Vicious vs. virtuous cycles of turn negotiation in American-Japanese telecollaboration: is silence a virtue?

ABSTRACT

This study analyzes the conversational styles of two dyads who engaged in a semester-long, video-mediated telecollaboration between Japan and America. While one dyad expressed the greatest satisfaction and developed the autonomy to continue the project beyond the curricular requirement, the other dyad expressed the greatest frustration, requiring a pedagogical intervention. To examine how the two dyads’ different experiences could be attributed to turn negotiation patterns, the English portion of the second interaction session was analyzed. The results showed that for the unsuccessful dyad, silence, which was used by the Japanese EFL learner as a contextualization cue, triggered the American student’s hyperexplanation to get the Japanese partner involved in conversation. However, such a high-involvement strategy, only resulted in producing fewer opportunities for the Japanese partner to contribute to the conversation (i.e. vicious cycle). In contrast, successful turn negotiation of the other dyad enabled them to share knowledge schema, improve recipient design, and adjust their speech accordingly. Such personalized speech, in turn, led to the co-construction of conversation (i.e. virtuous cycle). Based on these observations, I conclude that ‘missed communication’ may entrench attribution of negative personal traits unless appropriate scaffolding/intervention is provided.

本研究では、日米間のビデオ会話に参加した二組の外国語学習者のターンテイキングの様式を比較分析した。会話構築に成功したペアが友情を深め、授業履修後も連絡を取り合ったのに対し、もう一組のペアは教師の介入が必要な程、会話に支障をきたした。「会話スタイル」の枠組みを用いてこの二組の英会話時におけるターン構築を分析することで、プロジェクトの成功・失敗の要因を探った。談話分析の結果、日本人英語学習者により言語援助要求の合図として使われた沈黙が、アメリカ人英語母国語話者の過剰説明を引き起こしていたことがわかった。このhigh–involvementストラテジーが日本人英語学習者の会話貢献の機会を少なくしたため、更にターンの悪循環が起きた。一方、成功したペアの会話は、知識スキーマの共有、受け手志向性の改良などによって、協力的な会話構築がなされていた。聞き手の外国語能力に合った発話は会話を促し、それがターンの好循環に繋がった。これらの結果から、異文化間のミスコミュニケーションが起こった際、教室内外で適切なスキャフォールディングが行われなければ、会話参加者の否定的な感情を増強させてしまう可能性があることを示した。

KEYWORDS:

• Telecollaboration
• interactional sociolinguistics
• conversational style
• listenership
• silence
• turn-taking

Acknowledgement

I thank Lourdes Ortega and Cynthia Gordon for their helpful input and feedback on the content of this manuscript. I am also grateful to Kazuya Saito, my telecollaboration collaborator in Japan, the students who participated in this project, and Michael Ferreira and João Telles for the opportunity to conduct the study.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Yuka Akiyama is a Ph.D. candidate in Applied Linguistics at Georgetown University. Her research investigates online intercultural communciation between learners of Japanese and English (i.e. telecollaboration/eTandem). She is especially interested in examining the development of comprehensibility and interactional competence and the role of corrective feedback and tasks in telecollaborative interaction. Her dissertation employs a multimodal discourse analysis approach to studying ‘reciprocity’ and its implications for language and cultural learning. Prior to starting her Ph.D., she had taught Japanese at the MIT, Boston University, and Middlebury College in Tokyo.

ORCID

Yuka Akiyama http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2928-8533

Notes

1. I will use the term listener response as the superordinate term, including back-channels and minimal responses.

2. The names of the four participants are pseudonyms.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the ITEL Teletandem Project at Georgetown University.