Investigating engagement response tokens in spoken narrative discourse

Abstract

This paper reports the results of a recent project undertaken at a Midwestern university language programme to improve the methodology of teaching interactive listening skills and developing NNS students’ interactional competence. To document their current awareness and use of interactive listening skills, this study focuses on the analysis of response tokens used by NNS students in spoken narrative discourse. Response tokens are high‐frequency turn‐initial lexical items which occur in responses in everyday spoken genres, and which reveal various levels of the listener’s interactional engagement. In this study, the form and use of two kinds of engagement response tokens, surprise and assessment tokens, in NNS–NS and NS–NS interaction are examined. The findings of this study underline the need to raise students’ awareness of pragmalinguistic features of surprise and assessment tokens through explicit instruction.

Keywords:

• teaching spoken discourse
• learner corpus analysis
• pragmatics

Acknowledgments

I would like to express my sincere gratitude to Professor Ronald Carter for his strong encouragement in the publication of this study. I am also very grateful to Erica McClure, Irene Koshik, and Dawn Owens‐Nicholson for their very helpful and insightful feedback. Many thanks are due to my colleagues and students who participated in this study.

Notes

1. For a discussion of interactional vs. transactional competence (i.e., the ability to exchange information between the speaker and listener) see Kasper (1997), and O’Keeffe, McCarthy, and Carter (2007).

2. For an analysis of the functions of ‘oh’ see Heritage (1984, 1998), Aijmer (2002), and Schegloff (2007); see also Bolden’s (2006) discussion of discourse markers ‘so’ and ‘oh’ in social interaction.

3. Forty‐six per cent of intermediate‐level ESL students who attended the intensive language program during the semester this research was conducted were Koreans. Korean students have consistently represented an average of 50% of the students at all levels of the language programme for the past decade.

4. Data about the regional varieties of English the NS participants in both the control and the experimental group had been exposed to are unavailable.

5. NS rating of the NS‐produced tokens would have benefitted the analysis in this study. However, such a rating was not the focus of this study.

6. Concerns have been raised in the literature about the potential native speaker subjective and/or discriminatory judgement of NNS performance (Canagarajah 1999; Bresnahan et al. 2002; Lindemann 2006). While recognising the validity of such case‐relevant concerns, I would like to clarify that the decision to rely on NS raters to evaluate NNS appropriateness was based on a realistic assessment of research resources available to mainstream language teachers at the intensive language programme. The use of an eclectic methodology, and, in this framework, the feedback obtained from the native speakers, were part of a needs analysis process which aimed to inform listening and speaking curriculum development. The measured high inter‐rater reliability, indicating a high degree of agreement among the NS raters, provided reassurance of the validity of their evaluation.

7. The choice of NS raters was made based on the ‘native speaker’ criterion. However, we admit that having teacher and non‐teacher NS raters might carry with it the potential risk of teachers having different expectations than those of non‐teacher raters.

8. The student could have used ‘What’s up?’ to mean ‘What’s the matter?/What’s wrong?’ in British English. Even in such a case, this use would have been inaccurate, since ‘What’s the matter?/What’s wrong’ is generally used to ask about mood or circumstances not so obvious as the physical evidence (the black eye) described in the DCT.

9. Korean students of English often use ‘How’ in place of ‘What’ erroneously in questions such as ‘How can I do now?’, ‘How do you think?’, etc.

10. I am grateful to one of the readers who pointed out that critics of an over‐reliance on information gaps in Communicative approaches have indicated that it results in an over‐emphasis on transactional language (see Pachler 2000).