Building Connected Turns in Pedagogical Interaction: Nonnative Discourse Construction

초록

There is an increasing demand for fluent nonnative speakers of English who can perform a variety of discourse tasks across various professional fields, whether it is making arguments, narrating stories, describing things or giving instructions. What is common to these tasks is that they are performed through long stretches of speech—namely, connected discourse. The present study is designed to trace the process by which nonnative speakers produce multiple turns in contingent conversational interactions. The data were drawn from one-on-one tutoring sessions between native tutors and nonnative tutees in the writing center of a private university in South Korea. Nine tutoring sessions were recorded and transcribed according to the conventions of conversation analysis (CA). These analyses demonstrated, first, that in producing multiple turns, nonnative tutees seemed to carry out a variety of contingent tasks, such as offering background information on their writing, describing characters in the stories, explaining concepts or illustrating concepts. Second, the analyses showed two ways in which nonnative speakers build multiple turns, as they answer the tutors’ questions. The pedagogical implications are also discussed.

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