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Article published In: Applied Pragmatics
Vol. 1:2 (2019) ► pp.119–153

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Responding (or not) to other’s talk

Changes in recipiency practices during a Japanese study abroad program

 | Kobe University
Published online: 12 November 2019
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/ap.18015.bur
Abstract
This study follows (2017). Developing recipient competence during study abroad. In T. Greer, M. Ishida, & Y. Tateyama (Eds.), Interactional competence in Japanese as an additional language (pp. 253–292). Honolulu, HI: National Foreign Language Resource Center.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar call for longitudinal studies that examine how learners in the early stages of their study abroad sojourn develop skills in responding to prior talk. Using multimodal Conversation Analysis (CA), the study compares three interactions across a six-week sojourn between a learner of Japanese and his host father. For longitudinal comparison, the study focuses on sequences in which the learner has initiated a question or comment, and the host father provides a non-minimal response. The study finds a diversification of resources and an expanded repertoire of possible actions for displaying recipiency, changing from primarily minimal response tokens that only weakly display his stance towards the prior talk early on, to the greater use of assessments and non-minimal expansions toward the end of the sojourn. The study provides evidence that short-term study abroad experiences for novice languages learners can afford opportunities for the development of interactional competencies.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Recipiency in interaction
    • Continuers
    • Acknowledgements
    • Newsmarkers
    • Assessments
  • 3.The current study
    • 3.1Participants and data collection
    • 3.2Methodology and research questions
  • 4.Findings
    • 4.1Week 1
    • 4.2Week 3
    • 4.3Week 6
  • 5.Discussion
  • 6.Conclusion and implications
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
References (59)
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