turn-taking strategies in english and vietnamese casual conversations = chiến lược lượt lời trong đàm thoại thông thường tiếng anh và tiếng việt

11 of those matters is turn-taking. Actually, certain strategies are commonly used in English for taking, holding onto, and relinquishing the floor in conversations. The problem is whether these strategies are used in the mother tongue of the English learners and whether they are aware of such strategies if there are certain differences between those used in the mother tongue and those used in English. Thus, this paper seeks to examine different strategies employed during casual conversations by native Vietnamese speakers, to take, hold onto and relinquish the floor. The strategies will then be compared with those used by English speakers in their native language, and some pedagogical implications for teaching conversation in English classes will be discussed. From a sociologist‘s stance, the following is worth mentioning. The 21st Century is marked as the information era or the computer age, in which Internet is conceived as a distributed network that could connect computers together and with the invention of World Wide Web, Internet truly became a global network. Internet today has become the ultimate platform for accelerating the flow of information and is the fastest-growing form of media. With the ease and convenience of exchanging information via Internet, people are more and more reliable on Internet and less on direct communication. ―Staff sitting next to each other send email rather than speak‖ (Gascoigne, 2004). People find it easier to chat via Internet than meet in person. These cause serious problems to direct communication in general, and to communication skills in particular. Therefore, one purpose of this study is to improve learners‘ communication ability with the awareness of some turn-taking signals used in Vietnamese and English casual conversations. From the viewpoint of a technocrat, the study of a systematic turn-taking may make a little contribution to the robotic industry, which is to develop the turn-taking system in Vietnamese so as that the robot designers may find it useful in their creating robots closer to human beings, the new version of robots with ability to interpret both verbal and nonverbal languages. 1.2 OBJECTIVES AND SIGNIFICANCE OF THE STUDY Turn-taking actually plays important role in everyday communication. For the Vietnamese studying English and the people of other languages studying Vietnamese to 12 achieve smooth conversations in practice, it is a prerequisite to know how the turn-taking mechanism varies across cultures. The research aims of this study, therefore, are to investigate: - Turn-taking strategies used in Vietnamese casual conversations by native Vietnamese speakers. - The similarities and differences of turn-taking strategies used in English and Vietnamese. To achieve the above-stated objectives, the research questions should be designed so as that they cater for sufficient and relevant findings. With such, the below questions will be dealt with: (1) What turn-taking strategies are used in Vietnamese casual conversations? (2) What are the differences and similarities between turn-taking strategies used in English casual conversations and those used in Vietnamese ones? This study shall be of interest to those who are concerned with or have worked on Conversation Analysis, to the teachers and learners of English and of Vietnamese, who desire to develop a systematic conversation rules supporting in improving learners‘ interactional skills in the target languages, and to those who are struggling to improve their communication skills so as that they get involved in smooth and successful face-toface conversations. Specifically concerning Conversation Analysis, different researchers are recently paying much attention to turn-taking, under which two contradicted hypotheses are developed: (1) universal system hypothesis, which supports a universal set of rules governing the turn-taking mechanism across cultures, and (2) culture variability hypothesis, by which turn-taking is language and culture dependent. This study will be of moderately-significant contribution in settling such controversy over turn-taking. 1.3 SCOPE OF THE RESEARCH The research focuses on the turn-taking strategies used in casual conversations in Vietnamese and compare and contrast them with those used in English. 13 1.4 ORGANIZATION OF THE STUDY The paper is divided into 5 chapters as below: Chapter 1: Introduction, introducing the research topic, its rationale, aims, significance, scope, and the organization of the research. Chapter 2: Literature Review, discussing the theoretical background in the light of which the research matters will be discussed. Chapter 3: Methodology, describing the methods applied to investigate the research matters. Chapter 4: Findings and Discussion, presenting the outcome of the study and providing answers to the research questions. Chapter 5: Conclusion and Implications, summarizing the overall study, proposing some recommendations with regards to turn-taking in practice, and suggesting some forms of further studies on the field. 14 CHAPTER 2 LITERATURE REVIEW This chapter discusses the theoretical framework of the study which explores the below: o Conversation analysis o Definitions of turn and of turn-taking organization o Turn-taking strategies in English conversations o Turn-taking strategies in Vietnamese conversations 2.1 Conversation Analysis Conversation analysis (CA) is a growing field of inquiry which has been enriched by contributions from a number of disciplinary perspectives including ―pragmatics, speech act theory, interactional sociolinguistics, ethno-methodology, the ethnography of communication, variation analysis, communication theory, and social psychology‖ (Markee, 2000:23). Generally speaking, ―conversational analysts are concerned with naturally occurring instances of everyday talk follow still another, separate academic tradition of inquiry, which concentrates on the actual discourse mechanisms that serve to allocate turns of speaking, to negotiate changes in focus and to manage and direct the flow of interaction.‖ (Gumperz, 1982:158). Initially, CA researchers focused on describing the organizational structure of mundane, ordinary conversation, which may be defined as the kind of casual, social talk that routinely occurs between friends and acquaintances. More specifically, researchers described this organizational structure in terms of sequences, turn-taking and repair practices. The first researchers who set a foundation to CA are Sacks, Schegloff, Jefferson, Pomerantz and some others. Among them, Harvey Sacks and his co-researchers 15 are instrumental in studying the structural organization of everyday language use. In their research program, they ―focus on conversations as the simplest instance of a naturally organized activity and attempt to study the process of conversational management without making any priori assumptions about social and cultural background of participants‖ (Gumpertz, 1982:158). Then, Hutchby and Wooffitt (2001:13) defines CA as ―the study of talk‖ and more specifically ―the study of talk-in-interaction‖. Overally, CA is then the study of ―naturally occurring talk-in-interaction‖ (Hutchby and Wooffitt, 2001:14). Researchers also study the aim of CA. Principally, it is to ―discover how participants understand and respond to one another in their turns at talk, with a central focus being on how sequences of actions are generated.‖ (Hutchby and Wooffitt, 2001:14) To put it another way, the objective of CA is to uncover the tacit reasoning procedures and sociolinguistic competencies underlying the production and interpretation of talk in organized sequences of interaction. The upshot of this all is that CA seeks to ―uncover the organization of talk not from any exterior, God‘s eye view, but from the perspective of how the participants display for one another their understanding of what is going on.‖ (Hutchby and Wooffitt, 2001:15) With such aim in mind, CA researchers have developed its characteristics, among which the ones set by Markee (2000:28) are mostly cited:  CA is profoundly agnostic about the value of explanations that are derived from ethnic theories of social action because these explanations are not grounded in members‘ constructions of their own naturally occurring behaviors.  CA does not develop arguments about the structure of conversation on the basis of quantitative analysis of frequency data.  Conversation analysts use prototypical examples which give discursive form to phenomenon being analyzed.  Analyses must be subject to critical falsification. That is, analysts must demonstrate that potential counterexamples and different accounts for the same data set have been anticipated and that other researchers can replicate findings with different transcripts. 16 2.2 The Organization of Turn-taking 2.2.1 Definitions of Turn The organization of turns has attracted many linguistic researchers as well as researchers in other fields such as psychology. Accordingly, definitions of turns vary significantly from study to study and are implicitly and explicitly presented in previous literatures. Turns can be defined into two types: mechanical definitions and interactional definitions. Mechanically, turns are viewed as units of talks in interaction and exclude any interpretations that regard social context. Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson (1974) deliberately avoid defining turns by calling them basic units of utterance, ―unit types‖ or ―turn-constructional units‖ (TCU) and state that the types of units in English vary from sentence to clause, phrase and word. Duncan and Fiske (1977) also view turns as interactional units ―with an end boundary marked by turn-claiming responses from the auditor.‖ Interactionally, Goffman (1981:23) defines turns as ―an opportunity to hold the floor, not what is said while holding it.‖ Furthermore, turns in these interactional definitions concern the speaker‘s right/ obligation to talk, as well as the concept of floor, i.e. who has the privilege to hold the floor. Edelsky (1993:207) defines turns as ―on-record speaking behind which lies an intention to convey a message that is both referential and functional‖ and she defines floor as ―what is going on within a psychological time/space‖ (1993:209). She then audio-records interaction of five committee meetings with five female and four male participants. When analyzing the data, she classifies the floors into two types, (1) singly developed floor, which is characterized by monologues and single party control, and (2) collaborative floor, which is a more informal and cooperative venture. All in all, the definition of turn, which is most and preferably cited by researchers, is the one stated by Levinson (1983:295). ―A turn is a time during which a single participant speaks, within a typical, orderly arrangement in which participants speak with minimal overlap and gap between them.‖