (line 18) as the trouble source. And across a series of next turns, Sally elaborates on how it comes about that she feels better now as compared with before, mentioning the invasive procedures that she underwent and from which she is still recovering.
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For example, she states that she has a big incision (line 21) and that her blood was very bad (line 24). Huang replies very softly, yeah I understand (line 25), but it is unclear whether or how she understands (Sacks, 1992; Scheglof, 1982). Although Sally mentions that she feels much stronger (line 35), she gives a clear sense that things were quite difcult for a long time. In countering and reworking Huang’s utterance that everything is getting better to depicting an ongoing battle with the illness (lines 19, 21–22, 26–27, 31, 33, 35, and 40), Sally displays the interactional resource of colligation, i.e., “such that the wrong item is added to by the right item rather than discarded and replaced” (Jeferson, 1986, p. 6). It is clear that Sally is engaged in a troubles-telling (Jeferson, 2015). She tells her story to solicit sympathy and support, however, Huang’s responses remain minimal, which not only relinquish the foor but do not collaborate in driving the story as recipients typically do (see Chapter 3). Thus, alignment (progressivity) and afliation are separate matters whereas in previous CA studies involving L1 or monolingual talk, alignment and afliation tend to co-occur (e.g., Lindstrom & Sorjonen, 2013; Stivers, 2008). As Sally continues her story, she peels away at her inner self even more. For instance, she abandons the ongoing utterance everything you know, which might have been an incipient attempt to return to and correct everything is getting better (line 37), and in a same-turn repair (Scheglof, 1979, 2013), she now owns up emotionally when she utters, I’m not happy to have cancer, which is trailed by a turn-fnal but. She ends that turn (line 38) with troubles-resistant laugh particles (Jeferson, 1984). In her troubles-telling, Sally is soliciting sympathy, support, and outreach from her recipient, but she does not receive any. A few lines later, she takes a frst saying of everything you know (line 37) and produces a fuller version of it: Everything you know is as good as it can be (line 40–41). The inserted element that comes in between (i.e., I’m not happy to have cancer) is neither extraneous nor trivial (Wong, 2000). The halt in story progressivity creates space within the larger turn-constructional unit for the inserted element, which is a revelation of the emotional wear and tear Sally is experiencing (also see Chapter 6 on repair and story progressivity). But in Huang’s responses, she merely claims understanding but does not show it (Sacks, 1992; Scheglof, 1982). We bear witness to the interactional consequences. Where are the support and sympathy for Sally and her troubles? Is anyone out there “listening” (besides Huang)? At line 41, Huang’s continuer and positive assessment (uh huh. that’s good) might be taken as orienting toward closure of the topic and even treating the story as fnished. But if Huang treats Sally’s utterance of line 40 as a possible story completion point, notably, Sally disaligns when she produces a cut of so I followed by a now-prefaced utterance (Waring, 2012), signaling disafliation with her own prior talk as she moves from saying everything is good to the topical shift that some people have side efects due to the radiation treatment (line 42–43). So in resurrecting the topic of radiation, Sally attempts to keep the
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story open. In response, however, Huang produces another continuer (line 44). Subsequently, in Sally’s next turn (line 45), she seems to (fnally) give up; she heads toward closing the story by employing a summative remark (I just hafto wait). The utterance I just hafto wait may still leave open the possibility that there will be troubles down the line, i.e., Sally may still be conveying a negative stance. Huang produces laugh tokens (line 46), and follows up with I see (line 48); however, again, it is problematic what and how Huang “sees” Sally’s story. At line 49, Sally produces an assessment, one that relegates her illness as something thrust upon her or as a stroke of bad luck: It’s just one of those things (line 49). The utterance also signals possible story completion. Sally follows up with a preclosing utterance, but anyway I feel okay (lines 49–50), which, as a type of back-referencing (Button, 1990), returns the parties to where they began, i.e., Sally’s answer to Huang’s reciprocated “how are you.” Returning to the story’s beginning is one way to end the telling (Scheglof, 2011). In essence, while Sally’s initial answer to how about you is oh I’m fne (line 03), in the closing environment, ironically, she returns to a neutral type answer (I feel okay). At this closing juncture and after an unsuccessful attempt at telling her story, indeed, we see that “everyone has to lie” (Sacks, 1975). But neutral closure-relevant answers to the question “how are you” (e.g., okay, fne, good) typically are reserved for acquaintances and strangers, not for good friends who call to tell each other about their news, especially their health crises. Huang’s responses remain minimal; her assessment (line 51) displays understanding of story completion but is lacking in demonstrating understanding of the story’s action, i.e., a troubles-telling done to solicit afliation. Sally’s closing of the conversation with “other attentiveness” is one practice for moving away from the troubles talk (Jeferson, 1984). She frst ofers a solicitude as a preclosing when she expresses delight in chatting with Huang, adding that she hopes things continue to go well for her (line 52). Of course, one irony is that things are not going well for Sally, and her preclosing solicitude perhaps provides a next turn and another opportunity for Huang to ofer some emotional reciprocity. Sadly, Huang does not return the well wishes, nor does she ask Sally to keep her apprised of the health crisis, nor does she express any desire to contact Sally to inquire about the radiation treatment and its side efects. This is the kind of “damage” to the friendship “found” in the details of the talk.
Discussion and Conclusion Stories are locally co-constructed objects, inescapable from current and next turns (Sacks et al., 1974). What gets said in a prior turn, how it is said, and its action-import have an interactional bearing on what can get said in a next turn, how that is said, and any responding actions that may take place. This is all tied to the notion of adjacency (Sacks, 1992; Scheglof, 1988b), and for co-participants in storytelling what this means is that a next turn is their analysis of the prior
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turn, their claim of understanding – or not – their demonstration of understanding – or not. (This may not be news for those in CA, but it may be worth repeating especially for classroom teachers, language assessors, curriculum developers, or the like, who deal with L2 learners.) As noted previously, in Huang’s responses and actions, she claims understanding but does not demonstrate it, at least not in clear or unambiguous ways that display that she understands the action-import of the story, i.e., done as a troubles-telling. But teasing out and teasing apart just what is understood is not necessarily an easy task, for the analyst as well, particularly when an L2 user is not entirely profcient in the language nor in its interactional resources, i.e., when she produces utterances such as: uh huh, mm hm, or even when she says yeah I understand (line 25) (Gardner, 2001, 2004). Without any display elsewhere of a frm(er) grasp of Sally’s troubles-talk, her saying of yeah I understand must be taken with a grain of salt (or a heaping teaspoonful) as not doing understanding. Sacks (1992) notes that showing understanding is often done by tacit recognition, not by using overt signposts such as “I understand.” Our talk and our actions are not consequence-free. When Huang is not able to afliate with Sally adequately, she is not a “properly aligned” story-recipient (Jeferson & Lee, 1981, p. 400). (Of course, this is not to say that L1 users are always properly aligned recipients.) The data extract reveals “interactional asynchrony” about which Jeferson and Lee (1981) remark: “Coparticipants can be characterized as improperly aligned by reference to the categories provided for and crucial to the orderly progression of the sequence” (p. 402). In a troubles-telling, two categories come into play: Troubles-teller and troubles-recipient (Jeferson, 1980; Jeferson & Lee, 1981, p. 400). As the story-recipient, Huang co-drives the launch of Sally’s telling and its onward movement, but she is not a troubles-recipient in properly aligning with the story-action. One interactional outcome is that Sally’s troubles-telling is limited. Her story has no room to grow given recipient’s responses, not to speak of the afliation that is missing, which is the greater absence. As noted in Chapter 2, stories are tied to the notion of recipient design. Scheglof (1997) remarked: Recipients are oriented not only to the story as a discursive unit, but to what is being done by it, with it, through it; for the story and any aspect of its telling, they can attend the “why that now” question (Scheglof & Sacks, 1973). It should not be surprising that the projects that are being implemented in the telling of a story inform the design and constructional features of the story, as well as the details of the telling (Sacks, 1978). (p. 97) But Huang missed the “why that now” of Sally’s telling. Once again, as in the storytelling between Huang and Vera in the previous chapter, intersubjectivity or a shared world seems fragile beneath a surface veneer.
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Huang may not have been aware of the impact of her responses on Sally’s story. She began learning English as a foreign language in China in an earlier era; she may have been taught to respond to a teller’s story in the ways that she does. Fortunately, there is presently a shift in the second/foreign language teaching feld that emphasizes the value of authenticity in designing listening and alignment activities that aim to help L2 learners develop interactional competence. Also, there are recent calls for active listening and authenticity in language teaching (e.g., Dings, 2014; Ockney & Wagner, 2018; Sert, 2019; Wong & Waring, 2021). L2 interactional competence ought to be viewed as a variable phenomenon. Across the two chapters, we discover that the same L2 individual is more competent in one aspect of storying – i.e., telling – but less so in another, i.e., responding. Between these two interactional jobs, telling vs. responding, which is likely to be more difcult for language learners? In traditional language teaching, teachers typically assume that the telling of stories is where potential difculties may lie and that listening to stories, i.e., the content, is an easier task. But the extract shown earlier displays that not listening “properly” has its own pitfalls or risks. We tell stories as part of doing being ordinary (Sacks, 1984), and that includes stories told in multilingual interaction, though data from multilingual interaction (e.g., L1-L2 or L2-L2) has not been the object of scrutiny in earlier CA studies on storytelling. We lay bare our troubles, regardless of whether storytelling is done in an L1 or in an L2, when we unwind, rewind, play, replay, do, or redo our friendships with a host of signifcant others who are not mere listeners but who are active respondents. We expect recipients to come to our rescue in appreciating, understanding, empathizing, and afliating with our sufered experiences (Sacks, 1992). And when recipient fails to understand the action of a story, teller can make attempts to correct the failure (Jeferson, 1978; Sacks, 1992). That does not happen in the extract examined. Sally is left hanging, wanting for more at the termination of the phone conversation. Hopefully, she found recovery, emotional reciprocity, and friendship with someone with whom she could air her troubles more expansively. While Huang hears the story, Sally wishes to be heard. In the stories that we tell or respond to, we are never relieved of the sequential structures and strictures; they bind us – tightly or loosely – and are found in our micro-moments of creation and connection or disconnection.
Note 1 I am grateful to Jonathon Ryan for the opportunity to serve as Research Fellow at Waikato Institute of Technology (Wintec), Centre for Languages, where I initially presented the extract examined at a data analysis session (2018). Thanks are also extended to the following Wintec data session participants for their comments: Anthea Fester, Jenny Field, Leslie Forrest, Feng (Farrah) Jin, Thi Minh Huong, Jimmy Pickford, Jono Ryan, and Jin Yoon.
52 Jean Wong
References Barraja-Rohan, A.-M. (2015). “I told you”: Storytelling development of a Japanese learning English as a second language. In T. Cadierno & S. W. Eskildson (Eds.), Usage-based perspectives on second language learning (pp. 271–304). Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. Button, G. (1990). On varieties of closings. In G. Psathas (Ed.), Interaction competence (pp. 93–148). Washington, DC: International Institute for Ethnomethology and Conversation Analysis and University Press of America. Button, G. (1991). Conversation-in-a-series. In D. Boden & D. H. Zimmerman (Eds.), Talk and social structure: Studies in ethnomethodology and conversation analysis (pp. 251–277). Berkeley, CA, and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press. Couper-Kuhlen, E., & Selting, M. (2018). A “big package”: Storytelling (Online-D). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dings, A. (2014). Interactional competence and the development of alignment activity. The Modern Language Journal, 98(3), 742–756. Drew, P. (1997). “Open” class repair initiators in response to sequential sources of trouble in conversation. Journal of Pragmatics, 36, 69–101. Gardner, R. (2001). When listeners talk: Response tokens and listener stance. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Gardner, R. (2004). Acknowledging strong ties between utterances in talk: Connections through right as a response token. Proceedings of the 2004 Conference of the Australian Linguistic Society, Sydney, Australia, 1–12. Goodwin, C. (1984). Notes on story structure and the organization of participation. In J. M. Atkinson & J. Heritage (Eds.), Structures of social action (pp. 225–246). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Goodwin, C. (1986). Between and within: Alternative sequential treatments of continuers and assessments. Human Studies, 9, 205–217. Hellermann, J. (2008). Social actions for classroom language learning. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Ishida, M. (2011). Engaging in another person’s telling as a recipient in L2 Japanese: Development of interactional competence during one-year study abroad. In G. Pallotti & J. Wagner (Eds.), L2 learning as social practice: Conversation-analytic perspectives (pp. 45–85). Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i, National Foreign Language Resource Center. Jeferson, G. (1978). Sequential aspects of storytelling in conversation. In J. Schenkein (Ed.), Studies in the organization of conversational interaction (pp. 219–248). New York: Academic Press. Jeferson, G. (1980). On “trouble-premonitory” response to inquiry. Sociological Inquiry, 50(3/4), 153–185. Jeferson, G. (1984). On stepwise transition from talk about a trouble to inappropriately next-positioned matters. In J. M. Atkinson & J. Heritage (Eds.), Structures of social action (pp. 191–222). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jeferson, G. (1986, March 26–29). Colligation as a device for minimizing repair or disagreement. Paper presented at Talk and Social Structures: An international conference in conversation analysis and the sociology of language. University of California, Santa Barbara. Jeferson, G. (1988). On the sequential organization of troubles-talk in ordinary conversation. Social Problems, 35(4), 418–441. Jeferson, G. (2015). Talking about troubles in conversation (P. Drew, J. Heritage, G. Lerner, & A. Pomerantz, Eds.). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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Jeferson, G., & Lee, J. R. (1981). The rejection of advice: Managing the problematic convergence of a troubles-telling and a “service encounter”. Journal of Pragmatics, 5(5), 399–422. Kim, Y. (2016). Development of L2 interactional competence: Being a story recipient in L2 English conversation. Discourse and Cognition, 23(1), 1–28. Lee, Y.-A., & Lee, Y. J. (2020). Toward progressivity through repairs in multilingual storytelling. Lee, Y-A., & Hellermann, J. (2014). Tracing developmental changes through conversation analysis: Cross-sectional and longitudinal analysis. TESOL Quarterly, 48(4), 763-788. Lindstrom, A., & Sorjonen, J. (2013). Afliation in conversation. In J. Sidnell & T. Stivers (Eds.), Handbook of conversation analysis (pp. 350–369). Malden: Wiley-Blackwell. Macbeth, D. (2011). Understanding understanding as an instructional matter. Journal of Pragmatics, 43, 437–451. Mandelbaum, J. (1991/1992). Conversational non-cooperation: An exploration of disattended complaints. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 25, 97–138. Mandelbaum, J. (2013). Storytelling in conversation. In J. Sidnell & T. Stivers (Eds.), Handbook of conversation analysis (pp. 492–508). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ockney, G. J., & Wagner, E. (2018). Assessing L2 listening: Moving towards authenticity. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Pekarek Doehler, S., & Berger, E. (2018). L2 interactional competence as increased ability for context-sensitive conduct: A longitudinal study of story-openings. Applied Linguistics, 38(4), 555–578. Ryave, A. L. (1978). On the achievement of a series of stories. In J. Schenkein (Ed.), Studies in the organization of conversational interaction (pp. 114–132). New York: Academic Press. Sacks, H. (1975). Everyone has to lie. In M. Sanches & B. Blount (Eds.), Sociocultural dimensions of language use (pp. 57–80). New York: Academic Press. Sacks, H. (1978). Some technical considerations of a dirty joke. In R. Bauman & J. Sherzer (Eds.), Explorations in the ethnography of speaking (pp. 337–353). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sacks, H. (1984). On doing “being ordinary”. In J. M. Atkinson & J. Heritage (Eds.), Structures of social action (pp. 413–429). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sacks, H. (1987). On the preferences for agreement and contiguity in sequences in conversation. In G. Button & J. R. E. Lee (Eds.), Talk and social organization (pp. 54–69). Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Sacks, H. (1992). Lectures on conversation (Vols. 1 & 2, G. Jeferson, Ed.). Oxford: Blackwell. Sacks, H., Scheglof, E. A., & Jeferson, G. (1974). A simplest systematics for the organization of turn-taking for conversation. Language, 50(4), 696–735. Scheglof, E. A. (1979). The relevance of repair to syntax-for-conversation. In T. Givon (Ed.), Syntax and Semantics 12: Discourse and syntax (pp. 261–288). New York: Academic Press. Scheglof, E. A. (1982). Discourse as an interactional achievement: Some uses of “uh huh” and other things that come between sentences. In D. Tannen (Ed.), Analysing discourse: Text and talk (pp. 71–93). Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. Scheglof, E. A. (1988a). On an actual virtual servo-mechanism for guessing bad news: A single case conjecture. Social Problems, 35(4), 442–457. Scheglof, E. A. (1988b). Gofman and the analysis of conversation. In P. Drew & A. Wootton (Eds.), Erving Gofman: Exploring the interaction order (pp. 89–135). Cambridge: Polity Press.
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Scheglof, E. A. (1990). On the organization of sequences as a source of “coherence” in talk-in-interaction. In B. Dorval (Ed.), Conversational organization and its development (pp. 51–77). Norwood, NJ: Ablex. Scheglof, E. A. (1996). Repair after next t: The last structurally provided defense of intersubjectivity in conversation. American Journal of Sociology, 97(5), 1295–1345. Scheglof, E. A. (1997). “Narrative analysis” thirty years later. Journal of Narrative and Life History, 7(1–4), 97–106. Scheglof, E. A. (2007). Sequence organization: A primer in conversation analysis (Vol. 1). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Scheglof, E. A. (2011). Word repeats as unit ends. Discourse Studies, 13(3), 367–380. Scheglof, E. A. (2013). Ten operations in self-initiated, same-turn repair. In M. Hayashi, G. Raymond, & J. Sidnell (Eds.), Conversational repair and human understanding (pp. 41–70). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Scheglof, E. A., & Lerner, G. (2009). Beginning to respond: Well-prefaced responses to Wh-questions. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 42(2), 91–115. Scheglof, E. A., & Sacks, H. (1973). Opening up closings. Semiotica, 8, 289–327. Sert, O. (2019). The interplay between collaborative turn sequences and active listenership. In M. R. Salaberry & S. Kunitz (Eds.), Teaching and testing L2 interactional competence (pp. 142–166). Stivers, T. (2008). Stance, alignment and afliation during story telling: When nodding is a token of preliminary afliation. Research on Language in Social Interaction, 41, 29–55. Tabensky, A. (2008). Non-verbal resources and storytelling in second language classroom interaction. Journal of Applied Linguistics, 5(3), 321–348. Waring, H. Z. (2012). Doing disafliation with now-prefaced utterances. Language and Communication, 32, 265–275. Waring, H. Z. (2020). Multilingual storytelling and conversation analysis. Wilkinson, S., & Kitzinger, C. (2006). Surprise as an interactional achievement: Reaction tokens in conversation. Social Psychology Quarterly, 69(2), 150–182. Wong, J. (2000). Repetition in conversation. A look at “frst and second sayings”. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 33(4), 407–424. Wong, J. (2020). Our storied lives: Doing and fnding friendship I. Wong, J., & Waring, H. Z. (2021). Conversation analysis and second language pedagogy: A guide for ESL/EFL teachers (2nd ed.). New York: Routledge.
4 MANAGING PERIPHERAL RECIPIENCY IN TRIADIC MULTILINGUAL STORYTELLING Tim Greer and Yosuke Ogawa
Introduction When two people talk with each other, their back-and-forth management of turn-taking is relatively straightforward (Sacks et al., 1974), but speaker selection and recipiency can become more complicated when interaction takes place among three or more people (Lerner, 1996, 2003) that involves a primary speaker during storytelling, for example. It can become especially complex when the primary speaker is undertaking other tasks at the same time – an interactional phenomenon known as multiactivity (Haddington et al., 2014) or multiple involvement (Raymond & Lerner, 2014). However, at times a third person can aid either the primary speaker or the intended recipient with elements of the telling through clarifcations, reformulations and the like. Such third-person repair is of particular signifcance in L2 talk, where one or more of the interactants may have limited access to linguistic resources. This study draws on conversation analysis (CA) to examine a corpus of naturally occurring triadic L2 interaction recorded in a hairdressing setting among a Spanish-speaking client who speaks English as an additional language and a stylist and his assistant whose frst language is Japanese. The focus is on third-person repair in storytelling sequences in which the peripheral recipient (typically the assistant) momentarily becomes involved in the conversation between the stylist and the client in order to clarify, interpret or explain some aspect of the telling that has become problematic. Doing being a peripheral recipient (as opposed to a primary recipient) is a member’s practice or, in other words, an interactional matter to be identifed and accomplished by the participants themselves. The study’s fndings suggest that the peripheral interactant can play an important mediatory role in maintaining intersubjectivity, particularly when the stylist
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is paying more attention to the haircut than to the talk. The teller-recipient constellation can shift rapidly when a third participant receipts the telling on behalf of the person who initiated it or when a telling addressed to a primary recipient is taken up by the peripheral participant due to a delayed response. We also explore how shifts in the participant constellation can result from details of the topic development, efectively excluding one of the participants. The study ofers insight into how L2 interaction works (Hellerman et al., 2019) and extends CA scholarship on (a) multi-party tellings and (b) the fuidity of recipiency in storytelling sequences.
Background Researchers have long noted that storytellers do not treat all recipients in the same way and that they can be organized into parties via the specifc contingencies of the interaction (Scheglof, 1995). Gofman (1981) made a distinction between ratifed and unratifed hearers (such as bystanders, overhearers, and eavesdroppers). The current study does not deal directly with unratifed hearers but instead focuses on just those whom the speaker treats as intended recipients.1 Gofman notes that among ratifed hearers/recipients, there can be both addressed and unaddressed recipients, and in this chapter we will also refer to them respectively as primary and secondary (or peripheral) recipients. A recipient can be selected either directly with an address term – such as a name or the proterm “you” (Lerner, 1996, 2003) – or through gaze selection and other shifts in bodily orientation (Goodwin, 1980; Markaki & Mondada, 2012). Alternatively, they can be addressed tacitly via context-specifc details of the talk (Goodwin, 1984; Lerner, 2003), such as embedded displays of knowledge and other epistemic stances. During bilingual interaction within mixed profciency groups, switching languages can also serve to select a subgroup of participants and thereby rework the participant constellation to deselect others (Greer, 2008, 2013a). Gofman equates such changes in participation status with changes in footing – or the way participants align toward a particular utterance (see also Levinson, 1988), although Goodwin (2007) critiques the static nature of recipiency within Gofman’s framework and instead advocates a conceptualization of participation that is based on the “temporally unfolding process through which separate parties demonstrate to each other their ongoing understanding of the events they are engaged in by building actions that contribute to the further progression of these very same events” (p. 24). In other words, any multi-party audience can be made up of various kinds of recipients, and a storyteller may therefore treat individuals within the audience as possessing greater or lesser access to expertise or knowledge of the story (Goodwin, 1986), and this will be both borne out through the details of the talk and hold consequences for the way the story is told. While a speaker may be primarily addressing a particular recipient, they can still orient to another
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person as rightfully participating in the conversation as a peripheral participant. The peripheral participant follows the primary speaker’s talk but treats it as predominantly directed toward the primary recipient. This might be, for example, because they already know the story the speaker is telling – e.g., as in spousal talk (Sacks, 1992) – or even that they are a character in it (Goodwin, 1984) and can thus shift from recipient to co-teller. Likewise, someone who is being treated as a peripheral recipient is able to proactively rework the participant constellation with appropriately timed displays of knowledge regarding components of the teller’s story (Kidwell, 1997). The primary recipient, on the other hand, is typically an unknowing addressee. CA and ethnomethodology have therefore developed, explored, and transformed many of Gofman’s original fndings on face-to-face interaction (Scheglof, 1988). Hindmarsh (2010), for example, explores issues of peripherality and participation in relation to apprenticeship learning in a dental training program. As the supervising dentist examines the trainee’s work and identifes aspects of the procedure within the patient’s mouth, his observations are primarily directed toward the student dentist: The patient is peripheral to technical aspects of the talk but at the same time profoundly integral to the occasioning of the talk. The triadic nature of hairdressing training talk can be seen in a like vein – but with two essential diferences: The client has much greater capacity to talk, and the topics of conversation cross both service and mundane boundaries. In many cases, it is the stylist and the client who form the primary dyad, and the apprentice observing the cut is on the periphery in the role of peripheral participant. At times, then, the apprentice can pass between co-recipient and co-teller as the situation warrants. Our interest in this chapter, then, is in investigating how interactants adapt the participation constellation in order to address a peripheral participant.
Data Our analysis is based on data collected from a hairdressing salon in western Japan. The data involve three participants: Emil, the client; Yoh, the stylist and Yumi, an assistant. The full dataset consists of 16 hours of talk involving fve clients recorded on 15 occasions, but in this study we will focus on only two of these haircutting sessions. The hairdressers are Japanese, and the clients are non-Japanese from a variety of countries and language backgrounds. In the current study, the client Emil is from Bolivia. The majority of the conversation took place between him and Yoh while Yumi assumed a background role, observing the cut and aiding Yoh whenever needed. This meant that she was routinely located peripherally, both in terms of physical proximity and in relation to the interaction more generally. As shown in Figure 4.1, for instance, Yumi is standing slightly behind Yoh and Emil.2 The recording involved two cameras: One was positioned to the stylist’s right side and generally captured all three participants, while the other camera
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FIGURE 4.1
Relative physical locations of the participants
was behind them and focused on the mirror and therefore provided a face-on view, albeit one that did not always catch Yoh as he moved in and out of shot. Framegrabs from both angles have been incorporated into the transcripts where relevant. An audio device was also placed on the counter in front of Emil and was used to confrm unsure transcriptions. As mentioned previously, the client (Emil) was from Bolivia. His frst language was Spanish, and he was also highly profcient in English, although his Japanese was only basic. Yoh and Yumi, on the other hand, spoke fuent Japanese and only a little English. This meant that the interaction between the hairdressers and their client often involved a dual receptive strategy in which each person spoke their stronger language (see Greer, 2013b). In addition, physical restrictions within the environment such as the cape, mirror or shampoo basin impacted the talk, limiting elements of the embodied interaction to some extent (Greer, 2013c). Also noteworthy is that Yumi and Yoh are a married couple as well as the co-owners of the salon. There are moments where they orient to knowledge of each other’s lives outside the workplace, as found in the discussion of Extract 3 shown later, and therefore on occasion we will treat their interaction as couple’s talk when the participants themselves orient to it in that way (Sacks, 1992). The data have been transcribed according to the conventions developed by Gail Jeferson (2004), and embodied aspects of the talk have been indicated below the talk in an unnumbered sub-tier rendered in gray font. The onset of the action is indicated in the talk via a vertical bar. Where relevant, embodied actions are noted within the talk tier and tracked across turns via lines and arrows in a simplifed version of the system developed by Mondada (2018). Where actions from multiple participants are described, the speaker’s name in lowercase is followed by an abbreviation that signifes the focal action of the tier (-gz for gaze, -px for proximity, -gs for gesture, -hd for head and so on). A waved line indicates the speaker is moving into
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or out of the action, and a straight arrow indicates they are holding the action. Following Greer et al. (2017), Japanese talk is represented in English with a literal morphemic gloss in the second tier and a vernacular translation in the third tier. See the appendix for a more detailed explanation of the abbreviations and terms used.
Analysis Our analysis will focus on the peripheral participant role during (story)telling sequences, including how they help the primary recipient to understand the telling and how they assist the teller via the organization of repair.
Peripheral Participant’s Facilitation of Recipiency A peripheral participant can become more active in the conversation when the primary recipient experiences difculty in understanding the telling, often because they have been preoccupied with doing something else, such as searching for a grooming tool or assessing some aspect of the cut. In those moments, one option open to the primary recipient is to seek help from the peripheral participant, via the practices of third-person repair shown in Extract 1. Alternatively the peripheral participant can momentarily step in to ofer candidate repair at points when it appears that the primary recipient has not properly understood the telling, as in Extract 2. Both of these practices involve an adjustment to the participation framework. This section will examine examples of each of these in further detail. In Extract 1, Emil is explaining economic disparity in South America as part of a longer story that was initiated by Yoh in earlier talk (not shown), when he asked Emil how he came to be in Japan. Yoh is also cutting Emil’s hair and is therefore in close physical proximity to him, while Yumi is standing roughly a meter behind them, observing the cut and listening to the conversation. Extract 1. Poor Emil (client) is telling Yoh (primary recipient) and Yumi (peripheral recipient) about the economic situation in Bolivia. 01
EMIL:
yoh-bh
02 03 04
EMIL:
|because um (0.6) some people? (0.4) |cutting Emil’s hair –>line 8 are very rich. (0.3) they have a lot of money.
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05 06 07 08
EMIL:
yoh-bh yoh-hd
09 yoh-bh
10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18
EMIL: YUMI: EMIL: yum-hd EMIL: YUMI:
yum-gz yum-hd
19 20 21
EMIL: YOH:→
yoh-gz
(0.9) but (0.5) only a few (.) people. (2.0) |and many people? |(0.3) |stops cutting | nods |let’s say (0.2) sixty percent, |cuts hair – > line 21 (0.5) they are very ↑po↓or. (0.7) th[ey][ o ]h. don’ |have money. |nods (1.3) ↑so:: (0.7) it’s very difcult. (0.9) º[dif]|fcultº [|un] mm | . . . >up |nods [so ][yes ] (1.4) |pua: tte iu no wa | (.) (ºnihongo deº) poor QT say N S Japanese in What’s poor (in Japanese)? |~~>up |~>Yumi ---------->
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EMIL:
yum-fc yoh-gz
23
YUMI:
yum-hd
24
YOH:
yoh-gz
25 26 27 28
EMIL:
29
EMIL:
EMIL: YOH:
61
|ah! okane |nai: = money have-NEG They don’t have any money. |opens mouth slightly |~>Emil
=[|un] yeah |nods [ |oka]ne ga nai ne? money TOP have-NEG IP They don’t have any money, yeah? |~> Emil ---------> heh‘n (0.9) and( )- sore de: (0.3) e: muzukashii: to and then um difcult QT So that’s why you said it is, uh, difcult. yes
The word poor frst appears at the end of a complete turn-fnal TCU in line 10 as part of Emil’s broader story, in which he was telling the hairdressers how he came to be studying in Japan, and this is followed by a gap of silence (line 11) where Yoh could have provided some indication of uptake or acknowledgement. Since no such receipt is forthcoming, Emil gives an explanation of the word poor (lines 12 and 14), adding an increment across lines 12 and 14, which may suggest that he hears Yoh’s lack of uptake as potential non-understanding. However, as he does so, in overlap in line 13, Yumi provides just the sort of receipt token we might expect Yoh to have given in line 11, an acknowledging oh token.3 The fact that Yumi’s oh is not ofered sooner (e.g., line 11) helps reinforce the observation that she is (doing being) the peripheral recipient. Following another gap of silence in line 15, Emil’s next turn, an increment in line 16, is similarly met with silence from Yoh in line 17 and then gets some delayed receipt from Yumi
62 Tim Greer and Yosuke Ogawa
through her barely audible repetition of Emil’s turn-fnal word difcult and an uptake token mm (line 18). This suggests that even though Yumi is physically farther away and Emil has been treating Yoh as the primary recipient up until this point, for a brief moment Yumi has become the primary recipient “by default” in that Yoh has not provided any receipt. However, Yumi’s nod at line 14, which occurs before Emil fnishes his incremental elaboration of the word poor in lines 12 and 14, serves as a claim by Yumi that she understands the word at a much earlier point. It is not that her understanding is “delayed” until line 18 but that she may be treating or even deferring to Yoh as the primary recipient when she does not respond to Emil at the frst opportunity (line 16), therefore demonstrating her orientation to Emil’s turn as primarily directed to Yoh. It is only when Yoh does not provide a timely response that Yumi steps in to speak in his stead. This too suggests that the participants view Yumi as a peripheral recipient at this point in the talk. In line 21, a possible account for Yoh’s silence becomes apparent as he switches to Japanese to initiate repair on the English word poor. Other-initiated repair usually occurs as soon as possible, namely the next turn after the trouble-source (Scheglof et al., 1977); however, Wong (2000) has shown that such repair initiation can be delayed in L2 interaction. Although Yoh’s English profciency undoubtedly plays a part, his delay is much longer than that found in Wong’s corpus and therefore may be a result of his preoccupation with the cut and also his embodied adjustment as he turns to face Yumi. The frst part of Yoh’s turn in line 21 translates roughly as “as for the word poor” and is delivered with his gaze in mid-distance, so his gaze does not appear to be oriented toward selecting either Yumi or Emil, although the switch to Japanese might suggest the former. The second part of Yoh’s turn is less audible but is clearly directed toward Yumi, via a shift in gaze direction and body torque (Scheglof, 1998). Yoh displays a normative understanding that Yumi’s uptake in lines 13 and 18 can be seen as a claim that she understands the meaning of the word poor and that she can therefore provide him with a succinct Japanese equivalent. Such an appeal to a peripheral participant rather than to the producer of the trouble-source can be seen as initiating repair by selecting a third person as a broker (Bolden, 2012; Greer, 2015). During this brief moment, the participant constellation changes, with Yoh directing this turn primarily to Yumi: By switching to Japanese4 and turning his head toward her, Yoh’s turn formulation and embodied action imply that it is Yumi who should respond. Although there is evidence in the next turn (line 22) to suggest that Yumi also views it this way in that she opens her mouth to speak, it is in fact Emil who self-selects to complete the repair, by translating his earlier English explanation (lines 12 and 14) rather than providing a precise Japanese equivalent. Toward the end of Emil’s turn in line 22, Yoh treats this as adequate and turns
Managing Peripheral Recipiency
63
back to Emil to deliver a receipt through repetition (Svennevig, 2004) that reestablishes Emil as the teller (line 24). Notice though that Yumi also receipts Emil’s repair at this point (line 23), repositioning herself on the periphery of the talk by allowing him agency over his own interaction: Even though Yoh has directed his repair to Yumi in line 21, when Emil deals with the trouble-source himself in line 22, Yumi simply provides minimal uptake at line 23 rather than explaining any further. Although Emil is primarily directing his talk toward Yoh and the questions and uptake typically come from Yoh throughout the broader dataset, there are feeting moments in which Yumi steps in to assist in Emil’s telling, particularly at times when Yoh’s attention is divided between the story recipiency and the main business of cutting Emil’s hair. In such moments Yumi, as the peripheral recipient, self-selects to provide candidate other-repair rather than being selected by Yoh as the primary recipient. We see this, for example, in Extract 2, in which Yoh asks Emil if he saw the cherry blossoms, and Emil says he did, but he did not take part in the Japanese springtime custom of picnicking under the blossoms (known in Japanese as hanami or literally “fower viewing”). Extract 2. Hanami In response to a question from Yoh, Emil tells Yoh (primary recipient) and Yumi (peripheral recipient) that he did not picnic under the cherry blossoms this year (a Japanese custom). 01
YOH:
yoh-px yum-px yoh-bh
|(1.0) |(1.0) |left of E ~~> |behind E |behind yoh – —>> |>>combs hair |brushes hair of E’s back.
64 Tim Greer and Yosuke Ogawa
02
YOH:
yoh-gz yum-gz
03 yoh-px yoh-gz yum-px
04
EMIL:
yum-px yoh-px yoh-rh yoh-bh yoh-gz yoh-hd
05
06
07
EMIL:
|sakura: mimashita |ka cherry blossoms see-POL-PST Q Did you see the cherry blossoms? |emil’s shoulders -------------------> |yoh --------------------------------> |~~> E |(0.9) |turns to trolley – > |~~> trolley |steps toward E slightly |ah: yes |(0.7) |bu:t uh hanami, |(0.7) fower-viewing (party) |step back |moves toward E |-------> |turns back to E -----------> |puts comb in trolley |brushing E’s shoulders |->trolley |~->mirror |nods
|I didn’t do hanami. fower-viewing (party) yum-px |moves toward E slightly |~~>mirror yum-gz YOH: |hanami ni? fower-viewing to To a picnic under the cherry blossoms? yoh-gs |brushes hair of E’s shoulders –> |~~> E’s shoulders – >> yoh-gz |~~> up to Yoh eml-gz YUMI: → >|hanami wa shite nai down |shakes =|shite na[i n des ka:? do-CONT-NEG NOM COP-POL Q Oh, you didn’t? |E’s shoulders-------->> |brushing shoulders----->> [heheheheh hahahahah (2.1)
Although this case does not eventuate into a canonical storytelling with a clear beginning and ending, we do view it as a slot in which a possible story is being prompted, akin to the form of topic nomination that Button and Casey (1985) term an itemized news inquiry.5 As in Extract 1, Yumi is standing somewhat behind Yoh and Emil and is physically and interactionally peripheral to the talk throughout. Starting in line 1, Yoh moves from the side of Emil to directly behind him as he brushes hair of his back and starts to put the comb back in a nearby trolley (line 4). In other words, Yoh is undergoing a number of other embodied involvements in line 2 at the same time as he nominates a topic (Button & Casey, 1985) that is story-implicative. Yumi is responsive to Yoh’s movements, adjusting her gaze as he moves toward the trolley then shifting it toward Emil as Yoh nears the end of his question (line 2). During the brief silence that follows in line 3, Yoh is preoccupied with returning the comb to the trolley, and Yumi looks directly at Emil in the mirror and steps toward him slightly by shifting her weight onto her left foot. In short, Yoh has invited a possible storytelling (line 2), but Yumi has stepped in as a potential proxy recipient to Emil’s response while Yoh deals with his business at the trolley (lines 3–5). This suggests that she is aligning to the talk as a member of a party, namely herself and Yoh. At the start of line 4, Yoh is still occupied with replacing the comb when Emil starts his response with yes, but he looks back to the mirror as Emil delivers the remainder of his telling, qualifying his answer to say that he saw the cherry blossoms but did not attend any picnicking events (lines 4 and 5). Yumi, on the other hand, is attentive to Emil’s turn throughout, watching it via the mirror. She does step back momentarily at the start of line 4 to allow Yoh to reach to the trolley, but then she leans back in to Emil as soon as this is done. In line 6, Yoh displays his understanding of Emil’s turn in a manner that suggests he did not completely follow what was said. He repeats the key Japanese word hanami, but follows that with an upwardly intoned ni (to), resulting in a
66 Tim Greer and Yosuke Ogawa
sort of designedly incomplete utterance (Koshik, 2002) that initiates repair by framing the missing verb ending and in particular its polarity. In other words, at line 06 Yoh is asking Emil whether he went to a hanami picnic or not, which suggests that he did not completely follow the English segment of Emil’s justprior turn (line 05). It is at this point (line 07), that Yumi, the peripherally located recipient, self-selects to provide a Japanese version of Emil’s telling for Yoh, which also acts as a brokered repair in that it provides the verb ending of which Yoh was unsure. In efect, Yumi is speaking for Emil, and Yoh tacitly acknowledges this in next turn (line 08) by receipting the turn as if it were said by Emil rather than by Yumi (Oh, you didn’t?). Yoh’s gaze does not shift toward Yumi during the repair in line 08 but instead stays fxed on Emil’s shoulders as he brushes hair from them. Yoh’s word choice in line 8 also makes it clear that Yoh is designing the turn for Emil rather than Yumi, since the turn ends in a polite form of the copula (desu), a formulation that is usually used in Japanese for non-intimate addressees, including customers or guests. For her part, Yumi then works to reposition herself on the periphery by joining Yoh in his sequenceclosing laughter (lines 09 and 10). As the peripheral participant, Yumi sometimes also ofers repair assistance in a way that is somewhat more active, while still orienting toward Yoh as the primary recipient. This can manifest as a kind of co-accomplished response reminiscent of “couples talk” (Sacks, 1992) as shown in Extract 3, in which Yumi helps clarify Emil’s question for Yoh and then provides a candidate response, which is ratifed and delivered by Yoh. Extract 3. Omise Open 01
EMIL:
yum-px yoh-px yoh-gz
|how many years (0.9) ah:: |(1.4) |do you have |standing apart, arms behind back |E’s RT side, combs hair |behind E |RH to trolley |~~-->E |~~>trolley
Managing Peripheral Recipiency
02
EMIL:
this | (0.4)
eml-gz yum-gz yum-px
table --------> emil ---------> |leans in
03 04 yoh-bh
05 06
YOH: YUMI:
|place ºorº (0.6) have you |~~~~>yumi -------------> |-------------------------> |steps R leg toward E, extends neck
been working here |(0.6) |brushes Emil’s back, combs hair hm? |kotchi de ka here in Q Working here?
67
68 Tim Greer and Yosuke Ogawa
07 08 09
yum-rh
|points to foor
EMIL:
a[h- yes.
eml-gz
yumi – >
YOH:
[( ) nan nen (.) |ichi? what year one How many years? One?
YUMI:
yum-gz yum-rh
10 11 12 13 14
YOH: YUMI: EMIL: YOH:
left~~-> Emil~~--> |raises index fnger
(0.5) one year one yea[r [oh one year un (.) u::[: n [hai yeah
15 16 17
EMIL: YUMI:
yum-ll
18
YOH:
19 20
EMIL:
hmm
yes
Yeah, hmm, yes. [for one y[ear (1.9) |omise: o:pun s[h’te HON-shop open do-CONT The salon has been open. |shifts weight onto left leg [(o)mise: o:pun sh’te: HON-shop open do-CONT The salon has been open. (0.8) ha:::
Managing Peripheral Recipiency
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YOH:
69
ha:i yes That’s right.
Emil asks Yoh a question in English (lines 01–03), which is somewhat ambiguous in that it diverges into two possible endings: “How many years do you have this place, or have you been working here?”6 Note again that during Emil’s production of this turn, Yoh shifts his focus to his work, and Yumi steps in (both literally and fguratively) to transition from peripheral recipient to candidate primary recipient. As shown in the images in line 01, Yumi is standing well back from the chair both at the beginning of Emil’s turn and while Yoh is gazing directly at Emil (via the mirror) in the 1.4 second pause, but when Yoh turns toward the equipment trolley Yumi takes a step toward Emil, extends her neck and establishes mutual gaze, thus displaying her attentiveness to his question and making herself available as a potential respondent. In a sense then, Yumi is covering for Yoh as he divides his attention between the talk and the cut. Yoh faces back toward Emil and combs his hair in line 04, and this becomes the slot when Yoh (as the gaze-selected primary recipient) would be normally obliged to respond to Emil’s now complete question. Whether or not it was because of the question’s ambiguity or because of Yoh’s multiple involvement during its delivery, Yoh produces an open-class repair initiator (Drew, 1997) in line 05 with hm?, a clarifcation request that does not pinpoint any particular part of Emil’s turn as the trouble-source but instead leaves it to the recipient to locate the problem and deal with it. Subsequent to this and before Emil can respond, Yumi produces a second repair initiator (line 6) that is more focused than the one that Yoh has just formulated. Uttered in Japanese, her turn addresses the location element of Emil’s question (working here?). Other-initiations (OIs) of repair are graded in terms of their strength to locate the trouble-source (Scheglof et al., 1977), and in this case Yumi’s is stronger than Yoh’s in that it more specifcally identifes the element of Emil’s turn that is causing them difculty. Because Yumi’s turn is also positioned subsequent to Yoh’s, she is treating their repair initiators as consecutive and collaborative. The fact that Yumi has her hands free afords her the opportunity to accompany her repair initiation with a gesture, a point toward the foor, that provides Emil with an additional clue to its meaning. Yoh, however, has a comb in his hands and his gaze directed at Emil’s hair, making it more difcult to use a gesture, if he were to use one. When Emil delivers his confrming response in line 07, therefore, it is not surprising that he does so while looking toward Yumi rather than at Yoh and is orienting toward her as the primary recipient at that point. In short, Yumi has renegotiated the participant constellation, enabling her to smoothly continue the conversation while Yoh is concentrating on the cut.
70 Tim Greer and Yosuke Ogawa
Yumi then goes on to formulate a candidate answer (Pomerantz, 1988) to Emil’s question but does so while checking with Yoh and allowing him to retain a certain amount of agency by answering in tandem with him. In line 09 she asks How many years?, and this appears to be a mainly self-addressed question, partly because it is delivered in Japanese and partly because she averts her gaze momentarily from Emil as she does so. Note that this element of her turn also constitutes an upshot of Emil’s original question, albeit in a language that she is more comfortable with. Yumi then returns her gaze to Emil as she immediately responds to her own version of the question, saying ichi (one) with rising intonation and holding up one fnger (line 09). In doing so she provides room for Yoh to confrm, and thus collaborates in shifting the participant constellation back to Yoh, who confrms and answers in English at line 11. In that way, she again displays her peripherality. After a brief silence, Yoh then provides an English equivalent (one year in line 11), which Yumi repeats in line 12. A similar practice can be observed just a few seconds later when, after a short gap of silence Yumi self-selects to add The salon has been open (line 17), and Yoh repeats it beginning in overlap (line 18), displaying afliative agreement but also repositioning himself as an active recipient. At the very least this suggests that Yoh still sees himself as a ratifed recipient at this point, even though Yumi has stepped in and has become more active. The recipiency is therefore both collaborative and a matter to be negotiated on a moment-to-moment basis.
Peripheral Participant’s Facilitation of Telling Another set of third-person repair practices involves the teller appealing for assistance from a peripheral participant. In the data we examined, this often occurred in brief side sequences in which Yoh (as the teller) would ask Yumi (as the recipient) to help him in formulating a word, such as fnding an English equivalent to a Japanese word. In these cases, the interactants continue to orient toward Yoh as the primary speaker and Emil as the primary recipient, but for a brief moment Yumi shifts from being a consociate peripheral recipient to being a co-teller (Lerner, 1992), at least to the extent that she provides assistance for a sub-section of Yoh’s turn-in-progress. In this sense, Yoh and Yumi can be seen as participants but also as “incumbents of a party” (Scheglof, 1995, p. 33) that could be categorized according to interactionally accomplished collections based on their language preference, profession or couplehood. Any and all of these membership categories could serve to diferentiate Yoh and Yumi from their client, Emil, and this means that they are therefore on occasion talking as a party (rather than as two individuals). Scheglof (1995) maintains that “(t)his can involve their relative alignment in current activities, such as the co-telling of a story or siding together in a disagreement” (p. 33).
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When repair becomes necessary within the broader project of delivering a story, one member of a party may appeal to another member of the same party to broker understanding, rather than to a participant from outside the party. In Extract 4 this brokering does not result in a succinct English equivalent but instead consists of a protracted co-telling involving onomatopoeic expressions and iconic gestures. Yoh is telling Emil about a friend who travelled in South America, and this involves the naming of a particular waterfall. Yoh treats the Japanese word taki (“waterfall”) as problematic for Emil, and appeals to Yumi for help in explaining it. Extract 4. Taki 22:46 01
YOH:
02 03 04 05
EMIL:
06
YOH:
07 08
09
10
yoh-gz
11 12
EMIL:
sore de::: (.) ↑demo (1.0) a:no::: (1.0) and then but um ↑boku no: (0.8) sono:: >tomodachi< (0.6) mo me GEN that friend also (0.4) e: boribia toka: (0.7) ni: um Bolivia etc in (0.6) e: (0.4) ho:mstei- (0.5) um homestay (a-) CoS Oh! >shita koto ga aru hito ga< (.) ite: do-PST thing TOP have person TOP be-CONT And so, but, um, my- there was a friend of mine who also stayed with a family in Bolivia . . . (1.5) a:no: (0.7) soko (0.4) o (1.0) um there O e:: (0.4) chu:shin ni (0.7) e::h (1.1) taki: um central in um waterfall . . . um, he made that his base and there was a waterfall, e:: >ºnan te tta ka na:º< (2.0) um what QT say-PST Q IP um, what did he say it was called? |nantoka no tak|iguas7 no: something LK waterf(all) Iguaz LK Something-or-other falls- Iguaz . . . |~> Yumi ----------------> |~>Emil’s hair – > line20 (0.5) uhuh
72 Tim Greer and Yosuke Ogawa
13
YOH:
yum-gz eml-gz
14 15
YUMI: YOH:
16
17
YUMI:
yum-rh
18
YOH:
yum-gs
19
YUMI:
|taki:. >e: are nan te tta kana< toka waterfall um that what QT say-PST maybe etc . . . Falls. What did he call it? Something like that. |Yoh -------------------------------------> |Yoh ------------------------------------->
hhheh ig(h)as no taki: (0.7) Iguaz LK waterfall Iguaz taki. >taki tte nan te iu n(h)o< hohohoh waterfall QT what QT say IP What’s the word for taki ? kita ku |(˚ni aru˚) north ward in exist There’s one in North Ward. |points upper right
taki |tte:: waterfall QT taki means . . . |raises LH to upper right
|riba: river a river . . .
Managing Peripheral Recipiency
yum-gs
|aligns RH vertically
20
YOH:
21
YUMI:
riba: ga [ko:::h hheheheheh river S like-this A river goes like this. [|to : : : : : n | he|hehe crash splashes down. |chops |raises |down
yum-rh yum-bh
22
|(0.2)
23
EMIL:
I se(h)e(h)
24 25 26
YOH:
e[: heheheheh [eheheheheh toka: (0.6) o: ano[: (0.5) etc O um Or something like that, um –
YUMI: YOH:
|heh
|chops
73
74 Tim Greer and Yosuke Ogawa
27 28
EMIL:
29 30 31 32 33
EMIL:
YOH:
YOH: YUMI: EMIL:
[hohohh taki ga i- tak’san (0.2) arimas’ yo ne waterfall S ( ) many have IP They have a lot of waterfalls, don’t they? m ye:s un [heheheheheh [heheh (0.7) yes
As shown in line 13, during Yoh’s extended storytelling about his friend’s trip, both Emil and Yumi are listening attentively and maintaining gaze via the mirror but without giving a great deal of oral or embodied uptake, and even Yoh’s forward-oriented repair8 initiating question in line 13 (“What did he call it?”) is treated by the recipients as self-addressed, in that they do not respond to it. Although Yoh initially shifts his gaze to Yumi in line 10 in what might be seen as an invitation to coparticipate in the word search (Goodwin & Goodwin, 1986), he then reaches a partial solution, citing the name of the waterfall Iguaz (line 10) but without the English word for “waterfall” (line 13). Yoh treats his use of Japanese at that point as repairable as he goes on to repeat the phrase in line 13 to 15 and then specifcally asks, What’s the word for taki? in line 16. Yumi treats it as an appeal for assistance, possibly because the point of transition has become much clearer, and since the question asks for a translation of a Japanese word, she can be regarded as tacitly selected via her normative responsibility to understand the target word. She therefore joins Yoh in his telling, and in line 17 she cites the location of a nearby waterfall (There’s one in North Ward). Although it does not directly answer Yoh’s question, Yumi’s turn here is hearable as collaborative in that it attempts to accomplish an explanation via example, and doing so therefore implies that Yumi too is unable to access a timely English equivalent for taki. Emil does not display any recognition of this Japanese place reference (kita-ku/North Ward) or its relation to the word search, and Yumi instead shifts to an embodied explanation. As part of her turn in line 17, she raises her right hand above her head to point north, and in pursuant talk this hand position is transformed into an iconic gesture depicting a waterfall, frst indicating a vertical plane (line 19), then showing the movement of the water over it from top to bottom (line 21). These embodied actions are accompanied with two partly overlapped and collaboratively completed turns,9 with Yumi saying A river . . . splashes down (lines 19 and 21) and Yoh building of the frst part of her turn to say A river goes like this (at line 20) while producing a similar gesture. Emil gives a laughed-through receipt in line 23, and Yoh works to close down his story with a coda in line 28 that is treated by all of them as a sequence closing third (Scheglof, 2007). Yumi shifts from being a peripheral participant to being a co-teller. During the early part of the story, all three of the participants treat Yumi as a peripheral
Managing Peripheral Recipiency
75
recipient, predominantly through their gaze but also with regard to the talk. Yumi is not just Yoh’s assistant but also his wife, so she can be assumed to have a certain amount of knowledge about the friend he is discussing. If, for example, Yoh were treating Yumi as the primary recipient, he would likely have used the friend’s name rather than just calling him that friend of mine (line 2). In fact, Japanese has two words for the demonstrative “that,” one for an epistemically known referent (ano) and the other for a referent that the speaker assumes is unknown to the recipient (sono), so in line 2, when Yoh uses sono, he is displaying through word selection that he is directing his story primarily toward Emil. It is only when Yoh begins his word search for the English word waterfall, that he enlists help from Yumi. Another point worth noting in this case is that even though Yoh does not visibly gaze select her, Yumi still displays recognition that she has been petitioned to help solve the word search by ofering the place referent example in line 17 and the embodied explanation in lines 19 to 21. Again, this casts Yumi as the peripheral participant – since she can be normatively understood to know the Japanese word taki, and Yoh is therefore treating Emil by default as the one who does not know it. In joining Yoh in his embodied explanation, Yumi transitions from the periphery of the storytelling to its center, as a co-teller, showing again that these roles are fuid, ephemeral and contingent upon the moment-by-moment details of the interaction.
Discussion and Conclusion Story-tellings, and tellings more generally, are usually imparted from a knowing teller to one or more unknowing recipients. The teller can either orient to the recipients as a single party or treat one of them as the primary recipient and the other as peripheral. However, such orientations are rarely static, and the interactants can rework the participant constellation such that a peripheral recipient can momentarily become more central to the talk. In the current study we have seen that this can happen in brokering (or third-person repair) sequences, in which the peripheral recipient helps either the teller or the primary recipient with some unclear aspect of the telling. This shift in participant constellation can be refected in details of the turn design, such as when language choice is used to deselect one of the participants, yet the peripheral recipient can also work to disalign with this ascription (Kidwell, 1997) as we witnessed in Extract 1 line 22 when Emil self-selected to respond in Japanese to a question that Yoh had designed for Yumi. Peripherality involves monitoring the talk for a slot where one could or should become more active, and therefore a peripheral recipient is not simply a passive listener. Moreover, such participation can be supportive of the speaker’s telling activity, since being peripheral allows the third person to be available for a variety of possible action trajectories. The third person can publicly disengage from the talk, and this suggests that peripherality is comprised of difering extents of recipiency and availability. A peripheral participant can behave as a recipient
76 Tim Greer and Yosuke Ogawa
or as a supporter for the current speaker, and primary participants display their openness to the third person joining as a ratifed speaker. Another observation that emerged from the current analysis involves Yoh and Yumi’s co-incumbency as members of a party, i.e., as a couple. Sacks (1992) suggests that one feature of spousal talk is that when couples tell a story to a third person, their partner often already knows the story, and this can lead to a kind of co-telling in which one partner assists the other in telling the story. Part of that assistance can take the form of repair. This seems to be the case most clearly in our data in Extract 4, in which Yoh appeals to Yumi for help in explaining a word, and they go on to do so in a collaborative way, but we can see it also in other instances (such as Extract 1 line 21) when Yoh appeals to Yumi for an explanation of something Emil has said or when Yumi self-selects to correct Yoh’s misaligned uptake (Extract 2 line 07). At times Yoh and Yumi therefore seem to be doing being a “party” and not as separate “persons” (Scheglof, 1995, p. 33). But it is not just through their turntaking alone that this couplehood is made apparent: It also becomes a resource for enacting repair. In doing third-person repair, Yumi treats herself and Yoh as a party – one that casts them not only as a couple but also in other discourse related categories such as non-knowing recipients to a story and transportable identity categories like “Japanese” or “novice English speaker.” We might therefore also view third-person repair as two-party repair and inspect the data for interactionally contingent moments when Yumi and Yoh participate as individuals and moments when they behave as a couple. As Scheglof (1995) notes, the number of parties into which . . . participants may be seen to be organized (because they see themselves so to be organized, and embody that stance in their conduct) can change continuously as the contingencies of the talk change, contingencies most centrally supplied by the participants themselves and the nature of the talk which they undertake with one another. (p. 35) Participant constellation therefore is sometimes an assemblage of individuals and at other times an assemblage of parties, and this is accomplished on an emergent and shifting basis. Furthermore, the participants can also use such constellations to accomplish social actions, such as third-person repair or co-telling. There are still many issues that need to be further explored in relation to peripheral recipiency in storytelling. What happens when there are four or more interactants or when they come from three completely diferent language backgrounds? To what extent does the hairdressing setting shape peripherality, and how does it play out in other contexts? These and other questions are best left for another occasion, but the present study has provided some initial insight into how participation in multilingual (story)tellings varies from moment to moment.
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Acknowledgement This study was supported in part through JSPS Grant-in-Aid No. 2450619.
Notes 1 Gofman’s use of the word “hearer” can be problematic for CA, since the term is also used widely in information transmission models. In this chapter, we will therefore prefer the term “recipient,” although recipiency too is very much an issue for the participants themselves to decide in situ, and it is not our intention to assume anyone is a “recipient” prior to the interaction or its analysis. 2 All names are pseudonyms. 3 Note that “oh” is not necessarily a change-of-state token in Japanese but can express acknowledgement, surprise or awe (Greer, 2016). The Japanese change-of-state token is generally ah (Saft, 2001). The quality of the vowel sound suggests that Yumi is delivering a Japanese “oh” rather than an English one in this case. 4 See Greer (2008, 2013a) for further analysis on how codeswitching can change the participant constellation to (de)select particular recipients. 5 There was nothing particular that preceded this that could be considered a story, but it can be viewed as a potential slot where a story is being initiated or prompted by Yoh, along the lines of a “news-of-the-day telling” (Greer, 2019). In Japan, viewing the cherry blossoms culturally is not just merely seeing them but also provides for the possibility of a reportable related social occasion (i.e., picnicking under the blossoms), and Emil orients to Yoh’s question in that way. As it turns out, he has not participated in the reportable, and so it becomes a slot where a story is evaded rather than told, but Yoh even treats the non-reportable as newsworthy (line 8) and therefore orients to Emil’s response as the blocking of a possible story. 6 The formulation of Emil’s question suggests he does not know whether or not Yoh is the owner of the salon. 7 The Iguaz Falls (Cataratas del Iguazú) are on the border of Argentina and Brazil, approximately 2000km from the capital of Bolivia by car. 8 A forward-oriented repair sequence, typically a word search, locates the trouble-source in some as-yet unproduced element of the turn-in-progress (Scheglof, 1979). 9 Yumi’s turn in line 19 is not a collaborative completion of Yoh’s incomplete TCU in line 18, i.e., she is not saying “taki means river.” Instead, she seems to be initiating a new sentence as evidenced by the vowel extension and fat intonation. She completes this TCU in line 21.
References Bolden, G. (2012). Across languages and cultures: Brokering problems of understanding in conversational repair. Language in Society, 41(1), 97–121. doi:10.1017/S0047404511000923 Button, G., & Casey, N. (1985). Topic nomination and topic pursuit. Human Studies, 8(1), 3–55. Drew, P. (1997). “Open” class repair initiators in response to sequential sources of troubles in conversation. Journal of Pragmatics, 28(1), 69–101. Hellermann, J., Eskildsen, S., & Pekarek Doehler, S. (Eds.). (2019). Conversation analytic research on learning-in-action: The complex ecology of L2 interaction in the wild. Dordrecht: Springer.
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Gofman, E. (1981). Forms of talk. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Goodwin, C. (1980). Restarts, pauses, and the achievement of a state of mutual gaze at turn-beginning. Sociological Inquiry, 50(3–4), 272–302. Goodwin, C. (1984). Notes on story structure and the organization of participation. In J. Heritage & J. M. Atkinson (Eds.), Structures of social action: Studies in conversation analysis (pp. 225–246). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Goodwin, C. (1986). Audience diversity, participation and interpretation. Text, 6(3), 283–316. Goodwin, C. (2007). Interactive footing. In E. Holt & R. Clift (Eds.), Reporting talk: Reported speech in interaction (pp. 16–46). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Goodwin, M. H., & Goodwin, C. (1986). Gesture and coparticipation in the activity of searching for a word. Semiotica, 62(1–2), 51–76. Greer, T. (2008). Accomplishing diference in bilingual interaction: Translation as backwards-oriented medium-repair. Multilingua, 27, 99–127. Greer, T. (2013a). Word search sequences in bilingual interaction: Codeswitching and embodied orientation toward shifting participant constellations. Journal of Pragmatics, 57, 100–117. Greer, T. (2013b). Establishing a pattern of dual-receptive language alternation: Insights from a series of successive haircuts. Australian Journal of Communication, 40(2), 47–61. Greer, T. (2013c). Some multimodal constraints on L2 use in client-hairdresser talk. Journal of School of Languages and Communication, Kobe University, 10, 44–58. Greer, T. (2015). Appealing to a broker: Initiating third-person repair in mundane second language interaction. Novitas ROYAL, 9(1), 1–14. Greer, T. (2016). On doing Japanese awe in English talk. In G. Kasper & M. Prior (Eds.), Emotion in multilingual settings (pp. 111–130). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Greer, T. (2019). Initiating and delivering news of the day: Interactional competence as joint-development. Journal of Pragmatics, 146, 150–164. Greer, T., Ishida, M., & Tateyama, Y. (Eds.). (2017). Interactional competence in Japanese as an additional language. Honolulu, HI: National Foreign Language Resource Center. Haddington, P., Heinemann, T., Mondada, L., &, Neville, M. (Eds.). (2014). Multiactivity in social interaction. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Hindmarsh, J. (2010). Peripherality, participation and communities of practice: Examining the patient in dental training. In N. Llewellyn & J. Hindmarsh (Eds.), Organisation, interaction and practice (pp. 218–240). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Jeferson, G. (2004). Glossary of transcription symbols with an introduction. In G. H. Lerner (Ed.), Conversation analysis: Studies from the frst generation (pp. 13–31). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Kidwell, M. H. (1997). Demonstrating recipiency: Knowledge displays as a resource for the unaddressed recipient. Issues in Applied Linguistics, 8(2), 85–96. Koshik, I. (2002). Designedly incomplete utterances: A pedagogical practice for eliciting knowledge displays in error correction sequences. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 35(3), 277–309. Lerner, G. H. (1992). Assisted storytelling: Deploying shared knowledge as a practical matter. Qualitative Sociology, 15(3), 247–271. Lerner, G. H. (1996). On the place of linguistic resources in the organization of talk-in interaction: “Second person” reference in multi-party conversation. Pragmatics, 6(3), 281–294. Lerner, G. H. (2003). Selecting next speaker: The context-sensitive operation of a context-free organization. Language in Society, 32(2) 177–201.
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Levinson, S. C. (1988). Putting linguistics on a proper footing: Explorations in Gofman’s concepts of participation. In P. Drew & A. Wooton (Eds.), Erving Gofman: Exploring the interactional order (pp. 161–227). Oxford, UK: Polity Press. Markaki, V., & Mondada, L. (2012). Embodied orientations towards co-participants in multinational meetings. Discourse Studies, 14(1), 31–52. Mondada, L. (2018). Multiple temporalities of language and body in interaction: Challenges for transcribing multimodality. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 51(1), 85–106. Pomerantz, A. (1988). Ofering a candidate answer: An information seeking strategy. Communications Monographs, 55(4), 360–373. Raymond, G., & Lerner, G. H. (2014). A body and its involvements. In P. Haddington, T. Heinneman, L. Mondada, & M. Neville (Eds.), Multiactivity in social interaction (pp. 227–246). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Sacks, H. (1992). Lectures on conversation. Oxford: Blackwell. Sacks, H., Scheglof, E. A., & Jeferson, G. (1974). A simplest systematics for the organization of turn taking for conversation. Language, 50(4), 696–735. Saft, S. (2001). Displays of concession in university faculty meetings. Pragmatics, 11(3), 223–262. Scheglof, E. A. (1979). The relevance of repair to syntax-for-conversation in discourse and syntax. In T. Givon (Ed.), Syntax and semantics, vol. 12 discourse and syntax (pp. 261–286). New York, NY: Academic Press. Scheglof, E. A. (1988). Gofman and the analysis of conversation. In P. Drew & A. Wooton (Eds.), Erving Gofman: Exploring the interactional order (pp. 89–135). Oxford, UK: Polity Press. Scheglof, E. A. (1995). Parties and talking together: Two ways in which numbers are signifcant for talk-in-interaction. In P. ten Have & G. Psathas (Eds.), Situated order: Studies in the social organization of talk and embodied activities (pp. 31–42). Washington, DC: University Press of America. Scheglof, E. A. (1998). Body torque. Social Research, 65(3), 535–596. Scheglof, E. A. (2007). Sequence organization in interaction: A primer in conversation analysis. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Scheglof, E. A., Jeferson, G., & Sacks, H. (1977). The preference for self-correction in the organization of repair in conversation. Language, 53(2), 361–382. Svennevig, J. (2004). Other-repetition as display of hearing, understanding and emotional stance. Discourse Studies, 6(4), 489–516. Wong, J. (2000). Delayed next turn repair initiation in native/non-native speaker English conversation. Applied Linguistics, 21(2), 244–267.
APPENDIX Additional Transcript Conventions
Embodied Action Embodied actions are transcribed according to the following conventions, adapted from those developed by Mondada (2018). The embodied elements are positioned in a series of tiers relative to the talk and rendered in gray. || |---> ---->| >> ---->> . . . . . ----,,,,, ~~~~
Descriptions of embodied actions are delimited between vertical bars The action described continues across subsequent lines The action reaches its conclusion The action commences prior to the excerpt The action continues after the excerpt Preparation of the action The apex of the action is reached and maintained Retraction of the action The action moves or transforms in some way.
The current speaker is identifed with capital letters. Participants doing an embodied action are identifed relative to the talk in lower case in another tier, along with one of the following codes for the action: gz lh rh bh ll
gaze left hand right hand both hands left leg
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px hd gs
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proximity head gesture
Framegrabs are positioned relative to the moment at which they were taken, as marked by a vertical bar in the talk tier.
Translation ore ja nai me COP NEG It’s not me.
First tier shows Japanese talk (Hepburn romanization) Second tier gives a literal English gloss of each morpheme Third tier gives a vernacular English translation in bold
Abbreviations Used in Literal Gloss IP NOM O GEN TOP QT Q POL HON CoS COP NEG PST CONT POL
Interactional particle (e.g., ne, sa, no, yo, na) Nominative particle (-ga) Object marker (-o) Genitive (-no) Topic Marker (-wa) Quotation marker (-to, -tte) Question marker (ka and its variants) Politeness marker Honorifc marker Change-of-state token Copulative verb Negative morpheme Past tense morpheme Continuing (non-fnal) form Polite form
5 NANUN-PREFACING IN KOREAN STORY-TELLING Gahye Song and Hansun Zhang Waring
Introduction This chapter examines a particular use of reference to speaker in Korean in the environment where participants produce a series of tellings and construct a larger sequence of topical talk collaboratively. More specifcally, the analysis focuses on how the initiation of a similar type of telling or what we call ‘parallel telling’ (also see ‘second stories’ in Sacks, 1992, v2, p. 250 and ‘a series of stories’ in Ryave, 1978) is often marked with self-referential expressions in the turnconstructional unit (TCU)-initial position. The majority of self-referential forms used in this environment take the form of the frst-person pronoun na or ce ‘I’1 followed by the topic particle -nun (nanun hereafter for both na+nun and ce+nun with cen as the contracted form of cenun). The use of nanun at the outset of tellership transition has been noted previously (e.g., Oh, 2007; see Lee & Yonezawa, 2008 for a similar phenomenon in Japanese). However, the existing studies mostly focus on how the topic particle -nun projects a multi-unit turn and thus can be used in pre-telling utterances. In this study, we show instances where the TCU-initial nanun is used as the next speaker initiates a similar type of telling to that of previous talk in terms of topic and action, as well as format.
Background All examples shown in this chapter contain tellings of various lengths in which the participants report on personal experiences as they collaboratively construct a larger sequence of topical talk. The existing studies on the use of person references in storytelling have mainly focused on third-person references,
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explicating how tellers select a particular referential form for a character according to various interactional purposes such as marking protagonism or showing empathy. For example, Durnati (1984) shows how Italian subject pronouns, such as lui ‘he’ and lei ‘she,’ are used to identify the protagonist of a story or to convey the teller’s empathy or positive afect toward certain referents. In contrast, demonstratives, such as questo/-a ‘this’ and quello/-a ‘that,’ are reserved for minor characters or people with whom the teller displays lack of empathy or negative afect. Similarly, Oh (2007) shows that in Korean, a quasi-pronoun yay, which is a default referential form for co-present others, is recurrently used to refer to the (non-present) protagonists in the story. Minor characters are referred to by either kyay – a default referential form for non-present others – or by descriptions. Tellers’ self-reference in story-telling has been documented in a handful of studies (e.g., Oh, 2007; Lee & Yonezawa, 2008). In their conversation analytic (CA) study of reference to speaker in Korean, Oh (2007) reports an instance where the frst-person pronoun na ‘I’ followed by the topic particle -nun, i.e., nanun, appears in a story preface in which the teller describes their negative internal state. The author argues that the use of overt reference to speaker nanun contributes to projecting a further telling that accounts for the described negative state. The topic particle -nun conveys the meaning of ‘contrast’ (Sohn, 1999), and by invoking the (possible) contrast between the teller and their recipients with respect to the described negative state, the teller efectively presents the state as one that is not shared with the recipients and thus requires an account. In other words, Oh shows how nanun can be used to project a further telling upon launching a story. In their qualitative analysis of Japanese conversation data, Lee & Yonezawa (2008) describe the use of the overt reference to speaker, atashi ‘I,’ at the outset of tellership transition. Pointing out that overt reference to speaker is unnecessary for the purpose of disambiguating the referent, i.e., who is being referred to is clear from the context, they argue that using overt reference to the speaker at the initiation of a multi-unit telling can be understood as a foor-taking strategy. In this study, we present an analysis of a practice that has not been described in the previous studies – using reference to speaker to mark a telling that is similar to that of previous talk in terms of topic, action, and format. The term ‘parallel telling’ was originally coined by the frst author (Song, 2019) to capture a range of topical talk (Maynard, 1980) (e.g., share information, ofer opinion, tell stories) that bear various orders of similarities to prior talk but do not necessarily involve ‘stories’ as narrated events. In other words, parallel telling can but does not exclusively entail ‘second stories’ (Sacks, 1992) or stories in a series (Ryave, 1978). A telling such as I was always a ‘swimming pool’ (see Extract 1), for example, is not typically recognizable as a story (also see ‘topical telling’ in Ishida, 2011, pp. 49–50) although Sacks (1992) remarks on the possibility of second stories being produced in single utterances (v2, p. 250).
84 Gahye Song and Hansun Zhang Waring
In that regard then, all the instances in this chapter may be considered second stories. We have, nevertheless, decided to keep the wording ‘parallel telling’ to remain mindful of the notion of a prototypical story with its conventional arc.
Data This study is part of a larger project on person references in Korean, for which approximately 15 hours of video-recorded casual conversation in Korean were collected from 34 participants. The excerpts presented in this study mainly come from two hours of recording that involve seven participants who are women in their late 20s to early 40s. The two-hour recordings were transcribed and analyzed within the conversation analytic framework. A collection of eight instances that involve the use of self-reference with the topic particle -nun at the tellership transition point constitutes the basis of this project, along with 12 instances that involve tellership transition with other forms of self-reference (i.e., zero anaphora,2 frst-person pronoun followed by particles other than -nun, frst-person pronoun without any particles, as well as four cases with no reference to speaker) to demarcate the precise boundaries of our core collection.3 The three-line transcription convention is used to present the data, with the frst line representing the original utterance in Korean, the second line a morpheme-by-morpheme translation (see Appendix, adopted from Lee, 1991), and the third line an English gloss in bold. Also bolded is our analytical focus nanun in the frst and second lines. When quoting particular utterances from the frst line, we use its Yale Romanization followed by an English translation in single quotes (e.g., ttaymwuney ‘because of ’ for 때문에).
Analysis In this section, we frst show four cases where speakers use nanun-prefacing4 to launch a similar type or ‘parallel’ telling to that of the previous talk in terms of topic, action, and format. We end the section with a ffth case – one that involves the use of self-reference without the topic particle -nun in launching a telling, where the story does not appear to bear the same kind of relationship to prior talk as those launched with nanun prefaces.
Nanun-prefacing: Initiate Parallel Telling In the frst case, four participants – Sara, Suji, Hana, and Lina (all pseudonyms) – are talking about their potential and actual childhood nicknames. Prior to the following segment, Sara said that her parents were going to name her seywuk before she was born and added that that name would have given her a bad nickname, seywu ‘shrimp.’ As will be seen across Extracts 1 to 3, this triggers a chain of tellings about childhood nicknames among the participants. Everyone
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laughs after the mention of Sara’s possible nickname, and in line 01, Suji adds an increment ‘in elementary school,’ specifying when such teasing would have happened. Extract 1 Childhood Nicknames (1) 01
SUJI:
gaze to Sara-초등(h)학교(h)때
Elementary school when gaze to Sara-in elem(h)entary schoo(h)l
02
SARA:
03 04 05 06
SUJI:
07
SARA:
08 09
SUJI:
HANA: SUJI:
à
HANA:
어: 막= yes just yea:h just= =hehehehe[hehehehe] [hehehehe]hehehehe hehe[hehehe [hehe .hh 전 맨날 수영장, 막 이러(h)구, I-TOP cen always swimming pool just like this [hehe .hh I was always swimming pool doing like thi(h)s, frowning, pointing to Suji-어 그러니까,= yes like that-DET+INTERR frowning, pointing to Suji- yeah tell me about it,= =[hehehehehe =[hehehehehe
Note that in line 06, Suji launches a telling, with nanun-prefacing, of what her own nickname was – swuyengcang ‘swimming pool’ (line 06). The turn begins with cen (a humble form of na), a contraction of cenun, which is followed by a noun phrase swuyengcang ‘swimming pool.’ The word swuyengcang is said in an animated tone that makes the utterance hearable as quoting other kids’ teasing of her. Such hearing is reinforced by the turn-ending mak ilekwu ‘doing like this,’ a phrase that commonly punctuates direct quoted speech. Note that Suji is quoting other kids, not herself, but the turn nonetheless begins with the self-reference and moves on, without a prosodic break, to quoted speech by other kids. In other words, although nanun and what follows do not cohere as a grammatically ftted unit, it is nevertheless seamlessly produced as a single TCU, suggesting that the function of nanun may be discourse organizational in addition to person referential. In short, the use of overt reference to speaker in this turn may be doing something other than designating the agent of the described action. It appears to indicate that what follows is a parallel telling of a similar case that contributes to the topic of awkward childhood nicknames, hers being ‘swimming pool.’ As can be seen, Sara treats this addition, along with Hana’s laughter (lines 09), as an appropriate contribution to the ongoing talk (kulenikka ‘tell me about it’ in line 07).
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As the nickname episode continues, we observe additional examples of this particular usage of nanun-prefacing as Lina and Sara proceed to contribute further examples of embarrassing childhood nicknames in a slightly competitive environment, in Sara’s case, with a multi-unit telling. Extract 2 Childhood Nicknames (2) à 어: 난 송해[였어. Yeah I-TOP nanun Songhay be-ANT-IE yeah: I was [songhay 02 SARA: à [ facing Suji-나는: I-TOP nanun [facing Suji-I wa:s 03 나는 오↑ 때문[에. turns to Lina ] I-TOP nanun oh because of I was because of [Oh. turns to Lina ] 04 SUJI: [ gaze to Lina ] ============((lines omitted))================= 17 SARA: 엉::, yes yea::h, 18 LINA: (.) 19 [( )] 20 SARA: à [나는 ] ↑성때문에. I-TOP nanun last name because of [I was ] because of my last name. 21 오:씨오:[는 애들이, ]= oh last name oh-TOP kids-NOM the last name O:h- Oh [is for kids, ]= 22 HANA: [ nods-마자, ]= right [nods -right, ]= 23 SARA: =너무 놀리기 좋자나. 미국에서두, too making fun-NOML good America-LOC-ADD =too good to make fun of you know. in America too, 01
LINA:
In line 01, with nanun-prefacing, Lina shares that her nickname was songhay (Songhay is a well-known senior male television host). Soon after Lina begins her turn, Sara also launches a nickname-related telling (lines 02–03), beginning her utterance with nanun. Without a prosodic break, an adverbial phrase ‘because of Oh’ follows, and the utterance ends with a falling intonation. Sara halts as Lina’s telling gets the participants’ attention frst (line 04), and when Lina’s telling winds down (lines 17–18), Sara resumes her telling, again, with
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nanun-prefacing, ending the utterance with a falling intonation (line 20). After establishing the last name Oh is easy to make fun of (lines 21 and 23), Sara produces a multi-unit turn on various nicknames she had in elementary school because of her last name Oh, such as “oh no,” “Oreo,” and obangttek, a type of bread with red bean paste flling (data not shown). Nanun-prefacing is also used at a juncture where the current sequence of topical talk is about to close. The following example is a few minutes after the conversation presented in the previous example. By this time, all participants have made at least one contribution to talking about their funny nicknames. In the beginning of the following segment, Hana is wrapping up a telling about her friend whose nickname was pal ‘foot’ because of her last name son ‘hand’ (line 01).5 Extract 3 Childhood Nicknames (3) 01
HANA:
02 03 04 05 06
SUJI: HANA: SUJI: SARA:
07 08
발혜정이라 그러드(h)라(h)구, foot heyceng-QUOT like that do she signs pal heyceng gaze to H-[hehehehehe] [hehehehehe] [hehehehe] [sips cofee ] ( ) 뭐 놀리구 (너무심해,) what tease-CONN too much. ( ) tease and it’s too much, (0.5) 이름갖구. name with with your name. smiles, gaze to Sara [ nods ]= gaze to Suji-[유치하게. ]= childishly gaze to Suji- [childishly. ]= =puts down a cup .HH 어 나는: [나는 나- ] oh I-TOP nanun I-TOP nanun I =puts down a cup .HH oh I: [I: I] [ gaze to H ] [ gaze to H ] 그 머↑지, 나: 처:음에 가르칠때, that what-COMM I at frst teaching when what is ↑it, when I: was teaching the frst time,
09 10
SUJI:
11
HANA:
12 13 14
SUJI:
15 16
SUJI, SARA:
nods, gaze to H
HANA:
(.) 젤: 먼- 젤: 처음 수업 가르쳤든게 most fr- most frst class teach thing-NOM
SARA:
à
SARA: HANA:
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17
18 19
SUJI:
20
HANA:
SARA:
(.) the very fr- the frst teaching I did was 일학년 애들: [영어가르치는거였다, ] frst grade kids English teach thing be-ANT-DECL teaching [English to frst graders,] [ gaze to H, nods ] 초등학교,= Elementary school elementary school,= =eyes wide-초등학교 일학년:, elementary school frst grade =eyes wide-frst graders in elementary school,
In line 01, Hana concludes the telling by saying that now her friend signs pal ‘foot’ on all her paintings, to which Suji responds with laughter, treating Hana’s telling as a funny story, and Hana laughs as well without saying anything further (lines 02–04). After Suji disengages from the mutual laughter (line 05), Sara makes an assessment, which is closing-implicative (line 06). A 0.5-second gap develops as no one takes the next turn (line 07). Facing no response, Sara adds two increments, ilum katkkwu ‘with name’ (line 08) and yuchihakey ‘childishly’ (line 10), as Suji responds with nodding (line 09). Thus, at this point, the sequence of tellings about childhood nicknames has more or less run its course. However, Hana has one more story to add to the talk about funny nicknames. The way she launches a new telling orients to both the task at hand – i.e., launching another story related to the topic of ongoing talk – and its placement, i.e., keeping open the sequence in which her story can be properly told. Latching on to Sara’s utterance yuchihakey ‘childishly,’ Hana takes a big inbreath and, with another nanun (line 11), successfully secures the attention of Suji and Sara (lines 12–13). She then begins what appears to be a new TCU, which starts with na ‘I’ (line 11), is halted by a word search, i.e., ku meci ‘what is it,’ (line 14), and then restarts right afterward with a complete clause that projects further talk, na ceumey kalucilttay ‘when I was teaching the frst time’ (line 14). After Suji and Sara’s go-ahead (line 15), Hana gives another piece of background information (lines 16 to 20) before proceeding to tell how her students come up with creative nicknames for each other over multiple turn units (data not shown). Therefore, at a juncture where a sequence of topical talk about childhood nicknames is about to close down, Hana uses nanun at the turn beginning to frame her upcoming talk as a parallel telling to what has been told so far – funny nicknames that children come up with. The design of the turn beginning – latching, inbreath, and repetition of nanun – may suggest the speaker’s orientation to the vulnerability of the current sequence coming to a closure. In the fnal extract of this section, we show that nanun-prefacing is used to launch a second story around a diferent topic. In the following segment, EJ and
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MS, who have recently moved to the United States, are talking about embarrassing moments they experienced due to their English profciency. Prior to the following segment, EJ was telling MS about how she tends to be quiet in her ESL class unlike other students, and because of that, her teacher kept calling on her. Being constantly called on was very stressful, and she even contemplated dropping the class. Luckily, she had a chance to speak with the teacher a few days earlier to address the issue. Extract 4 ESL Class (1) 01
02
03
04
05
06 07 08
09
10 11
12
13
약간, 나는, 질문을 하기전에:, little bit I-TOP question-ACC do-NOML before-LOC like, before asking a question, >아니< 대답을 하기전↑에, 생각할 시간이 no response-ACC do-NOML before-LOC think-ATTR time-NOM >I mean< answering a question, I need some time [ 좀 필요하다. ]= little bit necessary-DECL [ to think. ]= MS: [ nods-그쵸그쵸. ]= right [ nods -right right. ]= EJ: =( )좀(h) 달(h)라(he)hehe, little bit give-IMPER =g(h)iv(h)e me s(h)ome ( )hehehe, [hehehehe] MS: [hehehehe] à 저는 가며는, 거기두, I-TOP cenun go-COND-TOP there-ADD I-TOP when I go, there too, 어::. (0.5) 다들 gaze to Y-되게:, uh everyone very u::h. (0.5) everybody is gaze to Y -very:, EJ: nods MS: (0.5) 일케 남미에서 온:, like South America from come-ATTR (0.5) like those who are from South America:, EJ: (0.2) nods-음::, mm (0.2) nods -mm::, MS: 사람들이 되게: >일케< 활발하게:, people-NOM very like actively seem to be ve:ry >like< active:, EJ:
90 Gahye Song and Hansun Zhang Waring
얘 [기:를 하는]거 같애여. talking-ACC do-thing like-DEF and [talkative. ] 15 EJ: [ nods -그쵸: 역시, ] right certainly [nods -right, certainly, ] ==========((22 lines omitted))========== 37 MS: =>그러고< 모, 무슨 답을 얘기하라그러는데, and what what answer-ACC speak-QUOT-do-CIRCUM =>and< like, the teacher tells me to say the answer, 38 EJ: nods 39 MS: gesturing page fipping-(0.2) 안했다(h)고,= NEG-do-ANT-DECL-QUOT gesturing page fipping-(0.2) I say I didn’t d(h)o it,= 40 EJ: =[hehehehe ] 41 MS: =[다(h), hehe, 아(h)직] 다(h) 못했다(h)구, all yet all NEG(IMPOT)-do-ANT-DECL-QUOT =[I(h) hehe, co(h)uldn’t ] f(h)nish them ye(h)t, 42 [hehehehe] 43 EJ: [ nods ] $그르니까:.$ 아:, like that-DET+INTERR [ nods ] $ri:ght.$ a:h, 14
From lines 01 to 03, EJ reports what she had told her teacher – that she cannot answer right away when the teacher calls on her, because she needs some time to think frst before answering. MS immediately provides a token of agreement (line 04) and displays a strong afliation with EJ’s characterization of her diffculty in speaking in English, i.e., you need time to think before speaking. In line 05, EJ wraps up her story by reporting her request to her teacher – to give her some time before expecting her answer. EJ presents this as an embarrassing request to make, as she produces and ends the turn with laughter (lines 05, 06) (see “troubles-resistance laughter” in Jeferson, 1984). MS reciprocates laughter in overlap with EJ’s (line 07). Thus, EJ’s telling reaches a completion at this point, with both participants treating it as an embarrassing story that happened due to the lack of English profciency. In response to EJ’s story, MS launches her own story, beginning the turn with the TCU-initial nanun (line 08). What follows is in parallel with EJ’s telling up to line 05, the evidence of which can be found in both the turn composition and what gets told in the ensuing talk. First, as MS launches the story (lines 08 to 14), she employs vocabulary that is indexical to the previous talk. MS’s turn begins with nanun and followed by kamyenun ‘when (I) go’ and kekitwu ‘there also’ (line 08). In this turn, MS establishes the setting of her telling, which turns out to be her ESL class, but that is only implied using keki ‘there.’ As the
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TCU-initial nanun indexes the initiation of a telling that is parallel or similar to what has been just told in some way – keki ‘there’ is possibly heard as MS’s ESL class. This hearing is confrmed in the talk that follows. Second, MS’s telling turns out to be about her being quiet in her class, just as EJ depicted herself in her story. That is, unlike those who are from Latin America, who are very active and talkative (lines 11, 13, 14), MS, the only Asian student in her class, stays quiet. She even pretends to not have fnished exercises just to avoid having to say the answers in front of class (lines 37 to 42). This is told in a similar way to how EJ presented her embarrassing request to her teacher in the previous story. That is, what MS reports as an embarrassing incident, i.e., choosing to be seen as unable to fnish exercises instead of speaking in front of class, is told with laughter that exhibits troubles-resistance (cf. Jeferson, 1984). In response to MS’s second story, EJ produces a token of agreement kulenikka ‘right’ and ends the turn with a sigh-like ‘a:h’ (line 43). In short, MS’s story was told in response to EJ’s story, as a second story that reinforces the gist of EJ’s story, i.e., you get to do embarrassing things because of English, by adding her own experience that is similar to EJ’s. Moreover, it is organized in a similar way to how EJ’s story is organized, i.e., the embarrassing thing is reported as a ‘funny’ incident at the peak of the story and is told to empathize with EJ. In many respects, this second story is parallel to the frst story it is responding to, and its launching was done with nanun-prefacing.
Speaker Reference Without Topic Particle: Initiating Non-parallel Telling So far, we have shown how nanun-prefacing can be used to launch various forms of parallel tellings or second stories in diferent environments. In our data, there are also cases where tellings are initiated with speaker reference but without the topic particle -nun. A close examination of such instances reveals an interesting contrast with those with nanun-prefacing. One example is presented here to illustrate the subtle diference. The following conversation is a few minutes after the one presented in Extract 4. Just prior to the beginning of the excerpt, EJ remarked that saying something short in the textbook is easy, but explaining something complicated or giving one’s opinion is tricky (line 01). Extract 5 ESL Class (2) 01
EJ:
nods->어 설명근데-< (.) 이제 막 영어를 써야되다보니까, but now like English-ACC use have to-DET+INTERR >but< (.) now I have to speak in English,
92 Gahye Song and Hansun Zhang Waring
circling index fnger around the head, gaze to M-뇌두 약간:,
03
brain-ADD little bit circling index fnger around the head, gaze to M -even the brain is a
04 05
06 07
08
09
10 11 12
13
14 15
16 17
18
19
20
bi:t smiles, nods EJ: 생각이 안나는 [긍까, ]= thought-NOM not-come out I mean not working [I mean, ]= MS: [smiles -mmm:]= EJ: =한 국 어 루 [두조차 이제 생(h)각이 안나구,] Korean in-ADD-even now thought-NOM not come out-CONN =even in Korean [I can’t th(h)ink, ] MS: smile-[$마자여 $ hehehehe ] right-IE smile -[$I know$ hehehehe ] EJ: 나는 그럼 도대체 이제 바보가 되는건가, I-TOP then now fool-NOM becoming thing-DUB am I now becoming stupid, MS: hehehehe, EJ: [( )] gaze to MS-( ) MS: à [저(h),] I [I(h), ] 어제, .hh어제 이제 그: 수업이 사일동안 하는데, yesterday yesterday now that class-NOM four days do-CIRCUM yesterday, .hh yesterday, now tha:t class is for four days and, EJ: nods MS: 그: 네:가지.-gaze to EJ that four things tho:se fou:r things-gaze to EJ EJ: [ nods ] MS: [ 모 리딩:, ] 라이링:, gaze to EJ what reading writing [you know, reading,] writing, gaze to EJ EJ: nods->어어:< yes yes nods ->yeah yea:h,< MS: 그: ㅁ-, that mUhm:, EJ: 리스[닝:, ] listening Liste[ning,] MS:
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[어 리]스닝 스피킹을:, yes listening speaking-ACC [yeah li]stening speaking,
21
MS:
22 23
EJ:
nods
MS:
더- 인제 °쫌°, 그: 하루하루씩 gaze to Y more now little bit that each day More- so each day gaze to Y
24 25
EJ:
nods
MS:
26
EJ:
>그< 하는식으루 해 [ 여:, 다 섞이기는하지만, ] That do-way-do-DEF all mixed-up-NOML-TOP do-CONCESS >uh< is devoted to one [even though they get all mixed up,] [ nods-음:, nods ] mm [ nods -mm:, nods ]
In lines 01 to 07, EJ talks about her difculty with speaking in English. During EJ’s turn, MS displays recognition (smiling and nodding in line 04 and mmm in line 06) and then gives a token of agreement (‘macaye “I know”’ in smiley voice in line 08) in overlap. EJ goes on, animating inner speech, icey paboga twenunkenka ‘am I now becoming stupid’ (line 09), hinting at her frustration. MS laughs in response (line 10) and then takes the next turn (line 12). In line 12, MS begins a new TCU referring to herself (‘ce “I”’). Unlike the previous examples, the frst-person pronoun ce ‘I’ is not followed by the topic particle -nun. MS continues, giving reference to time (“yesterday” in line 13), setting up for the upcoming telling. From line 13 on, she explains how her ESL class is structured – the class is four days a week, and each day of the week is assigned to one of the four skills, i.e., reading, writing, listening, and speaking (lines 13 to 26). What transpires after the excerpt is a multi-unit telling about what happened the previous day while she was trying to read a passage – it had been so long since she read anything, let alone in English, that she kept forgetting what she had just read. Note that MS’s uptake is non-parallel to EJ’s prior telling in that while EJ’s is simply a complaint about her difculty with English, MS tells a story that illustrates said problem. The presence or the absence of the topic particle -nun appears to be responsive to this subtle diference in the sequential environment.
Discussion and Conclusion This chapter examined a particular use of nanun in TCU-initial positions in the environment of storytelling. As we have shown, TCU-initial nanun indexes the initiation of a similar type of telling parallel to that in prior talk. This fnding contributes to the literature on person reference and storytelling in Korean in two respects. First, the study unveils an aspect of the function of the topic
94 Gahye Song and Hansun Zhang Waring
particle -nun in person reference. While previous studies have shown that personal reference followed by -nun is often used to usher in talk that in various ways bears a contrastive relationship to preceding talk (Kim, 1993; Oh, 2007), this study shows how nanun-prefaced talk may demonstrate similarity instead. The study also contributes to the literature on storytelling by showing how person reference may be used to initiate a particular type of telling. Even though the use of overt reference to speaker in initiating tellings of various sorts is frequently observed in Korean, systematic analyses of the phenomenon have been sporadic. Our description of nanun-prefacing takes one step toward building that analysis. Further research on the use of zero anaphora and nonverbal behavior as well as the use of bare NP (i.e., reference to speaker without any particles) in similar environments will enrich our understanding of the relationship between the type of telling and the use of diferent forms of speaker references. Finally, the use of nanun-prefacing to launch parallel telling also contributes more broadly to the conversation analytic concern of how within “clump stories” (Sacks, 1992, v2, p. 250) or “clustered stories” (Ryave, 1978, p. 120) are organized.
Notes 1 Ce ‘I’ is the humble form of the frst-person pronoun na ‘I,’ which is used when a speaker lowers oneself in the context of talking to someone superior (in age or in social position) or distant. 2 Zero anaphora is a ‘morphologically unrealized form of reference’ (Oh, 2007, p. 463) and considered as the most common referential expression in Korean (Chang, 1978; Oh, 2007). 3 The breakdown of referential forms at each point of tellership transition is as follows: No reference to speaker Zero anaphora to refer to speaker First-person pronoun na ‘I’ + topic particle -nun (nanun) First-person pronoun na ‘I’ without any particle First-person pronoun na ‘I’ + other particles
6 4 8* 4 4
4 Both forms of the frst-person pronoun, na and ce, may combine with the topic particle -nun. In this chapter, both na + nun (nanun) and ce + nun (cenun) in TCU-initial position will be called nanun-preface. 5 Hana begins telling about her friend’s nickname by beginning the turn with nanun, although it is not clear if this is another example of nanun-prefacing or a false start that quickly gets repaired. In line 03, Hana begins a new TCU by nanun, but it is soon cut of and followed by reference to her friend. 01 LINA:
난 송씬게 얼마나 시렀나 몰라,= I-TOP Song last name being how much hate-PAST not know How much I hated having the last name Song,=
Nanun-prefacing in Korean Story-telling
02 HANA:
03
95
=gaze to L-야 그래도너는 나아:, hey even so you-TOP better =gaze to L-hey but yours is not the wo:rst, 난- pointing to self-친구는 손씨였어.=손. I-TOP nanun friend-TOP Son last name be-PAST Son I- pointing to self -my friend was Son.=Son.
References Chang, S. J. (1978). Anaphora in Korean. In J. Hinds (Ed.), Linguistic Research (pp. 223-278). Edmonton, Canada: Linguistic Research Inc Durnati, A. (1984). The social meaning of subject pronouns in Italian conversation. Text & Talk, 4(4), 277–311. Ishida, M. (2011). Engaging in another person’s telling as recipient in L2 Japanese: Development of interactional competence during one-year study abroad. In G. Pallotti & J. Wagner (Eds.), L2 learning as social practice: Conversation-analytic perspectives (pp. 45–85). Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii National Foreign Language Resource Center. Jeferson, G. (1984). On the organization of laughter in talk about troubles. In J. M. Atkinson & J. Heritage (Eds.), Structures of social action: Studies in conversation analysis (pp. 347–369). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kim, K.-H. (1993). Topicality in Korean conversation: Conversation analytic perspective. In P. Clancy (Ed.), Japanese/Korean linguistics (Vol. 2). Stanford, CA: CSLI Publication. Lee, D.-Y., & Yonezawa, Y. (2008). The role of the overt expression of frst and second person subject in Japanese. Journal of Pragmatics, 40, 733–767. Lee, H. S. (1991). Tense, aspect, and modality: A discourse-pragmatic analysis of verbal afxes in Korean from a typological perspective (Publication no. 9115178). Doctoral dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles. ProQuest Dissertation Publishing, Ann Arbor, MI. Maynard, D. W. (1980). Placement of topic changes in conversation. Semiotica, 30(3–4), 263–290. Oh, S.-Y. (2007). Overt reference to speaker and recipient in Korean. Discourse Studies, 9(4), 462–492. Ryave, A. (1978). On the achievement of a series of stories. In J. Schenkein (Ed.), Studies in the organization of conversational interaction (pp. 113–132). New York: Academic Press. Sacks, H. (1992). Lectures on conversation. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Sohn, H. (1999). The Korean language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Song, G. (2019). Person reference in Korean (Publication no. 13882660). Doctoral dissertation, Teachers College, Columbia University. ProQuest Dissertation Publishing, Ann Arbor, MI.
APPENDIX
ACC ADD ANT ATTR CIRCUM COMM CONCESS COND CONN DECL DEF DET
Accusative particle Additive Anterior sufx Attributive Circumstantial Committal Concessive Conditional Connective Declarative Deferential particle Determinative
DET+INTERR DUB IE IMPER INTERR LOC NEG NEG(IMPOT) NOM NOML QUOT TOP
Deductive reasoning Dubitative Informal ending Imperative Interrogative Locative particle Negative particle Impotential negative Nominative particle Nominalizer Quotative particle Topic particle
6 TOWARD PROGRESSIVITY THROUGH REPAIRS IN MULTILINGUAL STORYTELLING Yo-An Lee and Ye Ji Lee
Introduction Storytelling in conversational interactions involves the contingent tasks of sequencing multiple turns and constructing narrative trajectories. Each turn at talk must connect and be relevant to the next turn(s) through which the topical theme of the story is maintained. The important feature to note here is that storytelling is interactionally and collaboratively accomplished in real-time discourse (Jeferson, 1978; Lerner, 1992; Mandelbaum, 2013; Sacks, 1972, 1978). Conversation analytic (CA) studies on storytelling have generally had two foci: (1) identifying the structural regularities through which narratives are initiated, deployed and completed in the course of interactions (Goodwin, 1984; Jeferson, 1978; Mandelbaum, 2013) and (2) tracing the process through which various social actions are accomplished through storytelling (Scheglof, 1997). Still, the key task for tellers and recipients is to maintain narrative trajectories by managing multiple turns at talk. In this regard, one important challenge is the omnipresent possibility of repairs. In storytelling, repairs tend to interfere with the progressivity of narrative content (Sacks, 1987; Scheglof, 2007) and thus topical coherence. When facing repairs, tellers are doubly bound by two conficting forces; they have to attend to intersubjective concerns prompted by repairs while moving their stories forward. As a result, storytelling poses a greater challenge to second language (L2) speakers who have limited linguistic repertoires in the target language compared to their native counterparts. In applied linguistics, CA studies have noted various structural regularities in L2 storytelling practices with some added interest regarding the development of linguistic features (Barraja-Rohan, 2015; Berger & Lauzon, 2016; Pekarek Doehler & Berger, 2018; Kasper & Prior, 2015; Kim, 2016; Lee & Hellermann,
98 Yo-An Lee and Ye Ji Lee
2014). However, few researchers have analyzed how participants manage the topical themes of the narrative contents through various repair sequences that deter the progressivity of the telling. The present study is designed to examine repair sequences in multilingual storytelling practices and to explicate how L2 tellers and their recipients manage repairs. Their interpretive choices regarding repairs tell us about what matters in building narrative content and how they manage these problems to restore the topical themes of their stories. The analysis is based on a data corpus collected from four groups of Korean learners of English who participated in weekly speech sessions. The fndings are organized into two sections in which two different types of repairable (i.e., linguistic and content) are managed. The analysis provides realistic descriptions of the nature of the challenges L2 participants face in managing multiple turns and constructing narrative content, an important dimension of communicative competence for L2 speakers.
Background Storytelling and Topical Theme CA studies on storytelling have focused on tracing how narrative contents are produced interactionally (Kasper & Prior, 2015). This approach has resulted in an emphasis on the features of telling rather than those of story in storytelling sequences; their fndings reveal various interactive actions that tellers and recipients engage in. This approach pulls into view that storytelling is more than recounting narrative contents; it also involves achieving social actions (Scheglof, 1997) such as joking, complaining, gossiping, performing institutional roles, and even engaging in social– relational work (Berger & Lauzon, 2016). Wong’s studies (Chapters 2–3), for instance, demonstrate how social relationships like friendship are manifested in the details of storytelling episodes. These fndings are credited to CA’s emphasis on sequential details that trace interactive moves in stories-in-progress. However, CA’s sequential analysis can be equally efective in tracing the process through which L2 tellers organize narrative contents in the evolving storytelling sequences. Tellers have to produce and manage multiple turns. As a result, each turn at talk is made relevant to prior and subsequent turns, and these turns must therefore cohesively relate to form stories. The multiple turns thus function like a ‘package’ of turns that is not available in a single turnconstructional unit (Sidnell, 2011, p. 174). In his seminal work on this issue, Sacks (1978) noted how tellers sequence narrative content to constitute the stories’ topical theme. For example, if a story is a joke about three daughters, the discussion of the frst two daughters may work as a setup for a story about the third daughter as the climactic point. This line of research seems to identify and trace the story dimensions of storytelling practices. Nonetheless, maintaining topical theme entails distinctive
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structural tasks for both storytellers and recipients. They need to suspend regular turn-taking mode (Sacks, 1974) and secure the conversational foor so that tellers can produce multiple utterances. Tellers need to organize their utterances to be recognizable as stories by establishing proper beginnings and endings (Sacks, 1992, pp. 261–266). Topical coherence is therefore likely to be housed in common structural components that range from story prefaces to climaxes and story appreciation (Goodwin, 1984). Recipients must also be oriented to the task of maintaining the topical themes of stories. If a teller deploys a story preface like ‘you want to hear a story my sister told me last night’ (Sacks, 1974), recipients may or may not align themselves as recipients; they may respond by ofering a go-ahead, blocking, or providing a preemptive utterance (Goodwin, 1986). Recipients may also show that they are oriented toward the teller’s particular stance by displaying alignment and afliation at sequential junctures (Day & Kjærbeck, 2019; Lindström & Sorjonen, 2013; Stivers, 2008). These moves by the recipients also contribute to the construction of topical themes in storytelling practices. The orientation toward the topical theme can also manifest, paradoxically, when topic shifts occur in a storytelling sequence. Thus, when shifts of topic occur, participants do additional work to lessen the abruptness by using various verbal markers. Scheglof and Sacks (1973) demonstrated how speakers mark topic shifts in the course of interaction with utterances like ‘actually’ or ‘by the way’ (Crow, 1983) or even ‘alright’ (Holt & Drew, 2005). Speakers may also take gradual steps toward topic shifts by connecting comments to prior utterances by acknowledging, assessing, commenting, or using fgurative expressions (Jefferson, 1993, pp. 9–10). When returning to previously discussed topics, speakers tend to mark those occasions to ease the transition by saying ‘anyway’ (Sacks, 1992). Using these utterances, participants can soften or qualify the disruptions on coherence caused by topic shifts. Relatedly, Wong (2000a) noted a ‘second saying’ practice in which the teller ofers parenthetical accounts for their frst saying before producing a second saying. In this context, the second saying seems to resume the telling that was briefy halted during the interaction. As a result, what appears to be a disruption in the telling, in fact, functions as a resuming move designed to maintain the narrative trajectory (Jeferson, 1972). These practices indicate that participants are oriented toward stories’ topical themes.
Repairs in Multilingual Storytelling In the prior section, we noted that the possibility of repairs is omnipresent in storytelling tasks. Monzoni and Drew (2009), for example, described an instance where a non-knowledgeable recipient intervenes mid-telling to ask a question through repair initiation. The recipient’s question even comes to be disafliative in the context of a complaint telling (also see Mandelbaum, 1991). Given L2
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participants’ limited linguistic repertoires, the unfavorable efect of repairs on the progressivity of the telling is even more pronounced in multilingual storytelling sequences. Applied linguistics researchers have extensively examined the pedagogical relevance of repairs (Hellermann, 2008, 2009; Hosoda, 2006; Kasper, 2006; Lilja, 2014). Hellermann (2008), for example, highlighted the diferent ways in which L2 speakers of varying profciency levels come to terms with repairs for word searches. Others have conducted longitudinal investigations of multilingual storytelling to identify how linguistic and sequential properties change and develop over time (Barraja-Rohan, 2015; Brouwer & Wagner, 2004; Pekarek Doehler & Berger, 2018). These longitudinal studies amply demonstrate how challenging it is for L2 tellers to manage the multiple turns required in storytelling. In her study of a Japanese exchange student, Akiko, in Australia, Barraja-Rohan (2015) found that while Akiko showed some developmental changes in using a more varied repertoire and more complex constructional units over 24 weeks, her stories were still composed of disparate parts and thus not strung together to form complete narratives. Pekarek Doehler and Berger’s study (2018) of a German speaker of French produced similar fndings; the subject took several months to develop the ability to relate turns to prior talk while establishing tellable features of the stories. The fact that storytelling involves such challenges reinforces the importance of examining how tellers manage topical coherence when facing repairs. While repairs draw tellers and recipients toward intersubjective concern, tellers need to move their stories forward. Thus, repairs can change the shape or order of interactional consequence and thereby alter stories’ topical coherence (Scheglof, 1979). Stories involving too many prolonged interruptions may become stalled or not get told in the way the tellers conceived them. Repair sequences can thus create tension in relation to teller’s eforts toward story progressivity (Heritage, 2007). Scheglof (2007) aptly described the dynamics between these two conficting orientations: Moving from some element to a hearably-next-one with nothing intervening is the embodiment of, and the measure of, progressivity. Should something intervene between some element and what is hearable as the next one due – should something violate or interfere with their contiguity, whether the next sound, next word or next turn – it will be heard as qualifying the progressivity of the talk, and will be examined for its import, for what understanding should be accorded it. (p. 15) To sum, repair operations produce various interactional consequences in conversational storytelling. In this regard, Jeferson’s (1987) distinction between embedded and exposed correction proves useful for diferentiating how reparative moves afect ongoing talk. Embedded corrections are by-the-way occurrences
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in the ongoing course of some talk. Here, participants often make such corrections without turning them into separate interactional treatments. In contrast, exposed corrections make the activities of correcting prominent and focal points of interactions; participants may prompt accounting practices to justify or explain such correction (Antaki, 1994). Repairs in multilingual storytelling are too complex to be contained in a few categorical classifcations. Linguistic matters might prompt repair sequences, but not all matters result in interactional negotiations. Repairs are also occasioned by the uncertainty the participants display on some narrative contents. Some contents may become focal points of interactions while others are just passed over. At times, even determining the nature of a repairable can prove difcult. In sorting out these complex repairs, Jeferson’s distinction emphasizes the character of the contingent decisions participants make in working through repairs and resuming their stories. The following excerpt illustrates the complex nature of repairs and their relationships to stories-in-progress. Here, the teller (L), a middle-aged female Korean, discusses her experience going to a rock concert with her sister. Notice how the teller resumes her telling after a repair sequence. Extract 1 Close 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10
L:
L:
à à à
L:
à
S:
.h ah: (.) haha an:d (1.0) aha: when- hm when the (.) concert- ah when we .h ah went into um m the theate:r, .h ah: (1.0) .h our seat:s (.) are: (0.5) tch in the (.) ffth row, ffth row from the sta:ge an:d in the cente:r, so: I can see the singe:r, (.) in the straight and very: .h ah: um:: ah:: (.) near? nea:r close? clo:se. (.) we’re close. (0.5) close:ly, .h an:d (0.5) tch ah: (.) the- because the theater was very sma:ll, I can see: the .h (.) bri ah breath of the singer,
The excerpt begins with the teller’s (L) description of how she and her sister found their way to their seats in the concert hall in lines 01–03. Then, the teller describes where their seats were located through successive repairs (Scheglof, 1979) in compound turn construction units (Lerner, 1991) using a ‘when’ clause. The teller then describes the quality of the seats by pointing out the clear view they ofered in line 04 (I can see the singer in the straight). Thereafter, she begins to ofer another assessment of the seats with and very: in a rising tone (line 04). However, the teller struggles at this point initiating a repair with a few particles (ah: um:: ah::). This initiates a repair sequence that halts the progress of the telling. At the end of the turn, however, the teller fnds the word (near? in line 05).
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In uttering this word, however, the teller conveys her uncertainty with a raised tone. This has the efect of inviting the recipients to engage in a collaborative word search, causing the interaction to deviate further from the story. In the next turn in line 06, one of the recipients (S) repeats the word (nea:r) and then provides an alternative word (close?). While S’s repair ofers a word, this one is also produced with a try mark (Sacks & Scheglof, 1979); the rising tone prompts the teller’s confrmation in the next turn. In the next turn in line 07, the teller responds by frst accepting the word (close) and then incorporates it into her utterance: We’re close. In so doing, the teller seems to close the repair sequence, an indication that she is ready to resume her telling. While the repair makes the language issue the focal point of the interaction, the participants do not engage in any further account of the repair. In the next turn in line 08, however, a brief silence ensues, implying a problem. Then the teller produces another repair (closely in line 09). The initiation of this repair seems to reopen the interruption that was about to be closed. The confusion here seems to be grammatical in nature, as she vacillates between ‘close’ and ‘closely.’ Either case could prolong the repair sequence and thus deter the progressivity of the telling. Notably, however, the teller does not engage the recipients any more with the new repairable. Rather, she opts to continue her story with the conjunction ‘and’ and other particles (tch ah::) followed by a ‘because’ clause in line 09. That is to say, the teller opts to move out of the repair and continue with her story without settling the matter. In so doing, the teller seems to connect her utterance to the prior telling, which would complete the extended turn as: ‘I can see the singer straight because the theater was very small.’ With this comment, the teller seems to pull together multiple utterances that were disrupted by the repair sequences. As previously noted, storytelling involves managing multiple turns by sequencing and ordering them. Repairs often highlight problematic matters that occur during this process, and linguistic matters often feature prominently in multilingual interactions. L2 tellers must attend to this interference and organize their telling so that the stories progress. The nature and character of repairs are then subject to the participants’ contingent decisions. Cataloguing the character of repairs is important, but explicating the interactive choices involved in shifting the interactions toward the stories-in-progress is even more important. Such analyses ofer a procedural account of how multilingual storytelling is managed and accomplished in conversational interaction. With this point in mind, the present study is designed to sketch out the contingent decisions L2 participants make in relating repair sequences to storiesin-progress. The fndings are classifed into two groups of repair sequences: The frst concerns linguistic matters, and the second concerns narrative contents. These two categories are not designed to be technical classifcations – but initial analytic entry points through which more complex phenomena can be explicated
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(e.g., Lee & Hellermann, 2020). Readers are invited to see the range of challenges repair sequences pose and the complex interpretive moves participants utilize to manage them.
Data The data corpus was drawn from four groups of Korean learners of English who regularly participated in weekly speech practice sessions. The frst two groups consisted of three female English teachers in their 30s and 40s, while the other two groups were composed of college students (one all-female group and one all-male group). In their practice sessions, the participants all gave improvised ten-minute speeches before engaging in 15-minute conversational exchanges. The two teacher groups participated in the practice sessions for about 12 months while the college student groups participated for 24 months. The students’ sessions were audio/video taped, but the teacher’s sessions were only audio taped. In examining the data, we focused on occasions in which storytelling sequences were halted by repairs. We analyzed 24 speech sessions that were transcribed for the analysis, six sessions for each team. For each speech session, the participants were free to choose any topic of interest, from personal experiences to academic content to current events or movies, for example. During the telling, the recipients routinely provided feedback through various response tokens that took both verbal and nonverbal forms. The following section presents two diferent types of repair sequences in multilingual storytelling. The frst type includes cases in which recipients provided linguistic corrections through other-initiated repairs without solicitation from the tellers. The second type consists of cases in which tellers initiated repairs related to narrative content to which recipients provided other-repairs. These are two diferent types of repairs that infuence and qualify storytelling sequences. Analytically, we focus on tracing the processes through which the topical coherence of storytelling is maintained through the repair sequences.
Analysis Repairs of Language Matters In this section, we present two excerpts in which recipients ofer linguistic corrections in the form of unsolicited other-repairs. As previously noted, the possibility of linguistic corrections is omnipresent in L2 interactional sequences. Not all these corrections are, however, treated as such, and how they are treated is subject to the participants’ orientations to the stories-in-progress. This section ofers two telling cases in which linguistic corrections are promptly incorporated into the tellers’ subsequent turns to resume the stories. The frst excerpt is taken from one of the teacher groups; the teller (L) recounts the challenge she faced
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dealing with parents and school administrators, and how she had to be patient throughout the process. Extract 2 Quit 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26
L:
S: L: Y: L: S: L: SY: L: S: L: S: L: S: L: S: L: S:
à à
.h ah: (0.5) so: .h all: the teacher ah- all the (0.5) students and the mother:s↑ .h ah: (.) just say like that, you’re the teacher, so: you are the: (.) hm? you don’t (.) hm beha:ve, you don’t say (that) things and so on:↑ .h just hm: in the name of the teacher↑ we have to be: tolera:te, .h or: to be sincere, an(h)d we have to: (.) do: all the things for kindness [and any other thin:gs, [hm hm they require u:s↑ to do that. ah:: (0.5) so: (.) that is uh: my job: (0.5) so I have to be cha(h)nge like that? hm .h i:f I cannot do: (0.5) .h ah well: hm that (.) my (.) role:s↑ .h ah: as he sai:d I have to repea(h)t ((laughing)) m(h)y job:, or: we have to f:ght↑ or (.) quarrel↑ hm everyday↑ hm in the (.) teachers’ of:ce, it would be very (.) noisy↑ hm hm ah (.) the- vice principal or principal↑ .h will quit me, fre. oh: fre, (.) or the government wi:sh (.) fre me: and so on, so I have to be tolerate, hahaha
The excerpt begins with the teller’s complaint about having to behave passively at school in lines 01–03. In the ensuing turn, she formulates what teachers are expected to do, including phrases like, to be tolerate, to be sincere, and to do all the things for kindness in lines 04–06. In the next turn, the teller ofers a concluding comment about the situation, saying, they required us to do that (line 08) and then, I have to change like that (line 11). Later in the sequence in lines 13–14, the teller begins to describe a hypothetical situation in which teachers refuse to perform their required roles. One consequence is that her principal (he in line 14) would make teachers perform the aforementioned tasks anyway (lines 14–16). Teachers otherwise have to fght
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or quarrel (line 16), which makes the scene very noisy (line 20). Throughout the telling, the two recipients (S and Y) produce continuers (Scheglof, 1982) that prompt the teller to continue their narrative. The teller’s portrayal of the situation seems to intensify such that the vice principal or principal will quit me, meaning fre me (lines 22–24), if she were neither tolerant nor kind in dealing with problems at school. Linguistically speaking, this turn contains an incorrect word usage, namely quit me (line 22). In the next turn in line 23, therefore, one of the recipients (S) ofers an other-correction, fre (line 23), which is designed to replace the word ‘quit’ in the prior turn. This corrective move has the efect of exposing a language matter and thus making it a focal point of the interaction. Notice, however, that the repair is produced quickly with one word that specifcally targets the problematic word without instigating any accounting practice. The question is, how does the teller react to this corrective? In the next turn (line 24), the teller produces oh: noting the correction and then repeats the other-repair, saying fre. Thereafter, she moves ahead with the story by embedding the correction (Jeferson, 1987) into their utterance saying, or the government wish fre me (line 24). This constitutes an ‘enfolding’ act (Wong, 2021a, 2021b, 2020) whereby the repair is integrated into the ongoing sequence of story events. Through this enfolding act, the teller restores and therefore demonstrates her orientation to the topical theme of the developing story. That is to say, the repaired item becomes part of the next telling, which describes the situation more intensely; this is because the agent of the act of fring changes from the vice principal or principal to the government, given the teller is a public school teacher. In the subsequent turn, the teller repeats their message so I have to be tolerate as a concluding comment (lines 24–25). The teller’s accommodation of the repairable seems to be an uptake of the correction, thereby functioning as an important pedagogical move. We also note that the teller accommodates the repair without any additional account of it. That is to say, the opportunity to expose the problem is bypassed in favor of moving the story forward, and, as a result, the topical theme of the story is resumed. The next excerpt includes more extensive repair sequences, which occur in two stages. The focus of the repair shifts from a word search to a pronunciation problem. Still, we fnd some evidence of contingent work by the participants to keep the story going. In the data, the teller (S) recounts her family trip to Angkor Wat in Cambodia. Angkor Wat is a famous temple complex, the largest religious monument in the world, which was constructed in 12th century. S describes the fne and precise design of the structures. Extract 3 Elaborate 01 02
S:
ah frst we visite:d banteay Srei. .h banteay Srei i:s one of the temp:↑le (.) of ah: Angko:r (.) Kingdo:↑m but hm: that i:s (.) the
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03 04 05
S:
à
very very (.) hm: (.) .h (0.5) cengkyohan, hh elaborate
06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15
à Y: à L:
à à Y: à S: à S:
L:
à
ela[borate? [elaborate? (0.5) elora:te? [ela:borate. [elaborate. elaborate, .h ah very very ela:borate ah: (.) reliefs everywhere, ever:y (0.5) wa:lls or ever:y (.) pillars or ever:y (.) roof, .h (0.5) everything has very (.) ela:borate (.) relie:f (.) that was fantastic very very fascinating, .h so:
The teller begins to talk about banteay Srei, a temple known for its elaborate architecture in Angkor Wat (lines 01–02). However, she struggles to fnd the adjective to describe the temple’s design, very very and then, hm: remaining unable to complete her turn in line 03. After a brief pause in line 04, the teller utters a Korean word instead (cengkyohan), followed by laughter (line 05). The word cengkyohan can be translated as ‘elaborate’ or ‘detailed,’ which she modifes with very very (line 03). This switched code to Korean could result in two different kinds of actions in this sequence. First, it could invite the recipients to ofer an English equivalent as a repair initiation. Second, this code switching could signal the teller’s decision to bypass the word search and move forward with her story. In the next turn, however, the two recipients (L and Y) ofer the same word for repair resolution in lines 06–07. They treat the teller’s remark as a call for a word search, and the turn is returned to the teller who has to determine what to do with the suggested word. If the teller accepts the word, she can resume the story in the subsequent turn as seen in the previous excerpt. However, the repair sequence is not resolved immediately. Notice that the suggested word by the two recipients was not registered immediately by the teller, resulting in a silent gap (line 08). This extends the interruption in the telling as it signals a problem. After the noticeable silence, the teller initiates another repair in line 09 by showing how she heard the word, elorate? with an uncertainty mark. The previous repair sequence halted the sequence for a word search, but this time it calls for phonological clarifcation, prompting another side sequence (Jeferson, 1972). While the second repair calls for phonological clarifcation, it also indicates that the teller might not recognize the word suggested by the two recipients. In the next turn, the two recipients repeat the word simultaneously in lines 10–11, and in the turn after that, the teller fnally shows her recognition of the word
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with elaborate, .h ah (line 12). Then, she immediately resumes her story about the temple. In so doing, the teller accommodates the corrected pronunciation into the interrupted phrase very very elaborate in the next utterance (line 12). That is to say, the teller resumes her talk from where she left of. In a later sequence, the teller uses the word ‘elaborate’ again to describe the temple (line 14). While the story is halted twice, the nature of linguistic trouble in this excerpt is clear. Naturally, repair sequences take the participants’ attention away from the developing story, but both the teller and their recipients handle the linguistic issues quickly without any accounting practices about the nature of the repair and their reasons. Instead, the teller simply accepts the word and its pronunciation. This may be why most exchanges in these repairs consist of one-word turns from lines 05 to 12, highlighting the drive toward progressing the story. The two excerpts in this section ofer examples of repairs in which recipients produce linguistic corrections without the tellers’ solicitation. Such exchanges are potentially distinctive to multilingual storytelling or multilingual interactions in general. While linguistic corrections can make language matters a focal point, the participants in these excerpts are also keen to return to the narrative content. For this reason, the two excerpts show that the tellers straddle the line between the embedded and the exposed (Jeferson, 1987). The linguistic matters are not entirely exposed to invite accounting practices, but they are visible enough to tell us that the participants note the problematic matter in the sequences. The ways the participants note and handle these linguistic matters therefore highlight the nature and character of their contingent decisions, indicating that participants generally favor restoring and thus progressing the story. Thus, while linguistic matters may be a distinguishing feature of multilingual storytelling, participants also demonstrate a common orientation toward the progressivity of the telling.
Repairs of Narrative Content In the previous section, we examined repair sequences that focused on correcting linguistic problems. In contrast, the excerpts presented in this section show repair sequences that are more concerned with narrative contents. These excerpts contain the teller’s self-initiated repairs that turn out to solicit contributions from recipients. Note how topical coherence is maintained through these different types of repair sequences. The frst excerpt is taken from a college student team that consists of three engineering students at a Korean university. In the excerpt, the teller (G) is talking about his experience going to a professional basketball game for the frst time. During his telling, he struggles to fnd words and therefore initiates a repair. Note how the participants identify the repairable and what efects these decisions have on the way the teller preserves topical coherence when resuming the story.
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Extract 4 Basketball 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15 16
G: G: S: G:
à à S: à G: à G:
à
C: G: C:
à
when I was twenty yea:rs- (0.5) twenty years ol:d? (0.5) I visite:d uh: Jamsil:: basketba:ll sta:dium? mm to watch: (0.5) the:: uh match between eskeitee: an:d other teams:↑ (0.5) an:d (0.5) the:y (1.5) there was no::::: uh:: (3.0) baseball:↑ basket[ball, [no audie↑nce, (0.5) basketball. (0.5) m[m: [basketba↑ll so- (.) there ar- is no one:↑ so: (1.5) they: just (1.0) give a ticket (.) to: the studen:ts (.) free:= =mm:
In lines 01–03, the teller describes their visit to a sports arena called ‘Jamsil,’ home to various sports facilities for baseball, football, and basketball leagues. In describing his frst visit, the teller says, Jamsil basketball stadium? but somewhat uncertainly with a try-marking at the end (Sacks & Scheglof, 1979). To this, one of the recipients (S) ofers a brief acknowledgment token (mm in line 04), after which the teller continues to describe the two teams that were competing the day they visited (lines 05–06). However, the teller struggles, producing frequent pauses and repair initiations such as an:d (0.5) the:y (1.5) there was no:::: uh:: (line 06), which is followed by a fairly long pause in line 07. In the next turn in line 08, recipient S initiates a repair saying baseball:↑ basketball,. This repair asks the teller to confrm whether they were referring to baseball or basketball. This seems to be a delayed repair-initiation (Wong, 2000b), which locates the trouble source in the teller’s earlier phrase basketball stadium? (line 03). Typically, the word ‘stadium’ is used for outdoor sports facilities such as those for baseball and football, and therefore the phrase ‘basketball stadium’ might have confused the recipient. Taken together, the two repairs in lines 06 and 08 halt the progressivity of the telling. In line 09, the teller produces no audience, which is a continuation of his own turn that was halted in line 06; G was searching for a word and fnds it here as a self-initiated self-repair. In the next turn in line 10, a silent turn ensues without any uptake by the recipients; the frst repair is solved, but the second one is still hanging. In the next turn in line 11, the teller delivers a repair basketball, thus addressing the second repair-initiation, which receives an acknowledgment token (mm) in line 13.
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The teller thus manages the two repair initiations one by one, the self-initiated repair frst and the other-initiated repair second (Sacks, 1987). A brief silence ensues in line 12, signaling a problem, leading the teller to repeat their repair in line 14 basketball, overlapping with C’s acknowledgment (Jeferson, 1983). The teller then says, so and repeats his earlier comment, there is no one in line 14. The replacement shows the teller’s uncertainty about whether the recipients registered their earlier comment (no audience in line 09). With this repetition, the teller produces a second saying of their frst remark as a means of restoring the progressivity of the telling (Wong, 2000a). This excerpt contains fairly complex sequences that involve both self- and other-initiated repairs. While the other-initiated repair concerns a sense-making matter regarding the nature of the sports game, the self-initiated repair involves a word search related to the narrative content about the basketball court. The teller resolves both initiations in the sequence, but responses from the recipients are delayed. Therefore, the teller repeats each repair in line 14; G says basketball frst and then repeats their comment about the audience there is no one. Particularly notable here is how the teller uses the repetition of the self-repair. Since their frst comment in line 09 is interrupted with another repair, their repetition in line 14 works as a springboard to continue the story. This excerpt demonstrates the teller’s orientation to the progressivity of the telling in managing two diferent types of repairs. While the recipient’s repairinitiation concerns the physical facility for the game, the teller’s repair concerns the main topical theme of the story – namely, how they obtained a free ticket to a professional basketball game. The remark there is no one explains how they obtained the ticket for free. The teller’s resuming action therefore begins with this point in line 14, noting the relationship between there being no audience and a free ticket as a result. This excerpt illustrates a case in which content related repairs are intricately tied to self- and other-repair initiations. Both repairs are managed briefy, but the teller’s resuming action is closely tied to his own repair (Helisten, 2017) because it has more relevance to the continuity of the story’s topical theme. The next excerpt illustrates another case in which the repair concerns narrative content. In this excerpt, the teller (L) initiates a repair, and a recipient (K) ofers the solution. Note how the teller accommodates the repair sequence and continues to build their telling. The excerpt is taken from a speech practice session in an all-female student group consisting of three English majors. The teller here complains about a time when their friends looked at a diary that she had left on their desk in a shared study room. Extract 5 Personal 01 02
L: S:
I wro:te all: of the thing:s of my min:d? .h mm:,=
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03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23
L: S: L: S: L: K: L: S: L: K: L: L:
à à à à
S: L: S: L: S:
à
=an:d (.) I just put it on my de:sk, in- in my:: (0.5) individual [de:sk, we ha:ve we have that kind of de:sk to stud↑y, [mm: so I just and [I thought that, [mm: (0.5) (.h) uh- I- I: do:n’t, (.) I don’t want to see: anothe:r (.) people:’s (.) uh[:: [diary, dia:ry, ah: because it- it- I kno:w that it is so::: personal [yeah: ve:ry private,= [yeah persona:l =yeah so (0.5) I: I just put (0.5) [it, on my de:sk, becau[mm:, with my:: with (.) the belie:f, belie:fs, to my friends, mm but (.) uh: in the end of the yea:r, I: I reali:zed that many people sawed my s: saw m:y diary. ah:
The excerpt begins with the teller’s remark about her diary; L wrote in her diary and put it on her desk in a study room that many students shared (lines 01–03). In the continuing turn (line 04), the teller ofers preliminary information to specify the context of the scene (Goodwin, 1984) – that the desks were individually designated but still in a shared study room. In lines 06–10, the teller explains why she left the diary on their desk: L believed nobody would read another person’s diary. However, a repair initiation comes at the end of this account as the teller searches for the word ‘diary’ in line 10, and a recipient (K) supplies it in line 11. Subsequently in line 12, the teller acknowledges the repair by repeating the word. This is a case in which the word search involves other-repair and the teller embeds the solution into her ongoing narrative, resulting in no break in progressivity. In the next turn in line 14, the teller continues their story, saying because it- it- I kno:w that it is so:::. Notice that the teller’s resumed story itself shows a series of self-repairs, beginning with because it- it- followed by the insertion of I kno:w and then again, it is so:::, which is a common feature in L2 speech (Hellermann, 2009). At the end, the teller initiates another repair by searching for word(s) in line 14. In the next turn in line 15, the same recipient K ofers an other-repair to the search saying personal yeah: ve:ry private,. The design of K’s turn is interesting because it comes with two repairs – frst ‘personal’ and then ‘private’: The
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second one seems to be an emphatic repetition of the frst one. These repairs demonstrate how K monitored the narrative content of the telling, especially in terms of how the teller conveyed her stance toward diaries (Stivers, 2008). To this repair, the teller frst produces an acknowledgment token (yeah) and then repeats the word ‘personal’ in line 16. L’s response overlaps with K’s second repair, very private (line 15). In the next turn, the teller latches another yeah and then begins to resume their story by going back to retrieve and repeat an earlier utterance in line 06: I just put it on. As soon as the teller fnds the word, she continues the story, explaining how people in the study room read her diary. The teller’s resuming move is based on the collaborative agreement that a diary is a personal thing. In fact, the teller reiterates this assumption in the subsequent turn in line 19, with the beliefs to my friends. The repaired comment ‘personal’ likewise becomes part of the topical theme the teller returns to in her resuming action. Notable in this sequence is that the teller repeats I just put the diary on my desk twice, once in line 06 and then again in line 17 (Wong, 2000a). The frst repetition seems to be part of the insertion sequence that begins in line 04, explaining where the desk is located and in what context. This seems to emphasize the tacit assumption behind her action of putting the diary on her desk. The story continues in line 09, where L reiterates this tacit assumption. The third saying and therefore second repetition comes in line 17; this time, the teller intensifes the relevance of her action by describing her emotional reaction through repairs, with my:: with the belief, beliefs to my friends (line 19). The gravity of the situation is reiterated in the later turns, where L realized that many people saw her diary. The exchanges that come between these repetitions are complex. In part, they involve parenthetical comments that try to explicate the relevance and implications of particular acts (Wong, 2000a). Additionally, these repetitions also function as part of the sense-making work through which the teller and their recipients come to gradually discover the gravity of the problem and its emotional implications. The topical theme the teller tries to deliver is thus collaboratively constructed such that recipients’ contributions confrm and thus prompt the tellers to move forward with the story, revealing more facts and describing her emotional reaction. The repairables in the two foregoing excerpts difer in kind from the earlier ones that involved linguistic corrections. These two excerpts contain sensemaking repair sequences related to the narrative content deployed by the tellers. In both cases, the tellers initiate repair and the recipients ofer solutions, which demonstrate that the recipients follow through and thus contribute to maintaining the topical coherence of the stories. In these two cases, the tellers engage in word searches, and the recipients ofer solutions to the searches, which the teller must accept or reject. These repairs may disrupt the progress of the telling, and yet the tellers manage them by embedding the repairs into
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the subsequent telling, confrming the message or clarifying misunderstandings. The resuming work therefore involves collaborative construction that focuses on sense-making work that determines the nature and character of the repairable in relation to the stories-in-progress.
Discussion and Conclusion Prior literature on multilingual storytelling has examined the intricacies of the negotiating process between tellers and recipients (Barraja-Rohan, 2015; Lee & Hellermann, 2014; Pekarek Doehler & Berger, 2018). In this line of research, the linguistic profciency of participants seems to matter greatly, as they are limited in their linguistic repertoires. Consequently, repairs are frequently observed in multilingual storytelling. Multilingual storytelling is also challenging because it requires discourse competence to deploy multiple turns at talk (Lee, 2012). Tellers need to connect their turns so that utterances are cohesively related to produce coherent stories. In this regard, repairs pose great challenges to L2 tellers because they disrupt the progressivity and topical coherence of the telling. Since repairs interfere with the progressivity of the telling, the tellers are doubly bound in that they need to move their stories forward while addressing the intersubjective concerns occasioned by repair sequences. We examined two types of repair sequences with the aim of tracing how L2 tellers manage these repairs while maintaining the topical coherence their stories require; after all, repairs are contingently occasioned in the evolving sequence of interactional exchanges. How tellers handle repairs is therefore intricately tied to the task of advancing the storytelling, and even L2 tellers are not relieved of this dual task. The two sets of excerpts show a diverse range of repairs, both in terms of the repair-initiators and the nature of the repair. The frst section has dealt with recipients’ corrections of language matters that occur in the telling. The second section has presented cases involving sense-making matters related to narrative content. While any of these matters can become focal points in interactions, the participants decide what is necessary, relevant, sufcient, and problematic in moving the stories forward while sustaining their topical coherence. The teller’s interpretive work manifests in how they manage repair sequences and resume their stories. While linguistic correction is handled minimally in one case, it is incorporated into the subsequent stories that the tellers resume in the other case. Repairs of narrative content follow a similar pattern as the tellers determine what to do with the repaired items in reference to the trajectories of the developing storylines. Managing repairs is therefore not just about fxing problematic turns but also about maintaining topical coherence in multilingual storytelling. Notable in these sequences is the participants’ orientation to the topical themes of the evolving stories. Repairs are initiated and addressed, but participants manage their treatment in reference to the stories-in-progress. The
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ongoing sequences involve connecting utterances meaningfully to produce storyable contents that convey the embedded messages. The storytelling task involves advanced language profciency for L2 tellers as they must produce connected discourses that are topically coherent (Lee, 2012). This ability involves both relating multiple utterances and acting upon locally emerging problems that interfere with progressivity by managing repairs and resuming the stories. This requires discourse competence (Celce-Murcia, 1991), which has a long history in applied linguistics as an important component for L2 profciency. CA’s sequential analysis ofers useful analytic resources for tracing the process through which discourse competence manifests in storytelling practices. Such competence is visible not just in the product of coherent monologues but also in the collaborative interactions with recipients to maintain the topical coherence of stories. Analyzing repair sequences in storytelling thus allows us an access to the contingent choices of talk and the methods of action L2 participants deploy and act on as they come to terms with the litany of issues repairs may occasion.
References Antaki, C. (1994). Explaining and arguing: The social organization of accounts. London: Sage Publications. Barraja-Rohan, A. (2015). “I told you”: Storytelling development of a Japanese learning English as a second language. In S. Eskildsen & T. Cardierno (Eds.), Usage-based perspectives on second language learning (pp. 271–304). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Berger, E., & Lauzon, V. F. (2016). Orienting to a co-participant’s emotion in French L2: A resource to participate in and sustain a conversation. In M. T. Prior & G. Kasper (Eds.), Emotion in multilingual interaction (pp. 87–110). Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company. Brouwer, C., & Wagner, J. (2004). Developmental issues in second language conversation. Journal of Applied Linguistics, 1(1), 29–47. Celce-Murcia, M. (1991). Grammar pedagogy in second and foreign language teaching. TESOL Quarterly, 25, 459–480. Crow, B. K. (1983). Topic shifts in couples’ conversation. In R. T. Craig & K. Tracy (Eds.), Conversational coherence (pp. 137–156). Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications. Day, D., & Kjærbeck, S. (2019). Membership categorization and storytelling. Pragmatics and Society, 10(3), 359–374. Goodwin, C. (1984). Notes on story structure and the organization of participation. In J. M. Atkinson & J. Heritage (Eds.), Structures of social action: Studies in conversation analysis (pp. 225–246). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Goodwin, C. (1986). Between and within: Alternative sequential treatments of continuers and assessments. Human Studies, 9, 205–217. Helisten, M. (2017). Resumptions as multimodal achievements in conversational (story) tellings. Journal of Pragmatics, 112, 1–19. Hellermann, J. (2008). Social actions for classroom language learning. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Hellermann, J. (2009). Looking for evidence of language learning in practices for repair: A case study of self-initiated self-repair by an adult learner of English. Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research, 5(3), 113–132.
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Heritage, J. (2007). Intersubjectivity and progressivity in references to persons (and places). In T. Stivers & N. J. Enfeld (Eds.), Person reference in interaction: Linguistic, cultural and social perspectives (pp. 255–280). New York: Cambridge University Press. Holt, E., & Drew, P. (2005). Figurative pivots: The use of fgurative expressions in pivotal transitions. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 38(1), 35–62. Hosoda, Y. (2006). Repair and relevance of diferential language expertise in second language classrooms. Applied Linguistics, 27(1), 25–50. Jeferson, G. (1972). Side sequences. In D. Sudnow (Ed.), Studies in social interaction (pp. 294–338). New York: Free Press. Jeferson, G. (1978). Sequential aspects of storytelling in conversation. In J. Schenkein (Ed.), Studies in the organization of conversational interaction (pp. 219–248). New York: Academic Press. Jeferson, G. (1983). Notes on some orderliness of overlap onset. Tilburg Papers in Language and Literature, 28, 1–28. Jeferson, G. (1987). On exposed and embedded correction in conversation. In G. Button & J. R. E. Lee (Eds.), Talk and social organization (pp. 86–100). Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters. Jeferson, G. (1993). Caveat speaker: Preliminary notes on recipient topic-shift implicature. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 26(1), 1–30. Kasper, G. (2006). Beyond repair: Conversation analysis as an approach to SLA. AILA Review, 19(1), 83–99. Kasper, G., & Prior, M. T. (2015). Analyzing storytelling in TESOL interview research. TESOL Quarterly, 49(2), 226–255. Kim, Y. (2016). Development of L2 interactional competence: Being a story recipient in L2 English conversation. Discourse and Cognition, 23(1), 1–28. Lee, Y.-A. (2012). Building connected discourse in non-native speech: Respecifying non-native profciency. Pragmatics, 22(4), 591–614. Lee, Y.-A., & Hellermann, J. (2014). Tracing developmental changes through conversation analysis: Cross-sectional and longitudinal analysis. TESOL Quarterly, 48(4), 763–788. Lee, Y.-A., & Hellermann, J. (2020). Managing language issue in second language storytelling. System, 93, 1–14. Lerner, G. H. (1991). On the syntax of sentences-in-progress. Language in Society, 20, 441–458. Lerner, G. H. (1992). Assisted storytelling: Deploying shared knowledge as a practical matter. Qualitative Sociology, 15(3), 247–271. Lilja, N. (2014). Partial repetitions as other-initiations of repair in second language talk: Re-establishing understanding and doing learning. Journal of Pragmatics, 71, 98–116. Lindström, A., & Sorjonen, M.-L. (2013). Afliation in conversation. In J. Sidnell & T. Stivers (Eds.), The handbook of conversation analysis (pp. 350–369). Malden: Blackwell Publishing. Mandelbaum, J. (1991). Conversational non-cooperation: An exploration of disattended complaints. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 25(1–4), 97–138. Mandelbaum, J. (2013). Storytelling in conversation. In J. Sidnell & T. Stivers (Eds.), The handbook of conversation analysis (pp. 492–507). Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. Monzoni, C. M., & Drew, P. (2009). Inter-interactional contexts of story-interventions by non-knowledgeable story recipients in (Italian) multi-person interaction. Journal of Pragmatics, 41(2), 197–218.
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Pekarek Doehler, S., & Berger, E. (2018). L2 interactional competence as increased ability for context-sensitive conduct: A longitudinal study of story-openings. Applied Linguistics, 39(4), 555–578. Sacks, H. (1972). On the analyzability of stories by children. In J. J. Gumperz & D. H. Hymes (Eds.), Directions in sociolinguistics: The ethnography of communication (pp. 325–345). New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Sacks, H. (1974). An analysis of the course of a joke’s telling in conversation. In R. Bauman & J. Sherzer (Eds.), Explorations in the ethnography of speaking (pp. 337–353). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sacks, H. (1978). Some technical considerations of a dirty joke. In J. Schenkein (Ed.), Studies in the organization of conversational interaction (pp. 249–269). New York: Academic Press. Sacks, H. (1987). On the preferences for agreement and contiguity in sequences in conversation. In G. Button & J. R. E. Lee (Eds.), Talk and social organization (pp. 54–69). Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Sacks, H. (1992). Lectures on conversation (Vols. 1, 2). Malden: Blackwell Publishing. Sacks, H., & Scheglof, E. A. (1979). Two preferences in the organization of reference to persons in conversation and their interaction. In G. Psathas (Ed.), Everyday language: Studies in ethnomethodology (pp. 15–21). New York: Irvington Publishers, Inc. Scheglof, E. A. (1979). The relevance of repair to syntax-for-conversation. In T. Givon (Ed.), Syntax and semantics: Discourse and syntax (Vol. 12, pp. 261–286). New York: Academic Press. Scheglof, E. A. (1982). Discourse as an interactional achievement: Some uses of “uh huh” and other things that come between sentences. In D. Tannen (Ed.), Georgetown university roundtable on languages and linguistics (pp. 71–92). Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. Scheglof, E. A. (1997). “Narrative analysis” thirty years later. Journal of Narrative and Life History, 7(4), 97–106. Scheglof, E. A. (2007). Sequence organization in interaction: A primer in conversation analysis. New York: Cambridge University Press. Scheglof, E. A., & Sacks, H. (1973). Opening up closings. Semiotica, 8(4), 289–327. Sidnell, J. (2011). Conversation analysis: An introduction. Malden: Blackwell Publishing. Stivers, T. (2008). Stance, alignment, and afliation during storytelling: When nodding is a token of afliation. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 41(1), 31–57. doi:10.1080/08351810701691123 Wong, J. (2000a). Repetition in conversation: A look at “frst and second sayings”. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 33(4), 407–424. Wong, J. (2000b). Delayed next turn repair initiation in native/non-native speaker English conversation. Applied Linguistics, 21(1), 244–267. Wong, J. Our storied lives: Doing and fnding friendship I. Wong, J. Our storied lives: Doing and fnding friendship II.
PART III
Multilingual Storytelling in the Classroom
7 STORYTELLING AS INSTRUCTIONAL PRACTICE IN PERSIAN LANGUAGE CLASSROOMS Gabriele Kasper and Elham Monfaredi
Introduction In classroom settings, storytelling is used as an instructional method for a variety of purposes, such as illustrating abstract concepts, gaining and sustaining students’ interests, or engaging students in knowledge construction or problem solving. There is a large body of empirical research investigating the use of storytelling in content and language teaching from diferent perspectives, but little is known of how storytellings are interactionally accomplished as a shared social activity and how their specifc organization contributes to the institutional goals of classroom instruction. For the most part, studies have investigated how preplanned narratives are explicitly taught or produced by students as pedagogical tasks. In contrast, this chapter views storytelling as an interactional, situated activity that is locally occasioned and contingently deployed. With a focus on classrooms in Persian as a foreign language, it puts the spotlight on teachers’ storytellings. Specifcally it aims to explore how the teachers’ storytelling is prompted by prior classroom events and unfolds as an ongoing activity, what social actions get accomplished through it, how the students participate in the telling, and in what ways it advances the teachers’ instructional project. Using multimodal conversation analysis and interactional linguistics as its theoretical and analytical perspectives, the chapter contributes to the literatures on storytelling in institutional contexts, classroom interaction, and the work of language teachers as practical action.
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Background Storytelling as an Instructional Tool The use of storytellings as preplanned pedagogical activities has been widely researched in both language and content education. Lucarevschi (2016) reviews a substantial body of qualitative and quantitative studies on the role and impact of storytelling in L2 classrooms with child and adult students, considering various narrative genres and stories told in oral, printed, and digital formats. He concludes that overall storytelling benefts various aspects of L2 learning, including L2 grammar, vocabulary, and pronunciation; receptive and productive skills; student motivation; and the supply of comprehensible input. As a pedagogical method to implement predetermined instructional objectives, storytellings serve as planned instructional tools, embedded in teachers’ lesson plans to provide contexts for developing L2 knowledge and skills. While many studies highlight students’ active participation in the storytelling events as an important factor to promote L2 learning, the question of how student participation evolves in the interactional organization of the storytelling is not raised. A conversation analytic project asks how storytellings are occasioned and produced by the participants as a mutually recognizable social activity, what interactional methods the parties mobilize to that end, and how they accomplish actions, stances, and identities through participation as teller(s) and recipient(s).
Storytelling as a Social Practice CA research on storytelling in L2 classroom interaction can draw on a large literature on the organization of storytelling in monolingual and, increasingly, multilingual interaction. Building on the classic work by Sacks (1972), Jeferson (1978), and Goodwin (1984), CA research pays particular attention to the ways in which a storytelling is connected to the preceding talk and in what ways it shapes the course of interaction after its completion; how the rules for turn-taking are suspended to grant the teller a multi-unit turn, and how turn-taking is resumed; how the storytelling as one kind of ‘big package’ (Sacks, 1992) is organized into sequences of ordered phases, and how the recipients’ actions shape the course and manner of the telling at diferent moments (Goodwin, 2015; Mandelbaum, 2013). Couper-Kuhlen and Selting (2018) specify the analytic program further: [If] our aim is to reconstruct and account for how participants make sense of talk-in-interaction in general, and of storytellings in particular, we need to complement sequential analysis with the analysis of the linguistic and embodied resources that participants rely on in the production and recognition of the storytelling activity and its components. (p. 3)
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From a praxeological perspective on language in social interaction, interactional linguistics (Selting & Couper-Kuhlen, 2001) explicates how tellers and recipients mobilize their language repertoires to format recognizable phases, actions, and stances as they progress through the storytelling. For instance, distinctions of tense, aspect, and mood can serve tellers to construct the temporal unfolding of the telling, prosody afords a structuring device and marker of afective stance, and a range of linguistic devices can be worked to animate story characters with reported speech or thought (see Couper-Kuhlen & Selting, 2018, for evidence from diferent languages). Taking ‘multimodality as an analytic orientation’ (Sidnell, 2006, p. 380), CA research on storytelling increasingly brings to the fore how participants confgure visual and vocal devices into multimodal ensembles to build characters and actions in the storyworld and display afectivity. For story-recipients, materially diferent modalities provide afordances for managing a systemic problem, namely to accomplish recipiency (i.e., refraining from competing for speakership) during the telling phase and at the same time support the teller’s afective stance. A substantial literature informs us how recipients navigate the potential confict between (structural) alignment and (social) afliation through embodied recipient practices such as nodding (Stivers, 2008) and facial expression (Burch & Kasper, 2016; Kupetz, 2014; Lamb, 2016; Peräkylä & Ruusuvuori, 2012; Selting, 2010; Sugita, 2012). According to these and other studies, both practices can convey alignment and afliation in midtelling. In contrast, in post-climactic environments, facial displays (which can index a particular valence and strength of afect) can show endorsements of the teller’s stance, whereas nodding (which can only claim access to the teller’s stance but not reciprocate it) can be taken as disafliative. Participants in ordinary conversation commonly tell stories to exhibit a particular stance toward the events and characters they are reporting about and to generate a congruent stance from the recipient. When recipients do not take up a matching stance in post-climax environments, tellers often pursue afliation (Burch & Kasper, 2016; Couper-Kuhlen, 2012; Peräkylä & Ruusuvuori, 2012) and in this way orient to stance reciprocation as the preferred type of response (Heritage, 2011; Stivers, 2008). Thus, storytelling serves as a key resource for participants to foster social solidarity.
Storytelling at Work Stories told as a part of an institutional activity seek to accomplish diferent projects (see Greer & Ogawa for stories told in a Japanese hair salon, 2020). The overarching analytical question is how tellings are designed in orientation to the institutional purpose and how participants’ discourse identities as tellers and recipients articulate with their setting-specifc category incumbencies (patient–doctor, caller–call-taker, student–teacher, and so forth). For example, in primary care consultations, patients use ‘narratives of problem discovery’ as a method of giving reasons for the
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visit (Halkowski, 2006; Heritage & Robinson, 2006). Similarly, in calls to emergency centers, callers employ problem discovery narratives to construct a reported event as troubling and mobilize the call-taker’s response (Zimmerman, 1992). In adult ESL classrooms, students participating in dyadic peer activities produce unelicited storytellings to accomplish the language learning task at hand while also fostering a classroom learning community (Hellermann, 2008; also see Greenhalgh & Wilkinson, 2020 Lo & Tadic, 2020 on storytelling in ESL classrooms). Furthermore, studies taking a developmental perspective have traced how ESL and EFL students change their storytelling practices in relation to their L2 profciency (Hellermann, 2008; Lee & Hellermann, 2014). Shifting focus from students to teacher, how occasioned storytelling fgures as instructors’ professional practice in real time is largely unknown. Initial insights come from two studies of professors’ storytellings in large lecture classes at universities in Japan. Takahashi (2010) examines the delivery of non-scripted lectures in such diferent academic disciplines as Buddhism, Statistics, Eastern European History, and Education. She fnds that storytellings are evoked by and ftted to the specifc lecture content that the telling seeks to illustrate or elaborate, as a method of presenting a topic or problem, and to generate student involvement. Particularly instructive for our study is Szatrowski’s (2010) single-case analysis of a story told to explain a haiku in the course of a lecture on a Japanese novel. The analysis makes visible how the professor methodically designs the telling for the student audience with a wide range of devices from diferent modalities (interactional particles and styles shifts, onomatopoeia and prosody, depictive and deictic gestures) and confgures them into formats for recognizable actions, such as securing tellability through epistemic status checks, mobilizing students’ background knowledge, ofering them multiple interpretive perspectives, and encouraging students to independently evaluate the story events. In sum, we see how the instructor’s storytelling is fnely tuned to the work of lecture delivery and in this way exhibits their professional competence in action. The study reported in this chapter extends the praxeological perspective on storytelling as the work of teaching professionals and their students to Persian language classrooms.
Data The data for this study come from two corpora of video and audio recorded interaction in an intermediate Persian class (12 hours) and an advanced Persian class (26 hours) at two diferent North American universities. The intermediatelevel class met three times a week during the academic year while the advanced class met every day during summer. The participants in each class were four students who were L2 speakers of Persian and a professor who was an L1 speaker of Iranian Persian. The students were from diverse cultural backgrounds1 and took interest in Persian for a variety of reasons. Their age profle difered in the two courses (intermediate: 27–53 years, advanced: 22–25 years).
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There were 39 cases of teacher’s storytellings in both classes, of which 27 were produced in the advanced class and 12 in the intermediate class. For this chapter, we selected one representative sample from each class. The cases are representative of both collections in that they illustrate how teacher-produced impromptu storytellings emerge from the ongoing pedagogical activity and are designed to implement an action related to the teacher’s local instructional project. They also exemplify some of the distinctive characteristics of each collection, namely (1) the category of classroom event that triggers the storytelling; (2) the language(s) in which the classroom talk is conducted; and (3) the ways in which the students participate in the storytellings. We will have more to say about the issue of representativity in the discussion section. The data is transcribed according to Jeferson’s (2004) transcription notations to represent the talk. Embodied conduct is represented with conventions adapted from Burch (2014) (Appendix A) and frame grabs from the video recordings. The original talk in Persian is represented in Romanized script according to the United Nations transcription symbols (2012). The list of abbreviations used in the interlinear gloss appears in Appendix B.
Analysis Divorce In the advanced class, storytellings are prompted by ongoing class discussion of a wide range of topics, including political, historical, cultural, social, and Persian language matters. These topics are not necessarily treated separately and can shade into each other. The episode in Extract 1 is a case in point. The class is discussing a text about marriage, divorce, and child custody in Iran. Prior to what is shown in the following extract, the teacher asks the class what adjectives they would use to describe divorce. The talk is organized as an InitiationResponse-Feedback (IRF) sequence with the teacher giving third-turn responses to each student answer. The students collectively generate a list of negative attributions (pordardesar ‘troublesome’, porsaroseda ‘noisy’, por tašanoj ‘tense’). Then one of the students, Mac, who has not ofered an answer yet, proposes a different perspective. The sequence ofers important contextualization for the analysis of the upcoming story and is therefore shown in full. Extract 1.1 New Opportunity T: teacher; N: Nita; L: Lida; M: Mac; J: Jace
01
all M:
+GZ>M (Figure 7.1) +momken-e: $forsat-e jadid$ possible-is opportunity-EZ new it may be a new opportunity
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FIGURE 7.1
t t
02
03
04 05 06 07
+smiles +raises eyebrows
+(0.4) t t
+GZ>J – +points RIF>M
T:
+aha: +um I see
t m
+GZ>J – +GZ>J
M:
+um
t
+GZ>J –
N:
+haha[hahaha [hahaha [haha[ha
J: M:
FIGURE 7.2
t t
08
T:
09 10
N: J:
+RIF up-down (Figure 7.2) +GZ J↔M
[+xošbin-e [hahahaha optimistic-is he is optimistic [hahahaha [hahahaha
Storytelling as Instructional Practice
11
M:
[hahahaha
t
+GZ>M ----------------
12
M:
13
T:
+.hh[(ya) nemidunam, (0.2) or I don’t know or I don’t know [ha
14
t
+GZ>M -------------
M:
+pordardesar xub bud. troublesome good was troublesome was good
t
15 t
16
T:
125
+GZ>M -------------
+(0.5) -------------------°aha° I see
In several ways Mac’s categorization of divorce as a new opportunity sets his proposal apart from the negative attributions made previously. It puts a positive spin on the subject and thus disagrees with the majority opinion. At the same time the epistemic downgrade (momken ‘possible’) and the delivery of the category term with a smile voice suggest that the proposal is not entirely serious.2 The teacher’s response reciprocates Mac’s ironic posture with embodied and vocal practices (lines 2–3) and generates a shared laughter episode (lines 5–7). The laughter episode culminates in the teacher’s humorous characterization of Mac, in the third person, as xošbin ‘optimistic’ (line 8) while making a pointing gesture at him and simultaneously shifting gaze between Jace and Mac. With these practices the teacher performs a stylized footing shift that re-categorizes Mac from addressed recipient to a third party. The teacher’s performance generates overlapping laughter from all participants including Mac (line 11). As soon as the joined laughter dies down, the teacher selects Mac by gaze concurrently with Mac self-selecting with a turn-initial inbreath (line 12). The teacher and Mac thus collaboratively reinstate Mac as a co-participant and designated next speaker. Perhaps in response to the uptake that his proposal received, Mac now backs down from his suggestion that divorce may be a new opportunity and expresses support for Lida’s earlier proposal pordardesar ‘troublesome’ (line 14). Yet his turn at lines 12 and 14 starts with ya ‘or’ – which projects an alternative to his suggestion rather than a withdrawal from it (Lerner & Kitzinger, 2015; Schifrin, 1987) – and a prepositioned negative epistemic marker (nemidunam ‘I don’t know’)3 followed by a pause of two-tenths of a second. With this cluster of devices, Mac’s backdown comes across as a reluctant concession rather than a full commitment to the majority opinion. During Mac’s turn, the teacher gazes at Mac, and he maintains his gaze on him after Mac completes his turn. While the teacher’s acknowledgement token (line 16) could be heard as a minimal sequence-closing third, his continued gazing at Mac (line 17) suggests
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that he may be waiting for Mac to expand upon his backdown. Yet Mac does not take up the opportunity for continued speakership. In his next turn, as seen below, the teacher reverts to Mac’s original proposal that divorce may provide a new opportunity with a storytelling. The telling evolves through several ordered phases. Extract 1.2 introduces the protagonist and ofers story-relevant background information about him. Extract 1.3 describes a temporal sequence of ‘story-relevant actions’ (Sidnell, 2010, p. 182) that lead up to the climactic event. Extract 1.4 represents the story climax. Extract 1.5 shows the students’ uptake. Extract 1.6 represents the exit from the storytelling and transitioning to next instructional matters. We will analyze the extracts by asking how – through what kinds of interactional methods – the participants produce each phase in the telling and make its import recognizable for each other. Extract 1.2 Background t t
17
T:
FIGURE 7.3
FIGURE 7.4
+GZ>N (Figure 7.3) +GZ>J
.hh +man +baradaram (0.4) I brother-SP I my brother
Storytelling as Instructional Practice
18
t t t
+RH up holding pen (Figure 7.4) +quick GZ>M +RH waves pen –
T:
+ye barädar-e +digam (0.6) a brother-EZ other-SP my other brother
t t t t
19
FIGURE 7.5
FIGURE 7.6
+GZ>J
-------+RH down (Figure 7.5) +GZ>M --------------
+Kanada +zendegi mikone¿ (0.7) Canada live-3SG-SPr he lives in Canada
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20
t t n
+GZ>J & N +raises brows (Figure 7.6) +nods
T:
+↑joda šode +az (.) hamsareš. separate-3SG from wife-SP he got divorced from his wife
t
21 t
22 t
23
t
24
+GZ>air –
+(1.2) -----------------panj šiš sal (0.3) fve six year ---------------------------------------baham zendegi mikardan ina↑ (0.5) together live-3PL-PsC and so on they had been living together for fve six years +GZ>N
+GZ>J
+GZ>air –
+moqe’i ke (0.2) +joda šod-o +ina¿ (1.2) when that separate-3SG-SPs-and and so on when he got divorced
Lines 17–20 are organized into several ordered units that allow the talk to be heard as the beginning of a story. Each unit contributes to setting up a character as story protagonist. In fact, the teacher accomplishes the story launch entirely through building the protagonist for the student audience with methods of person reference. First, with the repaired reference man baradaram ‘I my brother’ the teacher introduces a new character to the talk. The formulation of the third party could be heard by the students as non-minimal recognitional reference (Sacks & Scheglof, 1979) since the teacher talked about ‘his brother’ on previous occasions. However, the teacher cancels the possible hearing through a reference repair ye baradare digam ‘my other brother’, coupled with a wave of the hand. The repair invokes the teacher’s earlier mention of ‘his brother’ as shared knowledge among the class participants and identifes the introduced character as a diferent member of the same category. In this way the formulation of the new character as ‘my other brother’ works to achieve (possibly non-recognitional) reference, yet the category term also raises the possibility that ‘something else in addition to referring is being done’ (Scheglof, 1996, p. 439). Minimally, the ‘something else’ that the category evokes by default is the teacher’s and brother’s membership in the same family. The co-membership generates the inference that the teller has privileged knowledge about the character – as family members are expected to do – and, as such, warrants the credibility of the upcoming telling. Next, the place formulation ‘he lives in Canada’ not only makes ‘the other brother’ uniquely identifable to the recipients, it also suggests that the character’s country of residence may become relevant in the upcoming telling. Third,
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the description ↑joda šode az hamsareš ‘he got divorced from his wife’ (line 20) topically connects the character’s civil status to the theme of the preceding class activity and portends a telling in which that status gets some signifcance. Here we also observe that the crucial thematic link is given prominence through facial and prosodic practices: At the onset of ↑joda šode ‘got divorced’ the teacher raises his eyebrows and concurrently shifts to a higher pitch. In this fashion the laminated multisemiotic practices signpost the critical information for the class. Taken together with the methods of non-recognitional person reference and multisemiotic enhancements, the teacher formulates ‘the relevant thing(s)’ (Edwards, 1998) about the character – that is, from a large array of possible alternative descriptions, he selects those that combine to construct the character as protagonist for the particular emerging story. Lastly it is noteworthy that the teacher packages each piece of information as a prosodic unit, separated from the next unit through a pause. In this way, the temporal structuring of the talk contributes to the narrative buildup and alerts the students to the upcoming story as a divorce narrative (see also Couper-Kuhlen & Selting, 2018, pp. 11–12). The teacher’s turn-so-far achieves another critical goal of a story launch, which is to establish the teacher as storyteller and the students as recipients. During his talk the teacher recruits several of the students as recipients by shifting his gaze among them (lines 17–18), and all students direct their gaze at him (line 17–35). Specifcally, in response to the teacher’s producing ↑joda šode ‘got divorced’, accentuated with higher pitch and raised eyebrows at onset, Nita returns the teacher’s gaze with a nod (line 20). By the end of the story beginning, the participants have jointly reconfgured their participation framework and taken up the complementary discourse identities of storyteller and story-recipients (Zimmerman, 1998). In the next TCU (lines 22–23), the teller adds further background information about the protagonist’s married life that routinely comes up when the parties are unknown to the recipients of a divorce narrative, namely how long the couple had been married. The teller delivers the information with an approximate time reference (panj šiš sal ‘fve six years’) and general extenders (ina ‘and so on’), that is with two diferent methods of designed imprecision. Time formulations, as Raymond and White (2017) have shown, ‘do more than “just refer”’ – they work as afordances that shape the emerging action in orientation to the interactional purpose at hand (p. 125). Here the time formulation4 is designed to give the participants just as much detail as they need to know about the duration of the marriage – by commonsensical understanding, a substantial period of time but not one that extends over several decades. In a related but diferent way, the teacher uses the general extenders (‘interactional markers of intersubjectivity in shared social worlds’,5 Overstreet, 1999, p. 77) to allude to shared assumptions about ‘living together’ and ‘getting divorced’ and invites the students to fll in the blanks. So as design features of the informing, the quantity hedges (Overstreet, 1999) contribute to producing the informing as a building block for the emerging story context. In addition, the teller produces the informing
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in the same incremental fashion as the preceding units. As Couper-Kuhlen and Selting (2018) note, ‘(i)n order to track the progression of the story, recipients must thus be able to distinguish backgrounded from foregrounded events’ (p. 8). Excerpt 1.2 shows how the teller makes the story background recognizable as such through methods of formulation and prosodic structuring. Against the backdrop of circumstances laid out before, the next phase of the telling sets the scene for the climactic event. Extract 1.3 Temporal Sequence
25
t t t
+GZ>air – +lifts RH holding pen (Figure 7.7) + RH lateral to left (Figure7.8)
T:
+ye ruz (0.4) omad +inja:↑ (.) one day come-3SG-SPs here one day he came here
FIGURE 7.7
FIGURE 7.8
Storytelling as Instructional Practice
t
26
27
+lifts RH (Figure 7.9)
+baham raftim birun together go-1PL-SPs out we went out together t t t
+waves RH------- (Figure 7.10)
T:
+daštim +(1.4) jaye +šoma +xali↑ +(0.6) were-1PL place you empty we were (1.4) you should have been there
FIGURE 7.9
FIGURE 7.10
+GZ>J
+RH taps table +GZ>M +GZ>N +GZ>J –
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FIGURE 7.11
t t
28
29 30
J: N:
+lifts R fst (Figure 7.11) +GZ>J ---+GZ>air --------------------
+ye dune (0.3) +ciz-am mixordim -o↑ one thing-also eat-1PL-PsPg -and we were having something too [hahaha [haha
The teller alerts the recipients to the shift from background information to story-relevant actions with vertically laminated multimodal practices (Goodwin, 2013), the shift of his gaze, right hand movement, and the conventional narrative device ye ruz ‘one day’. These practices preface the events in the immediate run-up to the climax. In the temporally ordered sequence of past actions, the deictic place formulation in omad inja:↑ ‘he came here’ (line 25) works as a pivot that connects the remote storyworld (the there-and-then) with the present world (the here-and-now) of the telling. We also note that the action descriptions are composed in list format (Jeferson, 1990) with a minimum of detail and a prosodic shape (the rising intonation after the frst TCU, line 25) that represent the events as the ordinary kinds of activities that brothers can be expected to do, such as visiting each other and going out for a drink (Sacks, 1984). One detail that adds to framing the visit as a casual event and therefore to the normalizing efect is the earlier mention of the brother’s residency in Canada. For the story-recipients, a visit from Canada to their collective ‘here’, a major city in the eastern United States, can be assumed to be an unremarkable undertaking.
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Another method that contributes to the normalization is the parenthetical insertion (Goodwin, 1984) jaye šoma xal ‘you should have been there’ (line 27). Following the TCU ‘we went out together’ (line 26) the initial verb form of the next TCU, daštim ‘we were’, projects an in-progress action in the past. After the parenthetical, the TCU continues in line 28 with the projected object (ye dune ciz-am) and the main verb (mixordim). However, the insert ‘you should have been there’ puts the progression of the TCU on hold. With it the teller humorously ‘recreate(s) alternative reality in the past’ (Edmondson et al., 1977, p. 291) while briefy gazing at each of the recipients. The fctive device and selection by gaze combine to position the recipients as hypothetical characters in the storyworld who, if they indeed had been present, would have been witnesses to the events. When the teller resumes the interrupted TCU (line 28; see Wong, 2000, on resumptive resayings), he produces the object with a classifer (dune) and the generic noun ciz ‘thing’ together with a drinking gesture (Figure 7.11). The delay after the classifer suggests that the multisemiotic package might be the result of a search that alludes to the brothers’ drinking rather than directly formulating it. Jace and Nita show with their laughter responses that they appreciate the humor. A fnal observation concerns the selection of verb tense and aspect in describing the story-relevant actions. The frst two verbs omad ‘he came’ (line 25) and raftim birun ‘we went out’ (line 26) are in simple past, whereas daštim mixordim6 ‘we were eating/drinking’ (line 28) is in past progressive. As previous work shows, tellers regularly mobilize tense and aspect as grammatical afordances to characterize the fow of action in the storyworld (e.g., Couper-Kuhlen & Selting, 2018). Here the action of having a drink is constructed as an ongoing and relevant context for the next action, as shown in the following extract. Extract 1.4 Climax 31
32
t
GZ>air -------------
T:
ba’d gofteš ke (0.3) then said that
t t t t t
+GZ>J +raises eyebrows (Figure 7.12) +quick GZ>N +raises BH (Figure 7.13) +GZ>J –
+ feeling freedom do 1SG then he said (0.3) I feel free
134 Gabriele Kasper and Elham Monfaredi
FIGURE 7.12
FIGURE 7.13
The next prosodic unit (line 31) is built as the immediate preface to the story climax. Specifcally the temporal adverb ba’d ‘then’ points forward to a next action in the storyworld, and the quotative gofteš ke ‘he said that’ projects a representation of the brother’s talk.7 After a 0.3 sec. pause, the teller delivers the quote in direct format, that is, with deictic shifts of the verb to the frst person and present tense. The pause sets the prefatory component of from the projected quote, fags the imminent footing shift, and, by holding of the projected next action, contributes to creating suspense (Couper-Kuhlen & Selting, 2018, pp. 11–12). These combined practices prepare the recipients for the story climax as the next event due. At this point it becomes relevant to recall that, with the exception of Mac, the class collectively assessed divorce as an undesirable matter (Excerpt 1.1). So the classroom event that prompted the storytelling in the frst place could possibly generate opposing expectations about the turn that the divorce story might take, such as evolving into a complaint or troubles-telling or into a story that afrms Mac’s optimistic stance.
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135
In either case, the animation of the brother with the declaration ‘I feel free’ (line 32) is delivered as a typical story climax or turning point. It invokes the brother’s status as a divorced man and implicitly contrasts his present sense of freedom with experiencing the opposite during his married life. In large measure the celebratory stance comes about through the prosodic format of the talk and concurrent embodied actions. The shift to animation is marked by the teller raising his eyebrows, adopting a theatrical tone of voice, and producing the quote with slower speed. At the onset of the crucial word azadi ‘freedom’ (line 32), he raises both open hands, palms facing up, in a kind of ‘open hand supine’ gesture (Kendon, 2004) that can be seen as a metaphorical representation of ‘freedom’ (metaphoric gesture, McNeill & Levy, 1982). With these multisemiotic practices the teller uses a pervasive method for constructing the climax in storytelling, which is to shift the mode of representation from description to performance (Bauman, 1986; Buttny, 1998; Couper-Kuhlen & Selting, 2018). In co-present talk tellers routinely combine two methods to produce performativity, direct reported speech that conveys the character’s and teller’s stance through vocal resources (Günthner, 1999; Holt & Clift, 2007) and embodied practices that display action and stance visually (Burch & Kasper, 2016; Golato, 2000; Kupetz, 2014; Lamb, 2016; Niemelä, 2010; Selting, 2010). Here the stylized multimodal representation of the brother’s ‘freedom’ strongly contrasts with the factual tone of the telling before. Whereas the teller delivered the previous portion of the story without afective or evaluative stance, the climactic moment displays his endorsement of the brother’s sentiment in the form of an overlaid commentary (CouperKuhlen, 2012), performed through indexical production practices rather than expressly formulated. By extension, the teacher also conveys his endorsement of Mac’s earlier positive assessment of divorce. Specifcally, Mac’s proposal that divorce may ofer forsat-e jadid ‘new opportunities’ resonates with the brother’s experience of azadi ‘freedom’. The following excerpt shows how the participants manage the immediate post-climax sequence. Extract 1.5 Uptake t t n
33 t
34
M
t
35 m
GZ>J – +drops BH +nods
+(0.5) – GZ>J – ºuhumº – GZ>J – (0.3) +nods
136 Gabriele Kasper and Elham Monfaredi
36
T:
t
37 t
38
T:
t
39
+GZ>M –
+(0.9) – GZ>M – injuri. like this that was it +GZ>J
+(0.3) t t
40
+xob¿ okay¿
N:
+quick GZ>N +GZ>book +°°( )+( )(nemiše)°°
t
+GZ>N
not possible 41
+(0.5) n j t
42
T:
t
43
+nods +nods +GZ>J -----------------------------
xeili- +ciz +daštan +°una-m° (°tafavot-o°) A lot things had they-too diference-and they had a lot of things, diferences +GZ>J
+(0.2) +GZ>book ------------------ (Figure 7.14)
44
T:
FIGURE 7.14
+>gof alan ehsas-ebook -------
+°a- azadi mikonam° freedom do-1SG-SPr he said now I feel free
Just after performing the brother’s declaration, the teller drops his hands (line 33) and so signals that he has completed delivering the climax. At this sequential juncture, recipients are normatively expected to indicate that they recognize and afliate with the teller’s stance (Couper-Kuhlen, 2012; Kupetz, 2014). Nita and Mac register the climax with nodding (line 33) and a quiet acknowledgement token (line 34). As noted earlier, recipients’ nodding in mid-telling can be taken as a ftting display of afliation, whereas responses to the story climax require manifestly afliative stance displays (Stivers, 2008). The students’ weak responses fall short of showing appreciation of the enactment as the story climax and its connection to the earlier classroom discussion and of the teacher’s evaluative stance (Couper-Kuhlen & Selting, 2018). When afliative responses are not forthcoming, tellers often seek out matching uptake (Couper-Kuhlen, 2012; Kasper & Prior, 2015). Here the teller uses several practices to pursue a stronger response from the class. The particle xob¿,8 said with slightly rising intonation, is directed at Mac (lines 36–37), whose positive assessment of divorce may have prompted the story in the frst place and who can therefore be expected to share the teller’s stance. Yet the pursuit remains unsuccessful as Mac only nods. After a longer gap of silence, the teacher appears to give up on the students’ uptake and proceeds to close the storytelling down, using the exit marker injuri ‘that was it’ with falling intonation (line 38). However, the possible closing is put on hold when Nita issues a delayed verbal reaction (line 40), possibly evoked by the teacher’s brief gaze at her.
138 Gabriele Kasper and Elham Monfaredi
Nita’s utterance is barely hearable, but it could be conveying astonishment or disbelief (Selting, 2010). In any case, her turn attracts the teacher’s gaze again (line 41), and in response he re-enters the telling with an account of why the marriage failed (line 42). At diferent recognition points (Jeferson, 1973) during the teller’s explanation, Nita and Jace claim understanding with nodding, but neither they nor the other students display more engaged recipiency. The continued lack of afliative uptake may be prompting the teacher to revert to the closing of the storytelling. As a practice of ‘recompleting’ the story (Mandelbaum, 2013), he recycles the climax with several transformations that generate a less dramatic version (Burch & Kasper, 2016). The vocal delivery is more subdued, produced with accelerated speed for the backgrounded material (line 44) and a soft voice for the foregrounded component °a- azadi mikonam° ‘free’ (line 45). As in the frst version, the key lexical item azadi ‘freedom’ is accompanied by a metaphoric manual gesture, but this time around the gesture is downgraded to a one-handed version (Hauser, 2019, on downgraded hand gestures). These modifcations combine to attenuate the afective stance that the delivery of the climax embodies, whereas the addition of the temporal marker alan ‘now’ foregrounds the contrast between the brother’s experience of life before and after divorce. In this way the transformed version of the climax reinforces the pedagogical purpose of the story, namely to support a minority perspective on the topic of divorce. The design of the second version also signals its sequential import as the fnal story-relevant action. Concurrently with resuming the closing, the teacher begins to orient to the progression of the instructional agenda. At the onset of his turn the teacher’s gaze shifts to the textbook in front of him and rests there beyond the duration of the turn. In other words, while the teacher’s talk remains oriented to the storytelling, his gaze adumbrates the next classroom activity. The ‘dual orientation’ to the preceding and upcoming activity is a regular feature of activity transitions (Deppermann et al., 2010). The remainder of the excerpt shows how the teacher and the students collaboratively achieve the transition from the storytelling to the next activity in the teacher’s plans for the class. Extract 1.6 Exit t t
46 T:
+(1.5) – GZ>book – xolase hh summary anyhow
n
+RH down
t
47
– GZ>book ------+turns page
Storytelling as Instructional Practice
t
48 49
t
– GZ>book –
T:
injuri like this that was it
l n t
+GZ>book +holds book – GZ>book –
+(0.9) m t
+GZ>watch – GZ>book –
T:
+besyar xob alright alright – GZ>book – (1.2) – GZ>book – saf-e ↑ba’d page-EZ next next page
t
52 t
53
T:
m j
54
– GZ>book –
+(0.3)
50
51
139
+leans to grab book +turns page
+(1.2)
During a substantial gap of silence, the teacher upgrades his engagement with the textbook by turning a page (line 46). The embodied recruitment of the textbook is followed by a series of verbal transition markers, each occupying a turn of its own (lines 47, 49, 51). While the teacher’s attention thus continues to be divided between closing down the storytelling and transitioning to another textbook-based activity, Lida and Nita show that they register the teacher’s prospective orientation by gazing at and handling their books (line 50). When the teacher completes the transition with the directive saf-e↑ba’d ‘next page’ (line 53), Mac and Jace follow suit by manipulating their books in response. At this point, the teacher and the students have collaboratively reconfgured their participation framework and completed the transition to the next activity on the classroom agenda. In Extract 1, the teacher’s story is tied to an immediately preceding text-based activity on a cultural and linguistic topic, and it is specifcally set in motion by the contribution of a student that represents a minority opinion on the matter. Notably the story is launched from frst position without a preface, and the connection to the preceding classroom talk is unannounced. The students thus have to recognize the incipient story from the design of the frst turn in the new sequence (line 17).9 The referential practices in the initial TCUs recognizably
140 Gabriele Kasper and Elham Monfaredi
accomplish the story launch and at the same time provide the thematic connection to the previous classroom topic. The students align themselves as story-recipients and thereby show themselves as competent participants in the storytelling activity. While teacher and students achieve alignment of their complementary discourse identities as teller and recipients during the story beginning, they do not achieve a mutually afliative stance during the response sequence. There is a striking mismatch between the teacher’s exuberant enactment of the story climax and the students’ reticent response even when the teacher pursues afliative uptake. Such misalignments of afective stance in the response sequence of the teacher’s storytellings are seen in other cases in the advanced class as well (Monfaredi, 2019). In each of the cases the mismatch appears to be related to the topical content of the story and the way that teller and recipients position themselves to it. Here, it is possible that the students withhold afliation as a way of treating an intimate story about the teacher’s family as a delicate matter, and they may be orienting to their lack of experiential access to the event (Heritage, 2011). In the storytelling episode we turn to next, the students’ participation practices are very diferent.
Car Theft The second excerpt is from a grammar lesson in the intermediate classroom. The topic is the use of the present perfect and past tense. The class is discussing an example sentence in the textbook اتومبیل من سرقت شده استotomobile man serqat shode ast ‘my car has been stolen’. Referring to the verb form serqat šod ‘was stolen’, one student, John, asks whether ‘perfect (is) considered passive’. The question generates an extended clarifcation from the teacher, which does not solve John’s problem. At that point another student, Kevin, intervenes and explains that tense and voice are ‘completely diferent things’ and that ‘you can have every combination of tense and voice’. The explanation gets ratifed by the teacher, upon which the teacher and John formulate diferent upshots. Extract 2.1 Upshots 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08
T: J: T: J: K:
so like yeah you can have passive [that’s [so basically underyeah I think you (.) [( ) with this passive [but their meaning is diferent (0.4) they can be both was stolen or has been or had been or is stolen or
Storytelling as Instructional Practice
09 10 11
141
is being stolen or was being stolenit can be all of them j
+R thumb up
J:
+a::h (0.2) alright
The overlapping so-marked upshot formulations focus on diferent aspects of the passive: John formulates his understanding that the forms ‘was stolen’ and ‘has been (stolen)’ are both forms of the passive (lines 6–7), whereas the teacher emphasizes that these forms have diferent meanings. Kevin expands upon John’s understanding with a list of passive constructions in diferent tenses and a generalizing conclusion (lines 8–10). The explanation generates from John a strong claim of newly gained understanding with simultaneous vocal and gestural practices (line 11). However, the explanation – and hence John’s understanding claim – misses the teacher’s point that the present perfect and past tense mean diferent things (i.e., they express diferent temporal references). Without further commenting on the explanation sequence, the teacher now resorts to a diferent tack, namely, to give an example (Ex. 2.2). Extract 2.2 Give Example j n
12
13
+GZ>T +GZ>T
T:
let me +give you one good example
t r k
+RIF PNT>book (Figure 7.16) +GZ>T +GZ>T
T:
+about (.) +my car- +(1.1)
FIGURE 7.16
t
14
15
+moves RH (Figure 7.17)
+hodud-e nemidunam ceqad dah about-EZ I-know-NG how ten about- I don’t know ten ya punzdah sal-e piš or ffteen year-EZ ago or ffteen years ago
142 Gabriele Kasper and Elham Monfaredi
FIGURE 7.17
FIGURE 7.18
t
16
T:
17
18 19
J: T:
+moves RH to left (Figure 7.18)
vaqti +dar Iran budam, when in Iran was-1SG when I lived in Iran >šayad punzdah sal-e [piš,< maybe ffteen year-EZ ago maybe ffteen years ago [hm (0.2) .hh my car stolen was-Pss my car was stolen
Storytelling as Instructional Practice
143
As she announces one good example about (.) my car (lines 12–13), the teacher points to the textbook simultaneously with the onset of the prepositional complement (Figure 7.16). In this way she projects a telling and frames it as an illustration of the grammar problem. The referent ‘car’ picks up the sentence from the textbook, while the possessive pronoun projects a personal experience story. The announcement thus advises the students of how the upcoming story will be connected to the topic of the ongoing instructional agenda and enables the inference that the teacher’s story will be a personal experience story about a theft of her car. As a story preface, the turn also reconfgures the participation framework to that of storyteller and recipients. The beginning of the telling phase is signaled by a language shift from English to Persian. In the intermediate Persian classes, instruction in the Persian language as a learning object is regularly conducted in English, the shared lingua franca. Classroom talk about other matters is often conducted in Persian. To some extent language choice is indexical of activity categories (Kasper, 2004), although that association is fexible in the intermediate classroom corpus. Here the shift co-occurs with time and place formulations that set the scene for the story (lines 14–17). Notably the time formulations are prefaced by the negative epistemic marker nemidunam ‘I don’t know’, a practice that characterizes the time frame as approximate in the same way as its counterpart does in English (Weatherall, 2011). Co-produced with a hand gesture that indexes the location as ‘away’ (Figure 7.18), the place formulation identifes the teacher as a character in the story (vaqti dar Iran budam ‘when I was in Iran’) and further supports the expectation that the story will be connected to the agenda of the Persian class. The background is set of by a pause and inbreath from the next component, a description of the problematic key event, i.e., the teacher’s car was stolen (line 19). As the description is delivered at markedly slower speed it formulates the key event in the story world while simultaneously drawing the students’ attention to the language form. In particular the teacher puts prosodic emphasis on the verb form šod ‘was’, the simple past form. We see here how the format of the description not only picks up the grammar point but also the semantic meaning of the sample sentence in the textbook and thus strengthens the connections with the textbook exercise on two levels. However, the double orientation to the telling and the grammar point changes in the next TCU as shown in Extract 2.3. Extract 2.3 Grammar Explanation 20
n
+nods slightly
T:
I don’t say mas- +mašinam serqat šode ast my car stolen has been my car has been stolen
144 Gabriele Kasper and Elham Monfaredi
21 22 23 24
J: T:
(0.3) I use simple past tense= =was stolen ( )serqat šod↑ (0.2) because stolen was-Pss was stolen
t
25 26
K:
+stretches RH to right (Figure7.19)
I’m talking about- [+that time↑ [past tense
FIGURE 7.19
27 28 29
T:
and then- because after a month it was found
n
+nods
N:
[+uhu:m [hm
J:
t
30
T:
+nods
va b- va ba’d and and later found was and it was found later
With the metalinguistic description I don’t say (line 20) and production of the Persian sentence with the verb in present perfect, the teacher reverts from storytelling to grammar explanation. The shift in activity focus is refexively indexed by the shift to English as the medium of language instruction. More specifcally, the metalinguistic construction works as a link that juxtaposes the sentences with the correct and incorrect verb forms. Through the comparison, the TCU in the telling is retrospectively re-categorized from story component to language object. The comparison of linguistic examples is followed by an abstract grammatical formulation of the correct usage, I use simple past tense (line 22). John demonstrates his new understanding of the grammatical form with the collaborative completion was stolen at line 23 (Koole, 2010). The teacher ratifes John’s understanding by repeating the verb form in Persian (line 24), followed by an explanation of why the simple past is the correct tense (lines 25, 27, 30).
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145
To be more precise, the teacher ofers two explanations of diferent order, both projected by the causal connector because (line 24). The frst (line 25) describes a necessary condition for the use of the past tense with abstract semantic relations. For that she characterizes the time reference as the distant past with the distal pronoun that and an arm and hand gesture directed outward so that formulation and gesture mutually elaborate each other. Simultaneously with the teacher’s production of the abstract time reference, Kevin demonstrates his understanding with a collaborative completion of the teacher’s turn (line 26) that specifes the grammatical tense. However, his understanding display gets no response, perhaps because it is produced in overlap. The second explanation describes the critical real-world event in the story (because after a month it was found), which exemplifes the condition of an action completed in the past (i.e., the car is no longer stolen). Here, in the utterance format and then- because after a month it was found (line 27), the dual orientation to grammar and story surfaces again. The initial temporal connector and then links back to the last component of the telling ( ‘my car was stolen’, line 19) and projects continuation of the story. However, the teacher abandons the projected course of talk and restarts the TCU with the causal connector because, which possibly links back to the grammatical description I use simple past tense (line 22) and projects an explanation of the tense selection. Nina and John acknowledge the explanation with continuers (line 28–29) that orient to the story as not yet complete. The completion is delivered in the teacher’s next turn. She resumes the abandoned telling (line 30), indexed by a shift to Persian, with a version of the English description after a month it was found, va b- va ba’d ‘and it was found later’. As with the formulation of the problematic event before, she produces the verb form in the formulation of the resolution with prosodic emphasis, further enhanced with a nod. The terminal fall indexes the telling phase of the story as complete. This is how students and teacher treat the story in the subsequent talk (Excerpt 2.4). Extract 2.4 Response Sequence 1 31 32 33
(0.4) n
+nods slightly
N:
+uhu:m true story?
R:
t
+nods & smiles
34
T:
35 36 37
N:
+↑bale yes yes (.) ha[haha [hahaha
T:
146 Gabriele Kasper and Elham Monfaredi
38
r
+RH under chin
R:
+lucky ha
r
39
+GZ>T (Figure 7.20)
T:
xeili +xeili ajib bud, very very strange was it was very very strange,
n t
+raises eyebrow +moves RIF right to left (Figure 7.21)
40
FIGURE 7.20
FIGURE 7.21
+dar +Tehran serqat šod va in Tehran stolen was-Pss and
Storytelling as Instructional Practice
FIGURE 7.22
n
41
42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59
N:
+tilts head (Figure 7.22)
dar Hamedan↑ +peida šod. in Hamedan found was-Pss it was stolen in Tehran and found in Hamedan (0.2) huh
n
+nods
R:
+↑[wo:::w [haha my my uncle was so (0.3) brave he found $it$. [hh [hm [somebody needed a ride ha[haha [ye(hh)ah haha maybe your uncle drove it from [Tehran to Hamedan [hahahaha [hahaha[haha [hahaha[haha [hahaha[haha [he just needed [to get back home [no it was a [long story I can tell you [maybe he is not brave but guilt-ridden
T:
J: N: T: R: K: J: T: N: K: T: J:
147
148 Gabriele Kasper and Elham Monfaredi
After a gap (line 31) in which the students may be waiting to see whether the teacher adds more to the story, Ray initiates the response sequence with a recipient action (true story?) that shapes the direction of the talk for an extended period (line 33). Ray had not participated in the talk about the grammatical problem at all, and his question addresses the topical content of the story exclusively. Although the question is asked in English, the teacher responds in Persian and in this way maintains the story telling frame. Her strong multimodal confrmation gets a laughter response from Nina that the teacher joins in on (Glenn, 1989), and a humorous assessment of the story outcome from Ray (lucky ha) in the next turn (line 38). All three participants thus treat the story as an afliative stance object. Perhaps in orientation to that, the teacher ofers an assessment of the story events that categorizes the story as strange (line 39). As the assessment is produced with continuing intonation, it is not hearable as sequence closing but rather projects further talk on the matter. Indeed, the teacher launches a retelling that refexively frames the assessment as a story preface in that it raises the expectation to a particular kind of story (Mandelbaum, 2013). The retelling (lines 40–41) formulates the same key events as before but with the critical addition of the locations of where the car was stolen and found (dar Tehran serqat šod va dar Hamedan peida šod ‘it was stolen in Tehran and found in Hamedan’), supported with an iconic gesture that visualizes the distance between the two cities. The recognitional place references (Kim, 2012; Scheglof, 1972) make the students’ knowledge of the geography of Iran relevant, a condition for them to appreciate the described course of events as unusual.10 Nina and Ray display astonishment with emphatic response tokens (lines 43, 44) and so afliate with the teller as congenial story-recipients (Burch & Kasper, 2016). In overlap with Ray’s recipient token (line 44), the teacher expands the resolution (lines 45–46), prefaced by laughter tokens and completed with a smile voice. The expansion marks a new phase in the storytelling activity. For one thing, it specifes the protagonist of the story in active voice and attributes to him the retrieval of the car as an extraordinary achievement. For another, the teacher shifts from Persian to English. Taken together, the grammatical format of the description, the topical focus on the protagonist, and the codeswitch signal that language, even as a subsidiary topic, has been completely abandoned in favor of the storytelling. The humorous introduction of the uncle as heroic protagonist generates a sequence of strongly afliative banter that the entire class joins in on (lines 49–57). Responding to the imagined scenarios, the teacher announces a fuller version of the story in another story preface (line 58). There ensues an extended, highly engaged storytelling in which of all of the students participate. We join the telling again at the beginning of the response sequence (Extract 2.5). Extract 2.5 Response Sequence 2 156 157
R: T:
=good ending yeah very good [ending
Storytelling as Instructional Practice
158 159
N: T:
j
160
T:
n
161 162 163 164
T: N: T:
FIGURE 7.23
FIGURE 7.24
[haha[haha [but it was+GZ>book (Figure 7.23)
it was like a $story +reall(h)y$ haha +shakes head
$never happen-$ I mean +not always it happens (0.2) to be like [( ) [hahaha .hh [anyway
149
150 Gabriele Kasper and Elham Monfaredi
165
j j j r&n
+GZ>T +BH supine PNT>T (Figure 7.24) +GZ>book (Figure 7.25) +GZ>J (Figure7.26)
J:
+[otomobil-e: šoma,+(0.6) car-EZ you-PL your car
FIGURE 7.25
FIGURE 7.26
166
T:
167
J:
168
T:
stolen [serqat šod= stolen was-Pss was stolen = was
Storytelling as Instructional Practice
169 170
J: T:
151
haha[ha [bale yes
Again, launched by Ray, the response sequence is composed of two assessment sequences. In the frst, Ray and the teacher evaluate the outcome in the story world, i.e., the good ending (lines 156–157). In the second, the teacher assesses the story with an evaluation (lines 159–162) that connects back to her characterization of the story as ‘very strange’ in the preface (line 39) and thereby treats the telling as a completed activity. In her next action (line 164), the teacher signals sequence closure and ‘an impending break in contiguity’ (Park, 2010, p. 3283) with an inbreath and the free-standing particle anyway, without, however, indicating the direction of the next activity. In contrast, John had already directed his gaze to the textbook during the assessment sequence (line 160) and in this way begun to re-orient from the storytelling to language instruction (Figure 7.23). Now, in overlap with the teacher’s turn, with his gaze directed at the teacher and both hands in a supinated gesture pointing toward her (Figure 7.24), John begins to produce, in Persian, a sentence that draws on the story and the grammar topic (line 165). After saying the grammatical subject otomobile šoma ‘your car’ (linking to the story with the deictic shift from mašinam ‘my car’, reinforced by the gesture), he shifts gaze to the textbook, ostensibly in search of the verb (Figure 7.25). The teacher provides assistance by ofering the participle ‘stolen’ in slow speed, higher volume, and rising prosody, thus soliciting completion of the sentence from John. In overlap, John produces the entire verb form serqat šod ‘was stolen’, and the teacher repeats the past tense form, again in slower speed and higher volume. So John, whose question about the relationship of passive and perfect prompted the entire grammar explanation in the frst place, fnally demonstrates that he is now able to use the correct verb form, albeit with the teacher’s support. He celebrates his success with sequence closing laughter, and the teacher confrms the correctness of the sentence in Persian. In Extract 2, the storytelling is occasioned by a grammar topic on the ofcial teaching agenda. In the progression of the instructional unit the teacher only resorts to the storytelling as a method of explaining the grammar rule after explanations through abstract rule formulations failed, an indication that the story is contingently employed as a pedagogical resource. Of particular note is the teacher’s categorization of the story in the story preface as an ‘example’. As Lee (2004) shows in a study of how teachers in ESL classes use examples as ‘a practical and regular task’ (p. 104) to explain target concepts, teachers methodically tailor the example to the sequential context, the students’ displays of understanding, and the instructional purpose at hand. This is much in
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evidence in the initial telling of the car theft story as well. The story-relevant sequence of action is boiled down to a minimal confict resolution format that directs the students’ attention to the tense forms and treats the descriptions as linguistic examples and instructional objects. Although the initial story is self-initiated by the teacher, it is responsive to the students’ displayed non-understanding of her instructional project, the contrast between the time reference of present perfect and past tense. Likewise, it is the students’ shift in focus to the story content in the response sequence that eventually moves the teacher to tell the long version of the story in English and abandon her instructional project altogether until the storytelling has been completed. During the extended telling, the students repeatedly participate with story interventions (Monzoni & Drew, 2009) that occasionally derail the progression of the telling, such as topicalizing the make of the teller’s stolen car (not shown). Finally, it is a student who initiates the resumption of the abandoned language instruction and whose assisted correct delivery of the target sentence brings the grammar explanation to a successful conclusion.
Discussion and Conclusion Earlier in the chapter we observed that the two cases selected for this study were representative of the corpus of storytellings in the Persian classrooms. We can now elaborate on this point. As already noted, the storytellings are contingently occasioned by the ongoing instructional activity and a student’s response to the teacher’s pedagogical project, and they are self-initiated and undertaken by the teacher as the (primary) teller. Regardless of local particulars, the students recognize the story beginnings as such and align themselves as story-recipients. The tellings also evolve through the ordered phases seen in ordinary conversation (Burch & Kasper, 2016; Lamb, 2016; Mandelbaum, 2013) and exhibit the context-free methods of storytelling in interaction, adapted to the specifcs of the prompting event, the teacher’s pedagogical project, and each classroom setting. Both stories serve as real-life examples of abstract teaching objects and are designed as personal experience stories that feature a member of the teacher’s family as the main protagonist. Finally, teacher and students collaboratively transition from the storytelling to other classroom business. The conspicuous diferences between the two cases are shaped by the category and specifc instances of the prompting event. As an abstract concept, the topic of divorce calls upon the students’ social and cultural knowledge as competent (young) adults as well as their lexical knowledge as learners of Persian. Mac’s ironically proposed minority opinion (‘new opportunity’) and the teacher’s humorous assessment of Mac (‘optimistic’) generate afliative stance displays by the entire classroom community. In the interaction just prior to Mac’s proposal (see introduction to Excerpt 1), the class was generating a list of lexical items to characterize divorce as a vocabulary-building exercise. So the participants
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oriented to the topic of divorce as a matter of general knowledge rather than personal experience and consequently as equally accessible to all participants. The teacher’s story of the brother’s divorce experience reconfgures the epistemic and experiential balance and the associated rights to assessment (Heritage, 2011). Through the design of the telling, the teacher gives the students vicarious access to the scenario by humorously positioning them as hypothetical participants in the story world (Ex. 1.3) and dramatically enacting (Ex. 1.4) – and re-enacting (Ex. 1.5) – the climax. And yet, the students withhold all but minimal uptake in the response sequence when afliation with the teller’s stance is normatively expected. This may suggest that the students confront a dilemma: The preference for afliation (Stivers, 2008) and low entitlement to assess a personal experience to which they do not have experiential access of their own (Heritage, 2011; Sacks, 1992). The students’ reticence could be taken to indicate that they prioritize the latter. The grammar topic partitions the epistemic relationships in the classroom quite diferently. Knowledge about the target grammatical organizations is unequally distributed among the students, and no student shows a grasp of the teacher’s instructional project, the diference between the present perfect and past tense of the passive. The initial storytelling (Ex. 2.2 and 2.3) is methodically designed to accomplish its pedagogical purpose. As such, it exhibits the teacher’s institutional charge of meeting the goals on the ofcial agenda and her professional competence as a language educator. What is more, the teacher accomplishes her instructional project as John correctly produces the target sentence after the completion of the ‘long story’ (Ex. 2.5) and so visibly changes his epistemic status. Unlike the telling of the divorce story, the telling of the car theft story displays changing orientations between exemplifying grammar rules and personal experience story. The dual orientation to both activities is evident in the teacher’s initial version (lines 14–19) and John’s production of the target sentence with pronominal deictic shift (line 165). A single focus on grammatical form is seen in the metalinguistic comparison (lines 20–24), and the telling is the participants’ exclusive concern from Ray’s initiation of the frst response sequence (line 33) to the teacher’s fnal assessment in the long version (lines 160–162). The shifting orientations are indexed by language choice. The grammar instruction, both prior to and during the storytelling, is conducted in English; Persian supplies the language samples as instructional objects. The teacher’s concurrent orientation to grammar and the telling is signaled by her use of Persian. Predominantly English is the shared medium when the participants exclusively orient to their complementary discourse identities as storyteller and recipients. However, in the response sequence to the frst version of the telling (lines 33–41), the practice of ‘dual receptive language alternation’ (Greer, 2013) confgures the locally relevant membership categories somewhat diferently. Using English, Ray aligns and afliates himself as story-recipient (lines 33, 38), while his institutional identities as student and language learner remain
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inconsequential. The teacher’s responsive actions reciprocate Ray’s afliative stance, while the medium of Persian as action format simultaneously exposes the students to target language use. In this way the teacher manages to maintain her discourse identity as storyteller while also performing her institutional responsibility as Persian language instructor. With her shift to English for the telling of the long version of the story, the teacher accommodates the students’ unequally distributed language competencies and afords them opportunities to actively shape the course of the telling. The storytellings in the two Persian classrooms show systematic commonalities with and diferences from the storytellings in university lecture classes in Japan (Szatrowski, 2010; Takahashi, 2010). Of the 60 storytellings identifed by Takahashi, 39 are what she calls ‘illustration narratives’, that is, the story serves to explain an abstract concept by giving an example. Likewise, the teachers’ storytellings in the Persian classes implement the ‘practical and regular task’ (Lee, ibid.) of making abstract teaching objects accessible to the students. In both settings, the instructors calibrate diverse multimodal resources to signal story components and bring the connections between the telling and the object of the instruction into focus. As expected, the lectures for large audiences and the small Persian classes favor diferent organizations of delivery and aford diferent opportunities for student participation. But across settings, the instructor’s conduct shows that they monitor – and are responsive to – student uptake. The professor giving the haiku lecture solicits responses to epistemic status checks by show of hands to ensure tellability. The intermediate-class Persian teacher alternates between Persian and English to secure understanding. And all instructors observably design their storytellings to generate not only understanding of the teaching object but to foster student involvement. The storytellings are teachers’ and students’ collaborative accomplishments, even if the manner and extent of students’ participation difers. But in their organizational detail, the teachers’ storytellings and the students’ contributions are responsive to the specifc institutional ecology that gave occasion to the telling in the frst place.
Notes 1 In the intermediate class, two students were of Persian language heritage, one student was of Japanese ancestry, and one of European ancestry. In the advanced class, one student was of Persian language heritage, one of Turkish ancestry, and two of European ancestry. Since Persian is among the less commonly taught languages in the United States, course enrollment was low compared to foreign language classes that are typically taken to fulfll institutional language requirements. 2 Mac’s proposal also does not ofer another adjective and so falls outside the parameters of the current activity as set by the teacher. But the teacher’s and students’ uptake responds to the topical content of Mac’s proposal and so goes along with shifting the activity to an exclusively topical focus.
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3 In this environment the Persian expression works like its English equivalent, that is ‘it shows that the speaker has less than full commitment to what follows in the turn’ (Weatherall, 2011, p. 319). 4 According to the taxonomy proposed by Raymond and White (2017), absolute (in contrast to event-relative) and counted (in contrast to uncounted) time references enable speakers to ‘shape the hearer’s perception by selecting (a) unit of measurement’ and aford the ‘possibility of rounding, exaggeration, etc.’ (Figure 1, p. 118). 5 ‘In using a general extender, the speaker conveys to the hearer an assumption of shared knowledge, and she invites the hearer to supply whatever unstated understandings are required to make sense of the utterance’ (Overstreet, 1999, pp. 72–73). Overstreet’s analysis, based on collections from diferent varieties of English and German, applies to the teller’s use of ina in lines 23 and 24. 6 In spoken Persian the verb xordan ( )خوردنis used for both ‘eat’ and ‘drink’. 7 The complementizer ke after a quotative projects represented talk in either direct or indirect format. 8 Xob (roughly translated as ‘OK’, ‘right’) is a multifunctional marker in Persian talk. Among other things, speakers use free-standing xob to elicit recipients’ alignment or confrmation upon delivering a unit of talk in multi-unit turns (Monfaredi et al., 2019). 9 The method of starting a storytelling without a preface is attested in ordinary conversation as well (‘one way to launch a storytelling is simply to begin, relying on recipient ability to recognize an incipient storytelling’ Mandelbaum, 2013, p. 486). In classrooms the teacher’s privileged speaking rights may facilitate the co-participants’ alignment as recipients. However in this case, the frst TCU would be hearable as a story beginning regardless of the setting. 10 The actual driving distance between Tehran and Hamedan is 320 km. 11 Ezafe is a grammatical particle that links two words together (-ye- or -yi after vowels) between the words it connects.
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APPENDIX A Conventions for Representing Embodied Conduct
H R L F IF 2Fs 3Fs B GZ > ↔ + ----Italics PNT
hand(s) Right Left Finger index fnger index and middle fngers index, middle, and ring fngers both hands gaze ‘to’ – direction of gaze shift or movement shifting gaze onset of change (gaze or movement) continued movement or hold of gesture embodiments pointing
APPENDIX B Glossing Conventions
EZ NG OM PL PrP PRT PsC PsP Pss SG SP SPs
ezafe11 negative object marker plural present perfect tense particle past continuous tense past perfect tense passive voice singular sufx pronoun simple past tense
Acknowledgement The data for this chapter were collected as part of the second author’s PhD dissertation, which was generously funded by the Roshan Cultural Heritage Institute for the Elahé Omidyar Mir-Djalali Fellowship for Excellence in Persian Studies.
8 STORYTELLING IN A MEANINGAND-FLUENCY TASK IN THE SECOND LANGUAGE CLASSROOM Emma Greenhalgh and Ray Wilkinson
Introduction In the second language (L2) classroom interaction literature a distinction has been made between a form-and-accuracy approach (and tasks) on the one hand and a meaning-and-fuency approach (and tasks) on the other (Seedhouse, 2004).1 In relation to the former, a signifcant focus of analysis has been on the use of a sequence of three actions generally referred to as the Initiation-Response-Evaluation (IRE) sequence2 (or ‘known-answer question’ sequence (Scheglof, 2007)). For work in this area using conversation analysis (CA) see, inter alia, Lee (2007) and Waring (2008). The sequence generally involves the L2 teacher eliciting a response from a student, which the teacher will then evaluate in terms of its linguistic adequacy. Thus, the frst action is that of elicitation by the teacher – for example in the form of a known-answer (or ‘test’) question – or through directing the student to an item in the resource book/task sheet. The second action is the student’s response, which will generally involve content that has already been provided in some manner by the teacher or resource book/handout (rather than being generated – or, to adapt Gofman’s (1981) term, ‘authored’ – by the student). In the third position slot, the teacher then evaluates that response in terms of its linguistic correctness or adequacy. In other words, what the adequate form of response by the student should be is something that is treated by all concerned as being in the teacher’s domain of expertise, providing the teacher with a warrant to act as the person to evaluate the adequacy or inadequacy of the response. This type of sequence has a particular sequential structure; for example, if the teacher rejects the student’s attempt as incorrect or inadequate, it would make a further attempt from the student relevant (i.e., it expands the sequence), whereas if the teacher accepts the answer as correct/adequate, this is treated as closing the sequence (Scheglof, 2007).
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A short extract from our dataset is presented here to exemplify this type of sequence and to display a contrast with the type of sequence seen in the meaning-and-fuency task that will be the focus of our analysis. In this extract, Seo-yun, a female Korean student, is in an English as a second language (ESL) class in the UK. As well as the teacher, there are three other students present (not seen in this extract). Before the task starts, the teacher has explained that the nature of the exercise is that the students have to verbally produce the material from the resource book using the correct tenses, which in this case are past simple and past continuous. Extract 1 Waiting Is Long 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13
TEACHER: SEO-YUN: TEACHER: SEO-YUN: TEACHER: SEO-YUN: TEACHER: SEO-YUN: TEACHER:
Seo-yun you begin (0.3) °numbe::r° °one?° number ↑one a train waited (.) (0.5) °at the station° ( )° you- so you’ve got two ver:bs °Seo-yun° (.) which one is long and which one is short waiting is lo:ng. yeah (1.0) the train was waiting (.) when we arrived at the station. good. (0.6) that’s it.
Here, the teacher selects (by naming) and elicits a response from one particular student by directing her to the task material in the resource book (lines 01–02 and 04). The student’s response is produced in lines 05–06, using the content (vocabulary) provided by the resource book. The teacher’s third position response is frst a rejection of her attempt (lines 07–08) in the form of a prompt to remember a formulation they have used previously to distinguish the English past continuous and past simple verb tenses (i.e., as ‘long’ and ‘short’ verbs respectively). The student subsequently produces a second attempt (line 12), which the teacher then accepts as correct (line 13), thus closing the sequence. Compared to CA investigations of this type of form-and-accuracy task, there has been notably less conversation analytic work focusing on ‘meaningand-fuency’-type tasks. In this type of task, a range of forms of activity are employed that maximize the opportunities for learners to use the second language to communicate something of their own experience or opinions and convey ‘new information’ to recipients. The teacher regularly lets errors pass in favor of the progressivity of talk (i.e., they prioritize ‘fuency’ over ‘accuracy’), and the
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allocation of turns-at-talk is often less regulated compared to form-and-accuracy tasks (Seedhouse, 2004). Reddington (2018), for example, describes an ESL classroom activity that, she notes, fts Seedhouse’s (2004) defnition of a meaning-and-fuency task. In this activity, which the teacher described as ‘conversation practice’, she posed the question to the students of what traditional music from their country they would recommend she listen to if she were a visitor. Reddington notes that although the teacher set the topic and to some extent controlled the allocation of turns, the students were talking about a topic about which they had greater epistemic access (Heritage, 2012) than the teacher (and, in general, the other students). For her part, the teacher positioned herself as an active recipient, being informed by what the students were telling her. Rather than setting up particular types of activities, language teachers may also bring more ‘conversational’ forms of interaction into the language classroom in a seemingly more ‘ad hoc’ basis. Waring (2014), for example, noting that there has long been a desire for integrating students’ life-worlds into the L2 classroom, describes how ‘conversational’ talk (such as asking the students about their weekends) can be launched by the teacher during the undertaking of more traditional IRE language learning tasks. While there is little CA work on stories as a feature of language learners’ talk in the classroom, getting students to produce talk in the form of stories is typically seen as a positive and motivational feature of meaning-and-fuency tasks, since it is one way in which learners can express personal meaning and fnd their ‘voice’ in the L2 (Nicholas et al., 2011).3 In this chapter, one aim is to uncover some key interactional features of one particular meaning-and-fuency task – that of storytelling, where students draw on their own lives and experiences. Since meaning-and-fuency tasks focus on facilitating students’ language abilities in a diferent way from form-and-accuracy tasks, they can be expected to display distinct practices, actions and sequential organization of those actions compared to those evident in form-and-accuracy tasks. Our analysis will, in part, take the form of contrasting this type of meaningand-fuency task with the type of form-and-accuracy task seen in Extract 1. Another aim of the analysis is to uncover how storytelling and the receipt of stories may be adapted to a particular institutional context (Drew & Heritage, 1992) – i.e., here, a task carried out in an L2 English classroom lesson – and how storytelling sequences in this interactional environment may exhibit distinctive features compared to those told in spontaneous conversation. A theme of the analysis is the hybrid nature of the storytellings in this activity, which may refect the hybrid nature of meaning-and-fuency tasks. That is, while students in this task may be encouraged to talk – here, in the form of stories – about matters that pertain to their own experience and life-world, both the student storyteller and the teacher still display an orientation to this event as a task within a classroom through which language is being practiced and taught.
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Background It is not our aim in this section to provide an in-depth background to CA work on storytelling within conversation (see Mandelbaum, 2013 for one overview). Rather, we will outline some general fndings from this work concerning how stories are launched, produced and responded to, which constitute a basis for our ensuing analysis. CA research on storytelling sequences has highlighted two ‘positions’ from which a story can be launched. The speaker may launch a story from ‘frst position’ whereby they may move into a story directly from non-story talk or they may announce the potentially upcoming story with a story preface (Scheglof, 1992). In contrast, a story may also be launched from ‘second position’ as, for example, part of a response to a co-participant’s question (Scheglof, 1997). The story itself can be produced through a series of utterances, with temporary suspension of the usual rules of turn-taking (for which, see Sacks et al., 1974). Recipients have been shown to play an important role in the production of the story. Their intra-story response tokens can align with – and help forward – the production of the storytelling activity as well as display afliation with the storyteller’s stance (Stivers, 2008). One interactional task of the story-recipient is to monitor the progression of the telling for a point where the story may have reached a possible end. This can be, for example, the punchline to a funny story or a reporting of some form of complainable event within a complaint story (Selting, 2010). Following this possible ending, an appropriate response from the recipient is expectable, whereby they display some understanding of the story and an appreciation of the teller’s stance (Stivers, 2008).
Data The data presented come from video recordings of intermediate level ESL classes at a private language college in the north of England. The teachers were qualifed and experienced ESL teachers, and the students were attending a full-time course at the college. The classes were small, with between three and fve students of diferent nationalities within each class. The researcher recorded the classes on the same day of the week over a two-week period, resulting in a dataset of approximately eight hours. The four participants in the classroom activity that we analyze here are the teacher (‘T’ within the transcripts) – whose frst language (L1) is British English – and three adult students: Clara (C) from Spain (L1 = Spanish) and Ahmed (A) and Saleh (S) from Qatar (L1 = Arabic).4 The storytelling sequences we focus on here emerged as part of a language classroom activity using Discussions A-Z Intermediate (Wallwork, 1997), a published resource book, which is described as encouraging natural discussion among
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students. In the data analyzed, the teacher gives out photocopied handouts of one activity from the book entitled You, which presents questions for students to respond to, such as have you ever been the victim of a burglary?. From the introduction to the resource book, it is evident that these materials are designed primarily for use as part of a meaning-and-fuency task, and this is indeed the manner in which the teacher utilizes them. The types of questions used are clearly asking students to draw on their personal experiences and to produce answers that are longer than one word or phrase (Wallwork, 1997). While some of the questions do not lend themselves to answers in the form of stories (e.g., to what extent are possessions more important than people?), others do, as is evident in the examples analyzed here.
Analysis In this section we discuss three examples from this meaning-and-fuency task where student responses emerge in the form of stories. In analyzing the frst extract here (Extract 2) we will highlight some generic interactional features of this meaning-and-fuency task and the stories that are produced as part of it, as well as examining how these features present themselves in this particular extract. We then more briefy discuss two further extracts (Extracts 3 and 4) where students respond in this task in the form of stories, showing how these generic interactional features are also evident in these examples with some variations.
Generic Features In lines 01 and 02 of Extract 2 the teacher is directing the students to the last section of the text at the bottom of the activity handout and prompting them to choose one or more of the ten questions there to answer. Clara produces a query (line 04) about the frst question in the list (which is what’s the worst/ nicest thing that anyone has ever said to you?), and this discussion about clarifying some elements of the question continues over a series of turns between Clara and the teacher (lines 04–10). After this clarifcation, Clara self-selects to produce a response to the question on the handout (line 17) following a series of interactional steps (lines 11–16), which we will discuss later. Clara orients to one option from the handout question that she has just asked about (here, the worst thing), and her response takes the form of a story (lines 17–34). Extract 2 What’s the Worst/Nicest Thing That Anyone Has Ever Said to You? 01 02 03
TEACHER:
okay well we’ll have a look at this then (.) uhm a::nd, (0.6) °yeah just see what you° (0.4) °°say?°°
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04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42
CLARA: TEACHER: CLARA: TEACHER: CLARA: TEACHER: CLARA:
AHMED: CLARA: TEACHER: CLARA: AHMED: TEACHER: CLARA: AHMED: SALEH: TEACHER: CLARA: TEACHER: AHMED: CLARA: TEACHER: CLARA: TEACHER: CLARA: TEACHER: CLARA: TEACHER:
167
worst nice (what’s [this?) [what’s the worst [the worst is[ahh I understand (0.3) okay the:,(0.2) bad= =bad (0.5) worst and ni:ce, (.) bett[er. [nicest. (1.2) best. [°best° (0.7) hmm:::, [C turns gaze toward A and S; eye contact with S who then drops his gaze; A is gazing down at the handout; T is gazing at A and S talking under his breath while reading turns gaze to teacher and holds it there until he gazes at her
worst↑ (0.3) I study in uh:m (0.3) a religion school, mm hmm, and what’s the name[I: [can’t [remember [ C [gazes [at A; gestures to head [a nun? [ [a catholic school? a nun? gazing to and pointing at A [nun? gazes to T [(nun) gazes to T nun with gestures head covering woman, mm hm nun (mm) nods head uhm one nun say me tha::t (0.8) pharmac:y is too difcult for me. okay, and I must eh study:, (0.3) I must↑n’t eh stud[y pharmacy] [okay. ] okay. (.) ooh (so)= =and I (mean) [ptk. (0.9) [ghhehihh [points to her head [ shrugs yeah so you would have been quite eh (.) eh:m (1.0) with that.= =yeah yeah it makes you quite (.) sad=okay (.) and the best ↑thing
We will make four sets of observations about this storytelling activity. First, we will focus on the type of question from the handout that the students respond to in the form of a story. While these questions are not known-answer
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questions (Scheglof, 2007), they are also not straightforwardly ‘real’, informationseeking questions of the type that may be used by a speaker in everyday conversation (and which a participant may respond to with a story: Scheglof, 1997). One diference, of course, is that in the latter situation the speaker is likely to be both the author and animator (Gofman, 1981) of the question, with that question being directed at another participant as a frst pair part and making relevant from the other participant a second pair part in the form of a response to that question (Scheglof, 2007). In Extract 2, on the other hand, the question is one from a pedagogical resource book that a participant (commonly the teacher but in this case one of the students, Clara) animates by choosing and reading some or all of aloud. So, one way in which the student’s response here displays a kind of hybrid form is that its content is, as we shall discuss later, authored and animated by the student themselves and is at the same time hearably produced as a response to the demands of a classroom task (here in the form of a question from a resource book), rather than to a ‘real’ question of another interlocutor. While all the resource book questions in this activity can be seen to prompt the student toward producing a response of more than one turn-constructional unit (TCU: Sacks et al., 1974), some might nudge the student toward answering in the form of a story more than others.5 In the three extracts we discuss here the questions that elicit stories are: What is the worst/nicest thing that anyone has ever said to you? Have you ever been the victim of a burglary? What’s the most embarrassing thing you’ve ever done/said?
(Extract 2) (Extract 3) (Extract 4)
In each case the question prompts a possible recounting of a specifc tellable – and possibly rather dramatic – event in the student’s life, thus making a story one obvious format for the recounting, particularly since the teller may wish to provide some context or background to the main focus of the story (e.g., the situation that made what was said or done embarrassing).6 In two of the questions the event being asked about is referred to with an extreme case formulation (Pomerantz, 1986) – i.e., the worst or nicest thing that anyone has ever said; the most embarrassing thing that you’ve ever done/said – highlighting this event as a unique and highly recountable one. In the case of the other question, being burgled is, again, likely to be a memorable and recountable event. A second set of observations centers around the fact that, at least in the way in which the teacher uses the task materials in our data, typically no particular student is selected by the teacher to provide a response to the question. This difers from the form-and-accuracy tasks in our data (see Extract 1, line 01) where the teacher will quite regularly select a particular student to attempt an
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answer (i.e., an example of current speaker selecting next speaker: Sacks et al., 1974). This diference would seem to be related to the nature of the content being elicited; while in a form-and-accuracy task any student could in principle make an attempt at the answer (as long as it was broadly within their level of linguistic competence) and can be selected by the teacher to make an attempt, in this meaning-and-fuency task students are being asked to formulate a response based on their life experiences. As such, unlike in a typical form-and-accuracy task, a student can validly respond that they cannot answer for the reason that they have nothing to report, at least not in the form of a more extended answer being prompted by the question. For example, in response to a yes/no question, such as have you ever been the victim of a burglary?, a student may indicate that the answer is no. In our data there are two practices by which a particular student may become the one to answer in the form of a story. One practice is where, in this context, the student self-selects to take a turn (Sacks et al., 1974), and that turn emerges in the form of a story. The other is where the student self-selects and says something that is not itself the start of a story but that is hearable as indicating that the student has something to tell, perhaps in the form of an extended turn/story. The frst practice is evident in Extract 2. Clara frst clarifes her understanding of the question (lines 04–10) and then, with the prolonged hmm (line 11), appears to convey some sense of ‘thinking’ or ‘considering’. At this point, however, it is equivocal between whether she is going to answer the question that she has just asked about or whether her display of thinking indicates that she is considering the task more generally (and therefore may not be about to immediately address this – or another – question from the activity sheet). There is no explicit indication from the teacher or the other students that they are treating Clara’s conduct at this point as being a precursor to answering; the teacher, for example, is gazing at the other two students at this time (line 14). Clara’s gaze activity here, however, can be seen to be important in terms of her eventual self-selection to answer the question. From gazing at the other two students it would be clear to her that there is no indication that either of them is preparing imminently to self-select to answer; after briefy making eye contact with her, Saleh looks away, and Ahmed is gazing down at the handout before starting to mutter to himself (lines 12–15). Clara then gazes at the teacher, seemingly displaying her availability to speak and thus potentially be an answerer to the question. As soon as the teacher turns his gaze to her, she starts her answer (lines 16–17). A third set of observations centers around the stories themselves. A feature of these stories is that they are produced in ‘second position’ (Scheglof, 1997), in that the story serves as an answer – or as part of an answer – to the question
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from the resource book that has been chosen and read aloud, usually, but by no means always (see Extract 2), by the teacher. This sequential positioning of the story has implications for the telling and also how it is heard and responded to, both as it unfolds and in terms of when it might be heard as having reached a possible ending. For example, in terms of the telling of the story, the student is accountable for producing a story that is indeed hearable as an answer to the question that they are addressing.7 For the recipient, the point in the story when the question may have been answered can be hearable as the possible end of the story (and where the recipient should then respond in some way). In Extract 2, for instance, the fact that the question Clara is addressing is what is the worst thing that anyone has ever said to you? means that hearers may expect the possible end of the story to be some form of reported speech (direct or indirect), which presents this worst thing that was said. This is indeed what happens here, in the form of indirect reported speech (lines 30–31 and 33–34). The form of the question can also be seen to infuence what type of story is told; Clara’s story emerges as a complaint story (Selting, 2010), with the student teller presenting herself as the recipient of apparently unfair criticism from a nun at her school.8 While stories in conversation can also be produced in response to a question (i.e., in second position), the stories in this task difer in that they do not emerge from the topical development of an ongoing conversation (Jeferson, 1978). One consequence of this form of ‘artifcial’ elicitation in the task (compared to conversation) concerns what Scheglof (1997, p. 99) terms the ‘motive force’ of the telling; the function(s) the story may perform within the task is very likely to be much more constrained than those functions that stories in conversation may display (Scheglof, 1997; Mandelbaum, 2013). Indeed, what is evident in these data is that the student storytellers display an orientation toward these stories as, in part, a pedagogic task. One way in which this can be seen is that the tellers typically address the story to the teacher. In particular this takes the form of the teacher being the person who is primarily the focus of the speaker’s gaze during the storytelling. In this sense, then, the story is being profered to the teacher, who may react to it during – and at the end of – its production. This gaze to the teacher is evident even in cases where it is not the teacher who has ‘asked’ the question by reading it aloud from the resource book. In Extract 2, for instance, Clara chooses the question that will eventually be answered by her in the form of a story, but it is still the teacher (rather than the other students or the overall group of other students plus teacher) who is the primary story recipient as displayed through Clara’s gaze. The only notable exception to this pattern of Clara’s gaze behavior during the storytelling is when she experiences a word search and shifts her gaze to Ahmed (lines 19–20). This can be treated as her seeking assistance from Ahmed (Goodwin & Goodwin, 1986), and indeed at this juncture he provides her with a possible solution to her search (line 21).9
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As such, these storytellings by students display a hybrid quality. On the one hand, they are similar to stories in conversation in that they are packaging the teller’s personal experiences in a certain format for an audience. This may include content that could be seen as emotional and personally impactful, such as, in Extract 2, the nun telling Clara that she should not study pharmacy as it would prove too difcult for her. However, unlike stories in multi-party conversation where the primary recipient may well change between and even within storytellings, in this task the students recurrently treat the teacher as the primary recipient of the storytelling, thus displaying an orientation to the learning context in which the storytelling is being produced.10 Fourth (and fnally), we will highlight some features of the teacher’s conduct in relation to these student stories. As we have noted, the students treat the teacher as the primary recipient to whom the story is addressed. This means that unlike in ordinary conversation, there is a primary recipient throughout these episodes of interaction when a student tells a story, rather than, for example, diferent stories being told for diferent recipients. For his part, the teacher acts as the recipient of the storytelling during its course, both by gazing at the teller and producing response tokens during the telling. Research on storytelling within conversation (Scheglof, 1992) has shown that a task of the recipient (or recipients) on possible completion of the story is to display understanding, both of the fact that the story is now possibly complete and of what the point of the story might be. Part of the function of the recipient’s response in this slot is typically to display afliation with the stance that the teller has been taking during the story, and these displays of afliation may also be produced by the recipient during the telling, for example in verbal forms such as assessments (‘how terrible’ etc.) or in non-verbal forms, such as head nods (Stivers, 2008). These mid-telling displays of recipient afliation may be contrasted with mid-telling tokens of alignment, such as ‘mm hm’, ‘yeah’ and so on, which mark an awareness that the story is in progress and forward the progress of the speaker’s extended telling (Stivers, 2008). On the whole though, Stivers (2008) notes, stories in conversation constitute ‘a framework that prioritizes the sociorelational issues over the informational ones’ (p. 53). Similar to how the students simultaneously package and share their personal experiences as stories while orienting to the storytelling as a pedagogic task, the teacher in his responses occasionally displays afliation with the storyteller while also at other points making relevant his role as the students’ language teacher through, for example, engaging in vocabulary teaching. The displays of afliation by the teacher are rare and usually quite perfunctory, and in regard to recipient responses during the storytelling, the teacher typically relies on aligning responses rather than afliative ones, with ‘mm hm’ and ‘okay’ being common (also see Lo & Tadic, 2020, for an instance in which the teacher has trouble in afliating with a student’s story). In Extract 2, the teacher aligns with the student after she launches the story (line 18). Due to the relative brevity of the story and also its disruption by
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the word search in lines 19–29 there is little opportunity for the teacher to display either aligning or afliative responses to the developing story.11 Clara’s report of the negative thing the nun said to her (lines 30–31) could constitute the end of the story, but notably it gets only a minimal aligning response of okay (line 32) from the teacher (rather than, for example, an afliating response or a response that appreciates the story at its possible end). Clara then adds a further utterance that again reports what the nun said and that adds little in terms of content to what she said in line 30–31, indeed suggesting that she has reached the end of the story (and perhaps had done so in lines 30–31). This time, with ooh (line 35), the teacher does provide some afliation with this complainable thing the nun said – but only after he has frst receipted the story (and moved to display an understanding that it has possibly reached its end) with the repeated okay okay (line 35). Clara’s subsequent move toward a more explicitly negative stance toward what the nun said to her (including a point to the head, which can be understood as something like ‘crazy’ and then laughing while shrugging) is reciprocated by the teacher. However, this reciprocation pertains only to the verbal content of Clara’s turn, with the teacher’s display of understanding taking the form of formulating the upshot (Heritage & Watson, 1979) of what Clara has said in her story i.e., that what the nun said to her would have made her feel quite demotivated (lines 38–39). Notably, the teacher’s response does not take a more afective form, such as afliating with Clara’s laughter through laughter of his own (Jeferson et al., 1987), which could be hearable as afliating with Clara’s description of the nun – or what the nun said – as crazy. This is typical of how the teacher maintains a certain neutrality (Drew & Heritage, 1992) in his response to the student stories about their personal experiences.12 It is also notable that this display of understanding by the teacher is designed in such a way as to provide some possible language teaching for the student (and the other, overhearing, students). That is, the rather high-level vocabulary item demotivated is produced by the teacher and is done in a way that appears pedagogic; it is produced following a delay (consisting of ‘uh/uhm’ and silences) and with a delivery that is slower, as well as more drawn out and broken up than the words around it (lines 38–39). This marked presentation of the word is hearable as the teacher displaying awareness that he is presenting a word that the student(s) may not be currently familiar with. Further evidence for this interpretation is provided by the fact that he follows this with a linguistically simpler ‘defnition’ of the word demotivated i.e., makes you quite sad (line 41).13 As such, at the possible end of the story, the teacher receipts it with a display of understanding while also orienting to his institutional role as a teacher. Despite this occasional orientation to his role as a language teacher, one notable feature of the teacher’s conduct in this task is that he typically does not correct the students’ errors or omissions in vocabulary or grammar (see Seedhouse, 2004). For example, when, during her story, Clara says one nun say me
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that pharmacy is too difcult for me (lines 30–31), the teacher does not highlight or correct the errors.
Further Examples With Some Variations In Extract 3, the teacher (lines 01–02) reads aloud the question from the handout (have you ever been the victim of a burglary?). Saleh’s answer to this question (yes) gives the sense that he has something to tell. But here, rather than producing the telling via self-selection in response to the question, Saleh indicates the availability of a potential story and only ends up producing the telling after multiple prompts from the teacher. In other words, a sequence can ensue whereby if the teacher in some manner provides a ‘go-ahead’ for the student to proceed with the telling (as happens in line 06), the next part of the sequence can take the form of the student producing the telling/story.14 However, as indicated by the 0.5 second silence in line 07, Saleh does not immediately proceed to the telling, and at that point the teacher becomes active in eliciting it (or at least further details of the burglary) from Saleh through questioning. There then follows a series of yes-no questions from the teacher to which, in each case, Saleh answers no without providing further details (lines 08–15) before fnally (lines 17–22) responding to a question with a no and further details, with the telling emerging in the form of a story, which is hearably complete at line 31. The story concerns how his mobile phone got stolen. Extract 3 Have You Ever Been the Victim of a Burglary? 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18
TEACHER:
SALEH: CLARA: TEACHER: TEACHER: SALEH: TEACHER: SALEH: TEACHER: SALEH: TEACHER: SALEH: TEACHER:
clara:
ok↑ay:: (0.2) so:, (.) hav- a very (0.4) strange question, (1.3) have you ever been the victim of a ↑burglary? (1.8) nodding yes ( ) ↑yes, oh dear! (0.5) i:::n Qatar? [eh:: [no shaking head ↑here? no okay.= =in Thailand in . in a hotel?
(1.3) okay: [:, so was it pickpocketing=that’s where they in [( )
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19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46
TEACHER: SALEH:
TEACHER: SALEH: TEACHER: SALEH: TEACHER: SALEH: TEACHER:
[stea::l from you on person [reaches out hand in enactment of taking something no, (0.4) just I was like (.) lef-[left my phone like that on the ta[ble [picks up, then puts down, his [phone [okay, in a restaurant [like an (.) open restaurant [mm hhm okay, (.) for I didn’t see it like for ten minutes [then I [okay [looked and I didn’t fnd my phone. [gazes at his phone on the table; enacts surprise okay. ri↑ght, so somebody [SNATCHed: (.) [ enacts snatching
SALEH:
nods
TEACHER:
your phone. (0.3) but the good thing about iphones you can kill it with eh (.) mm hmm with your computer. yeah (.) and did you manage to (.) fnd your iphone? no I didn’t fnd it because I went back to Qatar and talked to my cousin okay (.) he did it for me. okay. (.) yeah ((12 lines omitted in which Saleh and the teacher talk mostly in general
SALEH: TEACHER: SALEH: TEACHER: SALEH: TEACHER: SALEH: TEACHER:
terms about how it is possible to fnd lost iPhones and how they are so valuable))
59
TEACHER:
okay (1.2) well let’s have a quick look at this te:xt,
When Saleh’s description of the theft is produced, it is a relatively competently constructed story, in that he frst produces some background setting (lines 21–28) before moving to the climax of the story with then I looked and I didn’t fnd my phone (lines 28–30). By gazing only at the teacher during the story, Saleh treats him as the primary recipient of the story. As with Extract 2, during the telling the teacher gazes at the teller and produces tokens of alignment (lines 24, 26, 29). At the possible end of the story the teacher receipts the story with okay right and then produces an understanding display of what Saleh has just told him, formulating (Heritage & Watson, 1979) the reported event as so somebody snatched your phone (lines
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32–35). Similar to Extract 2, therefore, some teaching of vocabulary appears to be taking place through the teacher’s design of his formulation/display of understanding; the word snatched is highlighted as a word having special importance for the student(s), in part through the loudness of its delivery and in part through its being accompanied by a gestural enactment of snatching, which acts to possibly clarify its meaning in case any of the students were in doubt. Informing/teaching was also evident in one of the teacher’s earlier questions, with the use of pickpocketing in line 17, which was immediately followed by a defnition of the word, with that defnition itself containing a gestural depiction of ‘stealing’, to clarify its meaning.15 Through this vocabulary teaching, therefore, we can again see the teacher orienting to his pedagogic role of teaching language. Saleh’s story is extended beyond its frst possible ending (in lines 30–31), in part through the actions of the teacher. For example, the teacher’s question in line 41 brings the student back to the storytelling after some more general, non-story, talk about iPhones (lines 37–40). This results in some more story details being added by Saleh (lines 42–46). In Extract 4 the teacher reads aloud the question (what’s the most embarrassing thing you’ve ever done/said?) from the handout. Clara frst puts herself forward as having some examples of embarrassing things about which she could tell (line 04). As it happens, the teacher in efect blocks the possibility of Clara proceeding to a telling (line 05), perhaps because he wishes one of the other students to take a turn at answering. Indeed, a little later, with how about you guys? (line 18), the teacher narrows down the pool of possible tellers to the two other students. Saleh then self-selects and produces an answer in the form of a story about his car crash while looking at his phone (lines 20–23).16 Extract 4 What’s the Most Embarrassing Thing You’ve Ever Done/Said? 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13
TEACHER:
[okay::, what’s the most emba:rrassing thing [gazing down at handout (0.4) CLARA:: a lot. (.) m(h)aybe a lot. TEACHER: : okay, maybe you shouldn’t say then khheh heh .hh there’s a lot of: (.) eh things the most emb(h)arrass(h)ing (h)th[ing CLARA: [kheh heh silent laughter TEACHER: [indicates toward Ahmed AHMED: [gh hih hih hih hehh silent laughter CLARA: .hhh AHMED: .hhh TEACHER: eh, ↑yeah
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14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55
TEACHER: CLARA: SALEH: TEACHER: SALEH:
TEACHER: SALEH: TEACHER: SALEH: TEACHER: SALEH: TEACHER: SALEH: CLARA: SALEH: TEACHER: SALEH: TEACHER:
(1.0) >I don’t knowwe are-< we have to go to trial. (0.2) [wow.] [ hh ]-gaze straight then back to ALA puts arms behind her head, smiles, nods [ wow. ]-gaze down [ wa:it. ] (0.2) gaze to ALA-hhh (.) nods once, gaze to ALA, hands behind head smiles, gaze to ALA hh
[h h h [h h h [h h h gaze to other Ss
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116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124
FER: ALA: YOS: AMI: NOE: FER: AMI: ALA: SS:
193
[h wh(h)a(h)t. [h h h [h h [h h h [h h [h h h [h h [h h h [h h [↑that’s cra:zy. h [h h shakes head with arms out, palms up [smiles-(it’s completely) crazy.= =WHAT IS HA:PPENING. heh heh heh heh
In line 84, Alan seems to begin a new formulation of the story-so-far (so) but abandons this trajectory in order to ask a follow-up question, did you see him again (note the micropause, lowering of pitch, and downward head-tilt that separate so from the rest of his turn), clarifying Fernanda’s previous characterization of having gone out with her assaulter once. With this question, Alan possibly postpones his renewed summary of the story-so-far and creates a space for Fernanda to expand her telling, which she does by delivering a non-typeconforming answer, explaining when she will see the antagonist of her story again (line 86), i.e., at the upcoming trial, as opposed to (dis)confrming if she did see him again in the past. In response to this new piece of information, Alan halts further development of the story, again seemingly to summarize or confrm his understanding of the telling with his gaze down (wait s- in line 89), but he then shifts his gaze back to Fernanda, moving his head slightly forward, and asks a clarifying question about the story’s timeline (line 90). At this point, Alan fnally refers to Fernanda’s partner (not Fernanda) as responsible for breaking her arm, with some pre-delicate perturbation (Silverman & Peräkylä, 1990) in the form of a restart. Upon receiving confrmation from Fernanda about when her story took place (in October in line 92), Alan further halts the story’s progression to formulate Fernanda’s when response as how long ago (that’s six months ago in lines 96–98). He delivers this formulation with added stress, increased pitch, and an iconic gesture (holding up six fngers), all of which frame the timeline of Fernanda’s reported events as extreme, even problematic. That Alan treats Fernanda’s reported timeline as problematic at least seems to be registered in Fernanda’s own response to this formulation as she ofers an acknowledgment and then an account for this considerable length of time by referencing the drawn-out nature of the legal process (lines 99–101). After a brief gap at the TRP (line 102), a couple of students take the foor and respond to Fernanda’s story with a surprise token (Wilkinson & Kitzinger, 2006) (wow in lines 103 and 106), and Alan then once again halts the progression of the story (line 107), this time with a more drawn out and emphasized wait. However, unlike previously (lines 89 and 94), Alan’s wait this time is not immediately followed by a clarifcation question, which would account for his
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halting of the sequence; instead, what ensues is a gap (line 108), met by laughter from the students and a repair initiation (also infused with laughter) from Fernanda (line 116). Fernanda’s repair initiation here seems to be treating Alan’s unaccounted-for halting of the telling sequence as the trouble source. With her gaze fxed on Alan (even as her classmates start laughing in lines 104 and 109), Fernanda frst seemingly aligns with Alan’s halting action with a nod in line 111, as if giving Alan the go-ahead for further follow-up questions; however, as no reason for Alan’s halting action is made immediately evident, Fernanda pursues it with the repair initiator what and a headshake accompanied with open arms, suggesting a somewhat challenging stance. An implicit account for Alan’s prolonged halting of the sequence comes after further student assessments of Fernanda’s story as crazy (lines 120 and 122), as Alan verbalizes his heightened confusion now explicitly with a loud and lengthened what is happening (line 123). His expression of disbelief (line 123) seems now to have reached its peak in this wh-question repair not merely of Fernanda’s telling but of this entire situation – one in which he has stumbled upon a delicate student telling and is struggling to fnd stable footing within it.
Student and Teacher Reconstructing the Incident After exclaiming his confusion in line 123, both regarding the sequence of events embedded in Fernanda’s telling and the fact that Fernanda has just disclosed having been abused, Alan continues to clarify Fernanda’s initial gloss using a candidate understanding in line 125. It is worth noting that by this point of the interaction, Alan’s understanding of Fernanda’s telling has evolved. Extract 4 Was It Like a Violent Thing 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139
ALA: FER:
ALA:
FER: ALA: FER:
YOS:
I mean, was it like a violent¿ [ °thing°? ] [ nod-↑YE ]s, {gaze downward-he wa:::s} (.) tch I don’t know the word but it was like, gaze to ALA .hh domestic violence? (.) head leans forward-how many times {shakes headdid you (0.2)} >go out on a date< with him. a lot. .hh ↓oh. {nods-yes} it was a lot was not that just the guy and I met and I did something. I was [ going out with] him for gaze upward-(.) [ gaze to FER ]
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140 141 142 143 144
FER: FER: ALA:
almost raises brows-one month. smiles (1.2) [smiles- °yeah°. ] [ tch. ] ↑okay:. so:, #Figure 9.2 right hand sweeps outward then drops
FIGURE 9.2
145 146 147 148 149 150 151 152 153 154 155 156 157 158 159 160 161 162 163 164 165 166 167
195
NOE: FER: SS: YOS: ALA: FER: NOE: ALA: FER: ALA: FER: ALA:
Alan's right hand movement
$ah uhm$ Tinder can be raises browsdangerous. [ yeah. ] [heh heh] [ heh heh heh ] [ gaze to ALA ] [ gaze to NOE, then downward ] nods-yeah, it’s really dangerous. leans on table gaze to FER so you- you have a trial? nods, pursed lips
and he was arrested? nods-yes. (0.2)-makes beats by tapping the back of a chair
FER:
FER:
ALA: FER:
and he has to go to a program to learn (.) uh: how to (treat) women so he has to do that for like o- over than one year? (.) once a week for four hours, and then (and/him) he’s going to be: frowns, head tilts-a suit? (0.2) a lawsuit, yes. and he was arrested.
Alan’s question I mean, was it like a violent thing (lines 125 and 126) articulates his renewed understanding of Fernanda’s gloss. This time, he appears to be much more tentative, formulating the candidate understanding as a yes/no
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question that seeks confrmation from Fernanda. Note that when he delivers violent thing, given that violent is not a possible completion point for the TCU, his pause after violent indicates a slight hesitation before the generic reference thing, which refers to her experience, in sotto voce. Together, these features of turn design display his new orientation to Fernanda’s story as a delicate matter (Lerner, 2013). Fernanda begins to answer immediately after Alan utters violent (line 127). She nods as she confrms Alan’s candidate understanding with an emphatic yes and goes on to describe the incident as domestic violence despite being unsure if it is the right term (lines 127–129). Alan proceeds to ask how many times Fernanda went out with the man (lines 131–132). Notice that the brief pause before naming the action (i.e., go out on a date with him), along with the sped-up delivery of the action, once again shows how Alan postpones mentioning the now-delicate subject (i.e., the abuse). After Fernanda replies a lot (line 134), Alan registers the receipt of information with a low-pitched oh (line 135). At this point, Fernanda appears to treat Alan’s oh-receipt as a claim of understanding. In lines 136–138, she provides defensive detailing (Drew, 1998; Jeferson, 1985) to clarify that it was not a single date as Alan might have previously assumed, nor was it the case that she was responsible for her injury; she had in fact gone out with the man for one month. Now that Fernanda’s gloss has been unpacked and the fact that she was not culpable for the arm injury she sufered has been made clear, her story has arrived at a possible completion. Yet, what ensues is a long silence of 1.2 seconds (line 141). As a story recipient, Alan is not ofering any uptake, nor is he expressing sympathy for what happened to Fernanda. In fact, Alan’s difculty in responding stalls the progressivity of the interaction. It is, however, worth pointing out that one possible reason why it is difcult for Alan to ofer an afliative response is the fact that throughout the telling, Fernanda has withheld emotional reactions and has not made her afective stance available to Alan. Instead, her smiles and relaxed posture display stoicism and trouble-resistance. In response to the long gap in line 141, possibly addressing Alan’s shock, Fernanda smiles and produces yeah to confrm the truthfulness of her telling (line 142). The token overlaps with Alan’s turn beginning tch, which is followed by two more tokens, okay and so (line 143). Occupying a response position, the frst token, okay, could be used to prepare for the transition to next-positioned matters (Beach, 1993); the second token, so, on the other hand, could be followed by a summary or conclusion of the telling. It should be noted, however, since Alan has not ofered any afliative response at this point, these two tokens are sequentially disjunctive and can therefore be seen as an attempt to exit the trouble talk (Jeferson, 1984a). Instead of a verbal response, Alan’s turn in line 143 is completed with a sweeping hand, which is then dropped, demonstrating trouble fnding an appropriate response. At this point, in line 145, Noelle, treating Alan’s gesture
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as laughable, enacts her role as a story recipient when she produces two laugh tokens and recycles the assessment that touched of the telling (ah uhm Tinder can be dangerous) while raising her brows (lines 145–146), which is a way to close the telling (Scheglof, 2011). As the class laughs and Fernanda agrees and upgrades the assessment (line 151) (Pomerantz, 1984), the whole sequence could come to a possible closure. Alan, however, once again opens up the topic by initiating two questions to confrm his new understanding: You have a trial? and he was arrested? (lines 153 and 155). After Fernanda’s confrmation (lines 154 and 156) and a further lack of substantive responses to her telling from Alan (line 157–158), Fernanda continues her turn and explains the legal consequences that the abuser has to face (lines 159–164). In line 167, she repeats the end of the story and he was arrested; her telling arrives at a possible completion again.
Teacher and Students Transitioning Back to Classroom Tasks Since the details regarding the abuse have been elicited and clarifed, Fernanda’s story is once again possibly complete, and now a response from Alan is also made relevant once again. But in line 168, we observe a 1.2-second gap. Extract 5 Life Is Hard 168 169 170 171 172 173 174 175 176 177 178 179 180 181 182 183 184 185 186 187 188
(1.2) ALA: FER: ALA: FER: ALA:
SS: ALA:
FER:
gaze away .HH[pppppp::ff:]::::-makes noise by blowing air out of his mouth forcefully
[ heh heh ] shakes head, rolls eyes-du:de. gaze to FER
-w:hat? [ heh heh ] [ nods, smiles-yeah. ] heh heh heh-one step back, leans on chair .HH uhm:: gaze downward so:: gaze mid-air, mouth slightly gaping-(1.2) gaze to FER, then gaze away-let’s open walks to side of the classroom-our bo(h)oks t(h)o pa(h)(h)ge[claps heh heh heh heh ]heh heh [ heh heh heh heh heh ] covers face with right hand-$I mean I don’t know how to both hands point to FERgo from that hands move sideways-to-$ (.) stands in front of his laptop, gaze downwarduh[m:: ] [↑hm]↓m:-drinks a sip of water, gaze to the audio recorder (.) points at recorder
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189 190 191 192 193 194 195 196 197 198 199 200 201 202 203 204 205 206 207 208 209 210 211 212 213 214
ALA:
shakes head-(0.2) [ tch. yeah. ]
FER: FER: SS: AMI: YOS: NOE: AMI: ALA: AMI: FER:
[they were ] recording this. shit. [ covers her face with both hands, smiling ] [heh heh heh [ heh heh heh heh heh]. [ heh heh heh heh heh] heh heh].HH [ gaze to FER, then back to ALA ] [ gaze to FER, then to ALA-hh ] [ smiles, touches FER’s arm ] [smiles-I mean I’m sorry that sounds awful. ] gaze to ALA smiles-mm yeah. heh heh drinks water
(0.8) ALA:
gaze to other side of classroom, slight head shake, smiles-I don’t- gaze to laptop-I mean I don’t [ have any- gaze to AMI]
AMI:
[ $life is ] hard¿$ [ opens textbook ] [smiles, gaze down then to FER-life is hard,] [ yeah. it was ] puts water bottle down, looks around her seat-more (.) scary than awful actually. gaze to other side of classroom-life is hard and then it gets worse, tch uhm: so:: you know, uhm: >let’s open our books< one fnger up))-to page one forty f:ve, claps
ALA: FER:
ALA:
In lines 169 and 172–173, Alan takes a deep breath, blows air out of his mouth, and rolls his eyes as he delivers dude what? Here, the constellation of verbal and embodied resources – open-class repair initiator (Drew, 1997), prosodic (i.e., elongated vowels), suprasegmental, and multimodal resources (i.e., eye rolls) – conveys shock and disbelief. However, Alan’s display of afect here is neither sympathy nor empathy, which are reactions that we might expect from or fnd relevant to a story about abuse. As Fernanda responds to Alan’s display of shock with yet another confrmatory yeah, Alan produces several laugh tokens while simultaneously stepping back, which could be taken as an attempt to withdraw from the ongoing talk. Producing an elongated so while gazing downward, here, Alan is noticeably struggling with coming up with a response; in addition to the pregnant pause (line 177), his averted gaze and gaping mouth (lines 176–177) display disengagement and discomfort. As he walks away and instructs the students to open their books, the turn is punctuated by laugh particles (lines 179–180). Alan’s laugh particles and the students’ subsequent laughter treat the abrupt change
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of topic as inapposite and humorous (line 181). Note that, thus far, Alan has yet to ofer any substantive afliative response to Fernanda’s telling, nor has he performed any interactional work to close down the topic. In line 182, Alan produces an I mean-prefaced account of why he laughs while covering his face, explicitly voicing his difculty in transitioning back to classroom tasks. His struggle to respond to Fernanda’s telling and to proceed to classroom matters can also be observed in his trouble fnding words to continue his turn (line 189). At this point, Fernanda notices the tape-recorder and expresses embarrassment by cursing and covering her face, which is treated by the class as funny (lines 193–194). It is then that Alan, with a smile, produces a pro forma empathetic response, also prefaced by I mean: I mean I’m sorry that sounds awful (line 198). Fernanda’s subsequent yeah shows agreement, albeit minimal agreement, with Alan’s assessment that sounds awful. While Alan takes the next turn in lines 203–204, as shown in the multiple restarts and cutofs, we see the same pattern of him having trouble formulating his turn. It is Ami, a student sitting next to Fernanda, who produces a closing-implicative idiomatic expression life is hard as she opens the textbook (line 205), turning Fernanda’s story into an aphorism that everyone can agree with and relate to, and thereby ofering Alan an opportunity to exit the topic and move on to other matters. Fernanda appears to resist Alan’s characterization of the story being awful and provides her own assessment of the experience: It was more scary than awful actually (line 208–210). Finally, now standing in front of his laptop, Alan builds on Ami’s idiomatic expressions to provide an ironic extreme case formulation (life is hard and then it gets worse in lines 211–212) before transitioning to the classroom task by asking students to open their books (lines 213–214).
Discussion and Conclusion The adult ESL classroom is one of the few arenas where a vast variety of cultural and professional backgrounds converge and interact. Many adult ESL learners see the classroom as a safe space for them to open up and share their real-world life experiences. We have analyzed one such episode of a student sharing her rather personal experience of being physically abused by a romantic partner. Focusing on the teacher as a main story recipient, we have examined the evolving responses to and negotiations of the story between the teller Fernanda and her recipients – the teacher Alan and Fernanda’s fellow classmates. Specifcally, we have shown that Fernanda initially delivered the story to show agreement with Alan’s comment on the dangers of dating apps in the participants’ city of residence. Packaging her story as a gloss, she left out the details of the abuse, which then needed to be collaboratively unpacked by her and her recipients. This unpacking led to a prolonged negotiation over how the reported event unfolded and what the appropriate stance toward it should be.
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Upon hearing the gloss, Alan frst treated it as a joke, taking over the telling and providing his own version of how Fernanda broke her arm. This redelivery allowed Alan both to enact high engagement with Fernanda’s telling and to clarify the events in it for the beneft of the recipients (himself included). The redelivery also entailed Alan’s appropriation of Fernanda’s lived experience and a lengthy negotiation, where Alan unpacked Fernanda’s gloss by eliciting details of the abuse and gradually adjusted his understanding of her experience. However, having fnally clarifed the nature of the telling, Alan oriented to the delicate nature of Fernanda’s experience, displaying shock and disbelief and struggling to transition back to classroom tasks. It is interesting that other story recipients, who are ESL learners, appeared to be more adept than Alan was in ofering afliative responses to Fernanda’s telling. Their recycling of assessments and use of idiomatic expressions ofered multiple opportunities to close the telling. Ironically, it was Alan, an L1 speaker, who struggled the most. In order to account for the strategies that Alan used in this episode, we have suggested that one key issue that emerged in the interaction was Fernanda’s packaging of the telling as a gloss and the subsequent unpackaging that followed. As noted in the analysis, the laughter-flled group discussion prior to this episode might have infuenced Alan’s choice of treating Fernanda’s gloss as a joke. In choosing to pursue and unpack Fernanda’s initial gloss, Alan supplemented details of the abuse by casting Fernanda in a lighthearted albeit negative light, attributing responsibility for the reported incident to her. However, once Fernanda rejected his version of the story, it became interactionally relevant for both Alan and Fernanda to negotiate what actually happened. As prior CA research on storytelling has found and as has been confrmed here in our ESL classroom data, a story is co-constructed by the participants involved. As we have shown, even though it is the teller who “owns” the (sufered) experience being reported on, a telling is in fact contingently (re)created by the teller and her recipients. Nevertheless, recipients’ contributions in co-constructing the story might be contested or challenged, and so, as our analysis has demonstrated, taking over the task of detailing a story is indeed a risky interactional move. Along with the humorous context in which it was frst delivered, Fernanda’s stoic stance toward the reported abuse might also account for the signifcant delay of an appropriate response from Alan. From the provision of the gloss until the closing down of the telling, Fernanda withheld emotional reactions and even smiled at many points of the telling. Her smile and laughter, as types of stance markers, could be interpreted as doing trouble-resistance, which in turn mitigates the seriousness of her telling (Jeferson, 1984b). The lack of afect display – both the afects she experienced during her abuse and the here-and-now afective stance toward the reported event – could be one reason why Alan might not have taken up the appropriate stance to the seriousness of Fernanda’s story. It is also worth refecting on why the closing of the telling was so labored. Recall that Alan’s responses displayed disbelief and shock rather than sympathy,
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and that he explicitly verbalized his difculty transitioning back from Fernanda’s telling to the classroom tasks. Such responses could very well refect his own treatment of Fernanda’s telling as inapposite in the classroom context – an unftting student contribution that needs to be reformulated, repaired, and sidestepped. We cannot help but wonder at various points of the telling if, had Alan not pursued further details of Fernanda’s story and instead chosen to disattend the story, he might not have found himself caught in an interactional double bind. Still, the teacher regularly needs to navigate murky waters, and it can be difcult for him to distance himself when potentially delicate or risky topics arise, particularly when he is positioned as the main story recipient. Close analysis of how a delicate telling is managed thus has important implications on training teachers on how to respond to sensitive issues in the classroom.
Note 1 Last-as-next bias is a turn-order bias that allows for the “speaker just prior to current speaker to be selected as next speaker” (Sacks et al., 1974, p. 708).
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10 LANGUAGE LEARNING IN REPEATED STORYTELLINGS The Case of Repair Practices Kelly Katherine Frantz
Introduction Language learning has traditionally been characterized as an individual cognitive process, where changes in learner production are evidence that learning has taken place. Although this product-oriented view of learning continues to dominate the feld of Second Language Acquisition (SLA), the past few decades have witnessed a growing interest in sociocultural perspectives. Responses to the call for a sociocultural “reconceptualization” of SLA (Firth & Wagner, 1997, 2007) are generally characterized by a focus on the local learning environment and interactional context. Among the many researchers working to provide a more holistic understanding of language learning, those from the feld of conversation analysis (CA) have developed an analytical approach called CA-for-SLA (coined by Markee & Kasper, 2004) or, simply, CA-SLA (Kasper & Wagner, 2011).1 Researchers who adopt this approach work from the understanding that learning is achieved during and as a result of interaction. They maintain that closely analyzing the sequential unfolding of talk-in-interaction can uncover evidence of learning opportunities, processes, and outcomes. From this perspective, learning is no longer just an internal cognitive process, invisible to the analytical eye of researchers. Rather, it is an interactional process that can be identifed and analyzed in talk. This chapter contributes to the larger efort to reconceptualize language learning by demonstrating how learning occurs and is made visible during a student’s interaction with her teacher and peers through repeated storytelling. I focus on one ESL learner’s storytelling in the context of a common classroom phenomenon: Repetition. Specifcally, my objective is to illuminate learning opportunities as tied to repair practices during a communicative, repetitive
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classroom speaking activity within a CA framework. Repetition in interaction is arguably understudied and “misunderstood” (Ochs & Schiefelin, 1983, as cited in Wong, 2000, p. 407), and the role of repetition in language classrooms, specifcally, has yet to be fully explored. While some SLA studies have shown the positive impact of task repetition on linguistic performance (e.g., Arevart & Nation, 1991; Bygate, 1996, 2001), to my knowledge, no studies have examined this from a CA perspective. A microanalytic CA approach has the potential to illuminate aspects of language learning during these activities that other SLA studies may overlook. With this goal in mind, I have adopted an analytical method that represents a hybrid of existing CA approaches. Before outlining the prevailing CA approaches and specifying my own, I will briefy summarize in the following section the theoretical foundations of CA to clarify its contributions to SLA research.
Background The Theoretical Argument for CA-SLA Second Language Acquisition research has traditionally made a clear distinction between language acquisition and language use (e.g., Gass et al., 2013). Conversation analysis with its focus on language use has yet to be fully accepted as a method for examining acquisition (He, 2004). However, alongside a growing interest in the role of interaction in language development, CA has begun to emerge as a promising method to examine how interaction brings about language learning. If we understand learning as a process that occurs not only inside the mind but also “in the micromoments of social interaction” (Firth & Wagner, 2007, p. 807), it is worth analyzing this interaction on a highly detailed level. With its roots in ethnomethodology (Garfnkel, 1967), CA is an emic, participant-relevant approach that examines naturally occurring talk-ininteraction. Rather than impose a priori theories on the data, researchers build interpretations based on participant understandings of talk. Through the system of turn-taking, participants display their understandings of the ongoing talk for their co-participants (Sacks et al., 1974). Accepting this basic premise has consequences for how analysts approach the data. Sacks et al. (1974) explain: [W]hile understandings of other turns’ talk are displayed to co-participants, they are available as well to professional analysts, who are thereby aforded a proof criterion (and a search procedure) for the analysis of what a turn’s talk is occupied with. (p. 729) This next-turn “proof procedure” (Sacks et al., 1974, p. 728) allows analysts to understand how speakers make sense of what their co-participant has said. When
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shared understanding is not achieved, participants generally take steps to amend this through repair practices (Scheglof et al., 1977). It is through this work to achieve shared understanding – or “socially shared cognition” (Scheglof, 1991) – that learning processes and outcomes are made visible to analysts in their local sequential environments. Therefore, a turn-by-turn analysis of talk-in-interaction can illuminate both the process and product of learning.
Tracing Language Learning: Two CA Approaches To move beyond merely identifying and describing learning opportunities in interaction and make a case for acquisition, studies must demonstrate that some type of change has occurred. CA-SLA studies generally do this by following the development of a learning item in interaction over time. Even though most CA-SLA studies follow developmental sequences and operate from the same basic understanding of the relationship between interaction and learning, their analytical foci and methodology are notably varied. There are two general approaches to examining language learning through CA: Longitudinal studies that trace the development of interactional competence over time and shortterm analyses that follow the evolution of a linguistic item through a single interaction. These two approaches operate on somewhat diferent defnitions of “learning,” which has consequences for how data are collected and analyzed. Longitudinal studies trace the development of some aspect of a learner’s interactional competence over time (e.g., Pekarek Doehler et al., 2018). These studies are often infuenced by theories of situated learning (Lave & Wenger, 1991) and language socialization (Schiefelin & Ochs, 1986). From this theoretical perspective, learning is understood as a gradual move toward fuller participation within a community of practice. To accomplish and coordinate social actions within a community, a learner must develop and deploy certain interactional practices, which together make up the learner’s interactional competence. These CA studies, therefore, trace the development of specifc interactional practices by collecting data from one learner across multiple interactional contexts over an extended period of time. Researchers have examined myriad context-specifc interactional practices, such as story openings (Pekarek Doehler & Berger, 2018), turn-taking (Young, 2003), and repairs (Hellerman, 2009), among others. While the aforementioned researchers tend to adopt a priori theories of learning to inform their analyses, others view this as a possible threat to the ethnomethodological foundations of CA. Markee and Kunitz (2015) characterize the diference as “developmental” vs. “purist” CA approaches. From the “developmental” perspective, CA is not equipped to address learning entirely on its own, which necessitates the adoption of other theories of learning. Studies from the “purist” perspective, on the other hand, are strictly emic and not informed by external theories. Instead, they are primarily concerned with how participants accomplish socially distributed cognition within a single interaction.
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Seedhouse and Walsh (2010), for example, showed how a student learned the pronunciation of the word “company” through classroom interaction. They found that the learner demonstrated uptake when other-repair was provided by the teacher but not when it was provided by another peer. It is clear that even within the feld of CA-SLA, how researchers defne and subsequently measure language learning varies. Regardless of the diferences, however, they all face a similar challenge: Locating practices in the data that can be deemed “similar enough” to trace sequential changes and, with that, make claims about possible development. Some activities in the language classroom, however, are actually designed to lead learners to produce “similar enough” utterances. Repetition – purposeful and incidental – is commonplace in the language classroom. While drills that require students to focus on and repeat linguistic forms do not produce the naturally occurring language that is at the core of CA, communicative activities that require students to engage in repeated meaningful interactions with diferent co-participants present an interesting locus for research. This chapter adds to the growing body of CA research on language acquisition by adopting an approach that falls somewhere in between “developmental” and “purist,” i.e., tracing changes in the short term. This analysis will contain two parts, each focused on changing repair practices around a diferent linguistic item. In the frst part, I will trace changes in the learner’s pronunciation repair sequences around a single word. In the second part, I will follow a more complex repair sequence with both a grammatical and phonological aspect. Two central questions guide the analysis: How is the repair sequence organized, and what changes occur in this sequence over time?
Data The data come from 15 hours of video recordings of an intermediate-level adult ESL classroom over one semester. An hour-long speaking activity was chosen to be the focus of this analysis. The extracts analyzed here follow the interaction of one student, an L1 speaker of Spanish named Maria, during and just before the speaking activity. The teacher, an L1 speaker of English, had asked the students to think of a memorable story of when they were engaged in a hobby – a topic based loosely on the theme of the textbook chapter. The language focus was on using the simple past and past continuous tenses to tell stories. On the previous day, they had read and discussed a teacher-generated example and had been asked to think of their own example for homework. The speaking activity required students to share their stories three times, with three diferent classmates. Maria’s interactions during the planning stage and the main speaking activity were transcribed and analyzed within a conversation analytic framework. I identifed two recurrent sequences that constitute my two analytical foci.
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For the frst analysis, I identifed multiple instances of a specifc word that seemed to cause some trouble for Maria. Maria used the word steep several times over the course of her interactions with diferent co-participants, and it often appeared as the trouble source in a repair sequence. Extracts of these repair sequences will be the central focus of this analysis. For the second analysis, I identifed a more complex sentence that Maria repeated three times, once to each of her classmates. Each time, her employment of repair practices is markedly diferent. The sequences surrounding the variations of this sentence, including both phonological and grammatical repairs, will be the focus of the second analysis. Together, these two analyses provide quite diferent examples of how we can use conversation analysis to understand language learning processes and opportunities.
Analysis Analysis 1: Steep Incline This analysis is divided chronologically into four sub-sections: The planning stage where Maria interacts briefy with the teacher and then each of the subsequent rounds of storytelling where she interacts with her peers. During each of these interactions, the learning item, steep, is not the main focus of the talk, although it sometimes becomes the focus during the repair sequence.
The Planning Stage Before the main speaking activity, the students spent approximately 15 minutes planning their own stories. They were encouraged to organize their story and take notes. During this time, the teacher circulated, answering specifc student questions. Maria’s story is of a bike-riding incident where she was riding too quickly down a steep hill, pulled her brake too suddenly, and fipped over her bike. Just prior to the following segment, Maria met the teacher’s gaze, and the teacher approached her. The ensuing conversation is in the following extract, where Maria asks a question related to either verb choice or tense. Extract 1 Steep (1) 01 02 03 04 05 06 07
M: T: M: T: M:
à
how do I sa::y I- my bi:cycle (0.2) gestures fast movement->go very fast.< (0.2) nods-my bicycle [went?] [was? ] well yeah leans down over paper-so what’s your sentence? reading from paper-we took a step- step
Language Learning/Repeated Storytellings
08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27
T: M: T: M: T: M: T:
M: T:
M:
209
incline?= =mhm:, gazes at T-and my bicycle (0.2) run? was going, was going, gazes to paper, starts writing was going very fast. writing-thank you. so we took a steep incline.=were gesturing downhill-you going do:wn [a steep incline?] [gazes to T-Yeah.] yeah >so you could say< we: (0.2) leans over paper-u:m you could actually use the: (.) past continuous there too. >Like< gestures downhill-we were going ↑do:wn a steep incline and my bicycle was going very fast. (syl syl) Cuz it’s sort of in progress right? writing-so we were going M continues writing in silence, and T walks away
In lines 01 and 02, Maria solicits the teacher’s help. In line 03, the teacher seems to orient to the ungrammaticality of my bicycle go very fast and provides the conjugated form of the verb in the simple past tense (went). In line 04, Maria appears to be providing part of a possible answer to her original question, but the rising intonation shows that she wants the teacher’s confrmation. The incongruence between the teacher’s suggestion in line 03 and Maria’s own proposal in line 04 leads the teacher to inquire about the specifc sentence. In lines 07 through 10, Maria reads the sentence in question. In line 07, Maria treats her utterance of step as troublesome and initiates a same turn repair with a cutof (Scheglof, 1979). (The extracts presented later will also confrm that her utterance of step is a mispronunciation of the adjective steep.) This is the frst of eight instances where Maria utters this word, correctly or incorrectly. In this case, after signaling trouble, she repeats the word with the same non-target-like pronunciation and completes her turn in line 08 with rising intonation. This intonation could signal a self-initiated other-repair (SIOR); however, the teacher does not address the pronunciation error. Instead, the teacher displays alignment in line 09, encouraging Maria to continue. As is clear in lines 11 and 13, the teacher focuses on the grammaticality of Maria’s second TCU (And my bicycle run?), providing an alternative verb and tense. Maria’s thank you in line 14 indicates that the teacher has provided a satisfactory solution to her original request for help. Maria begins writing, appearing to treat this as a conversation closing.
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The teacher, however, does not treat the solution as satisfactory and continues. From lines 15 to 25, while providing more detailed feedback on verb tense, the teacher introduces an alternate (target-like) pronunciation of steep. The progress of the ongoing course of talk continues, and verb tense remains the primary “interactional business” during this sequence of repeated embedded corrections (Jeferson, 1987, p. 95). As Jeferson (1987) explains, during an embedded correction, “correction occurs, but it is not what is being done interactionally” (p. 95). In this case, in the midst of giving grammatical feedback, the teacher appears to be providing the solution to the pronunciation repair initiated by Maria in lines 07 and 08. It is interesting to note that the teacher repeats the repair three times during this feedback sequence (lines 15, 16, and 23), which potentially provides Maria with more than one opportunity to notice the embedded correction. The teacher’s turn could mark the completion of a self-initiated other-repair sequence. Although Maria indicates trouble with the word in line 07, she does not adopt the alternate pronunciation once the teacher does embedded correction. Instead, Maria repeats the frst few words quietly and then writes in silence (lines 26–27). It is not clear here whether she notices the correction or not. As we will see later, this repair sequence contrasts with those around the same word during the main speaking activity, where the pronunciation of the word often becomes the main focus of the talk.
Storytelling 1 As opposed to the short repair sequence and embedded correction that occurred during the planning stage, Maria engages more explicitly with her pronunciation troubles during the course of her repeated storytellings in the main speaking activity. She maneuvers out of and back into her story to address this pronunciation concern in recurring side sequences that Brouwer (2004) calls “doing pronunciation.” During the frst round, Maria tells her story to Riichi, an L1 Japanese speaker. Following a similar organization for all three storytellings, Maria uses the word steep on two separate occasions: First, to describe the hill for the frst time, leading into the main event (the fall) and second, as part of her conclusion, where she explains her current fear of this happening again. In the following segment, Maria describes what leads up to her fall. Extract 2 Steep (2) 01 02 03 04 05 06
M:
gazes at paper-so we were gazes at R, lifts up hand-going downhill gesture-down?= nods=mhm,
R:
(0.5) M:
à
gazes at paper-u:::hm (0.5) leans back, lifts up hand to demonstrate-in a- a step-
Language Learning/Repeated Storytellings
07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20
T: M: R: M: R: M: R: M:
R:
211
gazes at teacher, gestures->step incline?< steep. nods nods-a steep incline? [It’s-it’s ]= [°steep.°] =like a downhill gesture-hill? (0.8)-M and R hold gaze nods-mhm okay, >you understand me?< nods-okay. hand gestures->okay.< gazes at paper-.h ↑a::nd my bic- bicycle lifts up hand to demonstrate, gaze lifts to R-was going (.) demonstrates speed with hand gesture-very fast. nods-hh $ok(h)ay,$
As Maria describes the hill to her co-participant, she signals trouble with a gap in line 04 and a non-lexical perturbation (uhm) in line 05. After two cutofs in line 31, she gazes at the teacher, makes a downhill gesture, and completes her turn, saying step incline with rising intonation and quickened pace. The completion of her turn does not signal a repair solution, however. Instead, by bringing the teacher into the participation framework and using rising intonation, she solicits the teacher’s help – she invites other-repair. In line 08, the teacher provides the solicited repair. In line 09, Maria repeats the phrase, a steep incline, with the correct pronunciation, signaling that she accepts the correction. Maria’s co-participant, Riichi, also repeats the word quietly in line 10. These moves are in line with Brouwer’s (2004) description of “doing pronunciation” in that the trouble source is identifed by the (non-native) speaker, placed at the end of a turn, and isolated through speech perturbations and rising intonation. Maria, the speaker of the trouble source, initiates this pronunciation side sequence, and the teacher accepts the proposal by providing the correct pronunciation. In this case, all three participants are engaged in “doing pronunciation,” including Riichi, who was momentarily excluded from the participation framework when Maria looked to the teacher. What follows this pronunciation side sequence – namely, Maria’s explanation in lines 09 and 11 – is also noteworthy because almost all of the subsequent occurrences of steep co-occur with a similar explanation. Maria defnes the phrase steep incline for her co-participant by saying, It’s like a hill, accompanied by a hand gesture. She appears to be orienting to the preference for recipient design (Sacks & Scheglof, 1979). That is, rather than moving back into her story immediately after the completion of the pronunciation repair sequence, she adds a defnition, perhaps recognizing that this term may not only be new to her but also to her non-native co-participant. Riichi’s withholding of a response token in line 12 does suggest that this may be a new term for him as
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well. Once Maria establishes co-participant understanding, she returns to her main story in line 16 with okay. That Maria succeeds in making the pronunciation of steep the topic of the talk in Extract 2 marks a clear change from the planning stage. In Extract 1, she signals trouble while talking to the teacher, but it is unclear whether she engages in self-initiated self-repair (SISR) or initiates other-repair by proposing a pronunciation side sequence, which the teacher does not immediately accept. The teacher only later provides embedded corrections without shifting the focus away from verb tense. Both the teacher’s and Maria’s explicit engagement with the troublesome word are minimal. In Extract 2, however, Maria succeeds in shifting the focus of the talk to explicitly address this pronunciation trouble. Sequentially, what comes between Maria’s repair initiation in Extract 1 and the SIOR sequence in Extract 2 are the teacher’s embedded corrections. Although it is unclear in the frst extract whether Maria, in fact, notices the correction, her return to this word in the second extract suggests that she might have. Toward the end of Maria’s story, she returns to the troublesome word to express her newfound fear of steep hills. Extract 3 Steep (3) 01 02 03 04 05
M: R: M:
à
R:
and now I- I feel (.) I feel s- scared? nods-mhm, when I gestures-go do:wn a step hi- steep hill. mmm::: nods $hehehe$ gazes up-.hh
In this instance, Maria opts for the phrase steep hill, instead of steep incline. She does self-initiated self-repair in lines 03 and 04. After pronouncing steep in a non-target-like way, she initiates repair with a cutof halfway through hill. The repair solution with target-like pronunciation (steep hill) immediately follows. Maria does not engage in any side sequence and does not solicit help from the teacher. She is able to provide the target-like repair solution herself.
Storytelling 2 The repair sequences around the pronunciation of steep during Maria’s second telling follow a pattern similar to that of her frst telling. First, Maria solicits the teacher’s help during a side sequence of self-initiated other-repair. And later in the same telling, Maria engages in self-initiated self-repair. Despite these similarities, there are also some notable diferences. In Extract 4, Maria describes the hill to her new co-participant Yoko, another native Japanese speaker.
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Extract 4 Steep (4) 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15
M:
à
so: we take uh the street but that street (.) u:h street (0.8) is- is like uh (0.8) gestures steep-step es- gazes at T-steep? steep. nods, gazes at Y-steep incline? mhm, gestures hill-It’s like a hill? nodding-Okay, .h so::: u::h gazes at paper-we were going (.) gestures downhill, gazes at Y-down=
à
=for that eh steep- steep incli[ne ] [ nods-mhm,] a:nd sits back, gazes at paper-(1.0) mhm.
T: M: Y: M: Y: M: Y: M: Y: M: Y:
nods
Maria begins to signal trouble with long pauses, cutofs, and uh’s in line 02. She produces the trouble source in line 03 with an accompanying gesture and follows with a cutof. (Given that Maria is a Spanish speaker, es- is most likely s-, which is probably the start of steep.) Maria then gazes at the teacher and says steep with rising intonation. Even though her pronunciation is target-like in line 03, this does not mark the repair solution but rather a pronunciation side sequence. The teacher again provides the correct pronunciation in line 04, and Maria responds with a nod. The repetition in line 05 is not directed at the teacher but at Yoko, her original co-participant. Yoko does not repeat the word as Riichi did but merely shows alignment with mhm in line 06. Although Yoko’s response token signals that she understands and encourages the forward progression of Maria’s story, Maria still provides the added term explanation in line 07: It’s like a hill? An important diference between this sequence and the other sequence where Maria solicited teacher support (Extract 2) is that, in Extract 4, after repeating the word and providing the defnition for her co-participant, she moves back into her main storytelling sequence by repeating part of the trouble source again. She signals the return to the action of her story with an inbreath and so in line 09, and then she engages in SISR in line 12. She initiates the repair with eh and a cutof. The cutof occurs near the end of the troublesome word, which she pronounces correctly. She then completes the repair with target-like pronunciation. A similar SISR occurs at the end of her storytelling sequence with the same co-participant. She again explains her fear of going down steep hills.
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Extract 5 Steep (5) 01 02 03 04 05 06
M:
à
drops pencil on desk-when I< gestures downhill-going for a hill or st-
steep- steep incline? Y:
nods points to self-because I feel scared.
M:
In line 03, Maria initiates a repair with a cutof. In line 04, she says the troublesome word with correct pronunciation but cuts of at the end, and then she repeats the word correctly, providing the repair solution. The placement of this phrase in relation to its defnition is notable. Where Maria follows the phrase with its defnition (It’s like a hill) in previous extracts, she switches the order here. Through her use of or, she avoids the need for an extra turn and presents both phrases – a hill and a steep incline – as interchangeable. Overall, the changes in Maria’s repair practices around steep from her frst to her second storytelling point to an interesting progression. First, within both tellings, Maria moves from self-initiated other-repair to self-initiated self-repair. Also, during the SIOR in the frst storytelling sequence, Maria opens the pronunciation side sequence by uttering a non-target-like version of the troublesome word. During the SIOR in the second storytelling sequence, however, Maria solicits the teacher’s help by uttering a target-like version of the same word. The subsequent SISRs refect a similar progression. In the SISR of the frst storytelling sequence (Extract 3), Maria utters the word incorrectly before arriving at the repair solution; in the SISR of the second storytelling sequence (Extract 5), she cuts of the correctly pronounced version of the word before arriving at the repair solution. Additionally, Maria seems to integrate the troublesome word into more complex syntactic structures during her second storytelling, evident in her post-recycled repair format in Extract 4 and her or construction in Extract 5. A close look at her third and fnal storytelling sequence provides even further evidence of development.
Storytelling 3 The same turn repairs around the word steep during Maria’s third storytelling are markedly diferent from the preceding repairs. In the following extract, she introduces the situation and the troublesome phrase for the frst time to her new participant, Satoru, another native Japanese speaker. Extract 6 Steep (6) 01 02
M:
à
so::: (1.0) u::h (1.2) we: u::h looks down at paper->oh my god hh.
okay.< we were going (.) u:h ↑down for- for- for a s- uh a steep incline? gestures-It’s like a hill? nods->yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah.< so:: my bicycle was (.) going gestures-very fast. nodding-oh yeah yeah [yeah yeah.]
S: M: S:
In this case, Maria engages solely in self-initiated self-repair and does not solicit any teacher support at all. She signals upcoming trouble in line 04 with a pause and uh and goes through two consecutive repair sequences in the same line. She treats for as a trouble source, initiating the repair with two cutofs, followed by the repair solution. The new trouble source then becomes steep as Maria initiates a repair with a cutof s- and uh. The repair solution immediately follows as she produces the troublesome word with correct pronunciation and added stress. She follows the completed turn in line 05 with the defnition: It’s like a hill? This repair sequence marks a clear departure from how Maria began her two preceding storytellings – with self-initiated other-repairs. While the turn is still marked by disfuencies, she no longer draws on “expert” help to arrive at a solution. As Maria nears the end of her fnal storytelling, she utters the word steep one last time. In line with the organization of her previous two tellings, she connects her past experience to the present. This time, she explains how she has learned to safely use the brakes in order to avoid a repeat of her story. Extract 7 Steep (7) 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09
M:
à
points down-and no:w when I going gestures downhill-do:wn for a steep incline
o:r a hill or something I use my brake.=But points back-my back brake. Not my front
S:
brake. nods-you [know? ] [gestures holding brake-The ] brake- the brake is broke- broke? Was broke?
Maria’s utterance of steep in this extract presents clear evidence of change. In all the preceding six extracts, Maria engages in repair. Here, she utters the term correctly in line 02 and gives no indication that this word is troublesome for her. There is no repair sequence, and the turn progresses without any disfuencies. In addition to this, she employs a much more complex syntactic structure here, with a subordinate clause and the or construction we saw in Extract 5.
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Analysis 2: I Promised For the second analysis, we return to Maria’s story as she shares it with her three co-participants. This time, as she arrives at the conclusion of her story, she shares her promise to never return to that dangerous hill. Maria expresses this promise in a single sentence, variations of which she repeats three times, once to each classmate. As opposed to the preceding analysis, which followed seven repair sequences that could be clearly classifed as phonological in nature, the extracts here include both phonological and grammatical aspects.
Storytelling 1 Because Maria does not produce this part of her story for the teacher during the planning stage, we begin with her interaction with her frst peer, Riichi. Near the end of her story, she describes the consequences of falling of her bike. Extract 8 Promise (1) 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08
M: R: M: R: M:
R:
à
I just broke my p[a:nts,]= [nods ] =and I hurt my [knee?] [nods ] gazes at paper-so that’s it. gazes at R-But I promise never going down points-to that street. shakes head-never. $hehehehe$ nods
Maria signals that she is nearing the end of her story in line 05, when she looks down at her paper and utters, so that’s it. Then, she returns her gaze to Riichi to add, But I promise never going down to that street. Never. This utterance, consisting of one clausal TCU and an increment, is the focus of our present analysis. It is notable that, during this frst telling, Maria does not engage in any repair practices. She does not signal trouble, and her speech is free from disfuency markers. In order to make comparisons between this utterance and future ones, it is important to take note of the grammatical make-up of the turn. By beginning with but, Maria contrasts the description of her only minor injuries (lines 01 and 03) with her frm promise to never return to that street. She uses promise in the present tense and the phrasal verb going down in its gerund form. She repeats never twice, frst with added stress between the two verbs, and second, as an increment at the end of the utterance. Her repetition of never, together with her falling intonation, creates a sense that her decision is resolute.
Language Learning/Repeated Storytellings
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Storytelling 2 During the second round of storytellings, Maria has just described her minor injuries to Yoko, and Yoko asks if Maria still enjoys riding her bike. Maria begins to respond to this question with an utterance similar to that from Extract 8. In this case, however, the utterance sparks a long side sequence, where both the pronunciation and grammar of the target sentence become the focus of the learner’s interaction with her peer and the teacher. Extract 9 Promise (2) 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15 16
Y: M:
T: M: T: M: T: M:
T:
à
but you still lo:ve (.) riding the bi:ke,= =↓ye:s >of ↑course gestures-but I prom- I-< gazes to paper-(0.8) Iturns to T-I- you say- I- >can I say< I promise I promised?-((adds extra syllable)) promised?-((target-like pronunciation)) points behind her-Not in past? in the past? [promised-((stressing /st/ ending sound))] [ >in the past.< ] promised?-((target-like pronunciation)) nods-mhm. writes “st” in air-ss[::t] [I ] promised? gestures to paper-This[this sentence is fne?]= [leans forward ]
After Yoko’s question, Maria confrms that she still loves biking and quickly signals a contrast with but in line 02. She initiates repair in line 03 with two cutofs (prom- and I-) before pausing to gaze at her notes. In line 04, she draws the teacher into the interaction through gaze. She initiates another repair with I- in line 04 and, after a few more cutofs, she arrives at the repair solution with a question directed at the teacher: Can I say promise I promised? With this question, she invites the teacher to provide the repair solution to the utterance she initiated in lines 02 and 03. Specifcally, she appears to be either asking about the past tense pronunciation for the verb promise or asking whether the use of the past tense is appropriate here. In response to Maria’s non-target-like pronunciation of promised, the teacher provides the repair solution (promised) in line 06. Maria takes issue with this response and initiates a post-expansion (Not in the past?), indicating that she heard the teacher’s suggestion in line 06 as promise rather than promised. In line 08, the teacher responds to Maria’s post expansion with an insert-expansion, repeating in the past with rising intonation.
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But then, without waiting for Maria’s response to the insert expansion, she repeats her original repair solution (promised) with added stress on the ending /st/ (line 09). This provides the second pair part to Maria’s post-expansion from line 07. At the same time, Maria responds to the teacher’s insert expansion from line 08 by confrming that she wants to know how to say the word in the past. Directly afterward, she acknowledges that she heard the teacher’s response to her post-expansion and repeats the repair solution (promised) with target-like pronunciation and rising intonation. In line 12, the teacher confrms that Maria has the correct pronunciation and provides further explanation of the sound. In lines 13 and 14, Maria says, I promised, with target-like pronunciation and rising intonation. This addition of the subject I marks an expansion from focusing on the pronunciation of the single verb to the grammaticality of the entire sentence. She then gestures to her notes, saying, This sentence is fne, with rising intonation, making the shift even clearer (line 15). The following extract comes directly after the previous one. After the pronunciation trouble is resolved, Maria does not yet return to the ongoing story but, rather, expands the side sequence to address the grammaticality of the sentence in focus. Extract 10 Promise (3) 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38
M: T: M: T: M: T: Y: M: Y: T: Y: T: M: T:
à
=just- I just wanna make [sure.] [nods ] I promised never goinggestures down-go down for that street. gestures with each new word-I promised never to go: picks up pencil, gazes to paper-°okay.°= =down that street again. wait I think [you can say]= [ writing-so I ] =shakes head-I never- I never go there. hand gesture-Or I never [went down that street again.] [nodding-yeah yeah yeah. ] >either [one.< ] [writing-So ] I- I promised never (.) gazes at T-to go? gazes at ceiling-↑I promised (.) never to go,=I promised to never go, (1.0) gazes at M->either one.< So gesturing with each word-I promised never to
Language Learning/Repeated Storytellings
39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51
M: Y: M: Y: M: Y: M:
219
go do:wn that street again. (1.2)-M and Y writing writing-do:wn, writing-down? writing-that (.) street again. leans over to see M’s paper-(promised what.) pointing at words on paper-promised never to go down. returns to paper and writes-(1.2) drops pencil on desk-when I< gestures downhill-going for a hill or ststeep- steep incline?
At the end of Extract 9, Maria initiates other-repair by asking the teacher to address the grammaticality of a troublesome sentence. At the start of Extract 10 (lines 19 and 20), Maria reads the sentence: I promised never going- go down for that street. It is notable that her pronunciation of promised here is target-like. In lines 21, 22, and 24, the teacher provides the solicited repair with a grammatically correct version of Maria’s sentence. Halfway through the teacher’s repair solution, Maria prepares to write. This signals an even larger divergence away from her original story sequence as Maria assumes the role of a notetaking student. As Maria begins writing and repeating the sentence aloud, Yoko joins the interaction and suggests an alternative sentence that has a similar meaning (lines 25 to 27). The teacher adds to this by providing yet another alternative sentence in lines 28 and 29. Yoko appears to acknowledge and accept the teacher’s contribution in line 30, and the teacher validates both alternatives in line 31 (either one.). Meanwhile, Maria attends to the original correct alternative provided by the teacher and repeats the frst part of the sentence with rising intonation (lines 32 and 33). The teacher gazes up at the ceiling, repeats the phrase, and directly afterward utters a slight variation of the phrase with the adverb (never), splitting the infnitive to go. The pauses and raised gaze suggest she is thinking about which structure is best. When her gaze returns to Maria, she tells her that either option is appropriate (line 37) but then repeats the original option in its entirety once more. The teacher has treated Maria’s repetition with rising intonation in lines 32 and 33 as soliciting confrmation that her sentence is accurate. The teacher’s eventual repetition of the sentence in lines 37 through 39 provides this confrmation. Maria treats this as a satisfactory response, and both Maria and Yoko start writing. From lines 41 to 47, as Maria and Yoko write down the target sentence, Maria now assumes the role of expert to assist Yoko with this. Maria fnally signals a return to the main story in line 48 by dropping her pencil and saying, and now, with a jumpstart. By dropping her pencil, she shows
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that she is fnished writing and is moving back into the role of storyteller. It is notable here that there is no fnal, complete repetition of the trouble sentence. She repeats promised with the correct pronunciation in lines 11 and 14 in Extract 9 and continues to pronounce it correctly when the focus of the side sequence shifts to sentence structure (Extract 10). However, she never repeats the target sentence structure in its entirety but, rather, diferent parts of it from lines 33 to 47.
Storytelling 3 During the fnal round, Maria concludes her story for Satoru in a similar way. She describes the minor consequences of her fall (ripped pants and a hurt knee) and describes how she felt during that moment (line 05). She then utters a sentence similar to the one that sparked a repair side sequence during the previous telling. Extract 11 Promise (4) 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15
M:
gazes to S-U::m afortunately (.) u:h shakes head-I just broke my pants and I
S: M: S: M:
S: M:
à
hurt my knee but (.) that’s it. [o::h.] [but I] really really felt scared. nods-mm. so I ↑pro:mised (0.6) gazes to paper-u::m gazes at S, gestures with each word-never go down- down for that street. [never.] [yea::h.] points down-and no:w when I going gestures downhill-do:wn for a steep incline o:r a hill or something I use my brake.=but points back-my back brake. not my front brake.
In line 07, Maria begins to share her promise with Satoru but again appears to fnd the sentence troublesome. After I promised, she pauses, gazes at her notes, and utters an elongated um. These disfuency markers initiate repair. As she returns her gaze to Satoru, she provides the repair solution by continuing the sentence: Never go down-. She engages in a short SISR sequence again as she cuts of down, repeats it, and completes the turn with falling intonation: Down for that street. She emphasizes the seriousness of her promise by adding the increment, Never. Maria’s fnal utterance of this sentence is both similar and diferent from the previous two utterances in some interesting ways. First, it is notable that
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she provides the past tense of the verb promise with accurate pronunciation and without any sign of disfuency. In Extract 8, she produces promise in its present tense form and does not appear to fnd it troublesome. In Extract 9, she self-initiates a repair on this word and engages in a side sequence where the instructor provides the repair solution: The verb in the past tense with accurate pronunciation. As she moves on to addressing trouble with the grammar of the sentence (Extract 10), she repeatedly utters the word promised with target-like pronunciation. In this fnal extract, the rest of the sentence is still marked with disfuencies. The emergent grammar of the sentence she fnally produces (I promised never go down for that street) is closer than Extract 8 (I promise never going down to that street) to the grammatically accurate target sentence. In addition to promise becoming promised, going becomes go, which is closer to the target infnitive to go. Changing down to that street to down for that street, however, does not necessarily bring her any closer to the target structure: Down that street. We can see, then, that after a long side sequence to address both phonological and grammatical troubles in a particular sentence, which she herself initiates, her uptake of the target-like alternative provided by the teacher is only partial. While her repeated and accurate utterance of promised without disfuency markers suggests that learning has occurred (at least in the short term), her continued struggle to accurately and fuently produce the sentence structure in its entirety shows that the learning is incomplete.
Discussion and Conclusion These two analyses have illuminated how Maria engages with and works through language learning opportunities on a moment-to-moment basis. In the frst analysis, a close examination of changes in Maria’s pronunciation repair practices around one word has allowed us to defne and demonstrate learning as more than just a move toward correct pronunciation. In this case, it has allowed us to see at least three emerging patterns in Maria’s interaction: A move toward more independent repair practices, a move toward phonological accuracy, and a decrease in disfuency markers. First, the transition from SIOR to SISR suggests a growing autonomy and less need for “expert” intervention to arrive at repair solutions (Scheglof et al., 1977). It appears that through repetition – or repeated “exposure” to a same trouble source – she gains an increasing ability to self-monitor her talk and do self-repair adequately. Second, Maria’s move from inaccurate to accurate pronunciation of the learning item during points of repair initiation shows that even her “frst guess” is becoming more targetlike. Finally, her increasing fuency, especially evident in the fnal extract, indicates that she is fnding this word easier to produce. The newfound ease also appears to co-occur with her use of more complex syntactic structures. In the second analysis, Maria’s development is less straightforward. However, her complicated engagement with and partial learning of the target utterance
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has illuminated at least two key takeaways. First, we have been able to observe how she demonstrates learner agency when faced with a multitude of unplanned learning opportunities. Moment by moment, Maria is presented with numerous learning opportunities with which she self-initiates engagement. In Extracts 9 and 10, for instance, we see how Maria initiates and then redirects the focus of the side sequence to address diferent linguistic concerns. Second, we observe that her role in the classroom is dynamic. It appears that learners, like teachers, are multivocalic (Waring, 2015). Maria moves between many roles and voices within these short transcripts. In just Extracts 9 and 10, for instance, we see Maria shifting from the role of storyteller, to language learner, to language teacher as she initiates a side sequence, solicits the teacher’s help, and helps her peer process the new information. Through the frst analysis, we can trace a clear progression of a learning item. Through the second analysis, this progression is not as clear; however, adopting a similar analytical approach has illuminated other aspects of the learner’s interaction that are important as we strive toward a more holistic understanding of language learning processes. By illuminating a learner’s ability to monitor her talk and engage in self-repair, this study informs our understanding of the role of noticing and awareness in language learning (e.g., Schmidt, 1990, 1993, 2001; Schmidt & Frota, 1986). Additionally, it speaks to the potential impact of repetition on vocabulary learning (e.g., Nation, 2001). Topics like noticing and vocabulary acquisition are traditionally tied to mainstream SLA studies; however, as Wong (2013) explains, “if we come at the research puzzle from as many angles as possible, the greater are our chances of glimpsing the total picture” (p. 16). By adopting a participant-relevant perspective, we can expand the focus of language learning research to more fully understand how learners adapt their linguistic and social knowledge to particular environments, act on their current knowledge states, and engage with learning opportunities. The approach adopted in this study follows one learner through multiple interactions over a short period of time. While the setting and the L2 learner who is tracked remain the same, her classmate co-participants change. This analysis demonstrates CA’s analytical potential for examining learning processes during classroom activities on a highly detailed level by focusing on repairs. Repetitive, communicative activities – the analytical focus of this chapter – are arguably quite common in the language classroom, which ofer rich opportunities for future research on how learners engage with learning opportunities, solicit help from others, and employ interactional practices as their co-participants change.
Note 1 Wong (2013) argues that CA has already gained a place at the SLA table, so the use of terms like “CA-for-SLA” is unnecessary. However, I still fnd this term useful in distinguishing from others the CA studies that are particularly interested in examining language learning.
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APPENDIX Transcription Notations
. ? , – :: word word WORD °word° ↑word ↓word >word