When is it appropriate to talk? Managing overlapping talk in multi-participant voice-based chat rooms

Abstract

There has been extensive reporting on the interactional characteristics of multi-participant text-based chat rooms. In these chat rooms there are several students typing at the same time, often on more than one topic. As a result, it is not uncommon to see multiple overlapping utterances. Despite these communicative challenges, research suggests that multi-participant text-based chat rooms are beneficial for language teaching and learning. It is my objective to investigate whether the same can be said for multi-participant voice-based chat rooms. As there is little empirical work on the interaction that results from communicating in voice-based chat rooms, a necessary first step in discussing pedagogical benefits is to investigate its interactional structure. This study will therefore focus on how overlapping talk is dealt with in a medium in which multiple voices are heard in the absence of nonverbal cues. The findings show how pauses act in connection to overlapping talk, both as a source and an interactional resource. These findings will then be used to discuss the pedagogical implications of communicating in multi-participant voice-based chat rooms.

Keywords:

• computer-mediated communication
• conversation analysis
• turn-taking
• overlapping talk

Notes

1. Jepson (2005), and Heins, Duensing, Stickler, and Batstone (2007), adopt a largely quantitative approach to investigating spoken interaction (see Seedhouse, 2004, and Schegloff, 1993, for the problems with coding and quantifying spoken interaction).

2. Findings have been limited to the pedagogical benefits of voice and video CMC (Hampel, 2003; Wang, 2004, 2006; Vetter & Chanier, 2006).