Volume 43, Issue 1

This study focuses on Chinese EFL (English as a Foreign Language) peer tutors’ discursive behavior to manage epistemic challenges in writing tutorials at a local university in China’s Mainland. Based on approximately 24 h of audio-recorded interactions involving eight tutorial groups over six weeks, we searched different types of epistemic challenges to Chinese EFL peer tutors and explored how they managed them discursively. Our findings, in adopting a CA (Conversational Analysis) approach, show that Chinese EFL peer tutors mainly experience two types of epistemic challenges – the language proficiency-based challenges and the resistance-based challenges. They construct different identities to cope with these challenges – EFL learners, careless but competent tutors, and authoritative and trustworthy experts. These practices are realized through valuable pragma-linguistic devices, including advising and assessing speech acts, deontic modality, self-mocking expressions, imperative and assertive tones, narrative discourse, and smiley voice and laughter. These findings highlight the need for writing center instructors to follow tutor training guides suitable for EFL peer tutors instead of following a universal training recipe.

In this paper we offer a longitudinal Conversation Analysis of talk lasting 18 months between a father and son, which reveals changes in the child’s level of Interactional Competence (IC). We propose an index of developing IC based upon Sacks’ distinction between “invited” and “volunteered” stories. While stories have a “socialization function” we suggest stories may be tracked in terms of IC also. What has been called “today narrative” routines (“What did you do at school today”, etc.), initiated by the father, predominate in a series of conversations. The analysis reveals how the child is encouraged to take extended turns through the father’s questions and comments, which are developed into a storytelling sequence. We observe that the child’s responses to the initial inquiries become more elaborate over time. Furthermore, there is a gradual resistance to the invited story format because it inhibits how the child organizes his stories. Volunteered stories obtain a more personal ‘voice’. The paper showcases the nexus between socialization and interactional competence.

“VP/AP +  (dek)le  + AP/VP” is a predicative complement construction in Shanghai Wu Chinese (SWC) with (dek)le being the complement marker. In everyday SWC conversation, the terminal complement is often dropped, forming the Truncated Predicative Complement Construction (TPCC): “AP +  (dek)le ”. The data for the present study are approximately 4.5 h of naturalistic SWC face-to-face conversations. Adopting the methodology of conversation analysis and interactional linguistics, we explore the interactional functions of the TPCC in the SWC conversational data. We find that TPCCs after the possible closure of a topic are deployed to initiate a new topic in two ways: initiating a disjunctive topic shift, and changing to a topic that is connected to a prior one. The findings demonstrate that TPCCs are routinized grammatical patterns accomplishing the conversational action of initiating new topics in SWC conversation.

This article investigates sequences of collaborative writing that are part of classroom interaction in student dyads and triads working with a digital device and a paper worksheet. In analyzing instances from a corpus of 18 h of video recordings made in five high-school classrooms through an ethnomethodological and conversation analytic approach, I focus on two embodied practices which do the work of recruiting assistance during the course of inscribing: lifting the pen and lifting the gaze. These practices are viewed as ordinary digressions from the basic posture of the writing body. I demonstrate that lifting the pen as a recruitment practice can be done as a brief stopping of the pen in its movement, as wrist rotation, or as hand elevation. Lifting the gaze can have varying temporal properties and occur synchronously with hand-on-face gestures. I conclude that collaborative writing underlines the indeterminacy of bodily practices as either recruitments, requests or contributions to joint courses of action. I also suggest that the identified practices may be further investigated as components of the specific speech-exchange system inherent to the activity of writing together.

In developing ethnopoetics as an approach to the interpretation and analysis of oral performance, Dell Hymes controversially insisted that spoken narratives should be heard and read as poetry rather than prose. Although ethnopoetics is cross-culturally intended, only a few studies in a limited number of languages have so far been conducted. This article provides an analysis of a Danish spoken narrative of personal experience that supports Hymes’s contention that narratives are patterned in lines, that verses constitute the units that organize lines, that relations among verses are measured, and that parallelism is a pervasive feature of everyday storytelling. Verse analysis is unique in demonstrating the expressive force, poetic sophistication, psychological complexity, and aesthetic quality of spoken narrative. The article discusses the methodological implications of moving between text and performance, a static object and a dynamic body, the spatial distribution of written symbols and the temporal organization of orally expressed language.

This paper studies referential accessibility marking in predicative and specificational clauses, in particular the ones in which the roles of ‘description’ and ‘variable’ are realised by an indefinite NP (e.g. He is a baker vs. One of his talents is pastry ). While the indefinite NP in the two clause types has been studied in detail, little is known about how the other two roles – of ‘describee’ and ‘value’ – are typically realised. This study, therefore, examines the choice of referring expressions for the items filling these roles, as an index of their retrievability and degree of accessibility. The analysis is based on 750 corpus examples from spoken and written British English. Moreover, since specificational clauses allow for the value to be either complement or subject, this study also provides insight into what may motivate the choice for one pattern or the other. Significant differences were found between describees and values, as well as between value-subjects and value-complements. These findings are interpreted as indicative of different discourse functions of the three constructions. While predicative clauses typically elaborate familiar information, specificational clauses serve a broader discourse-organising function: starting a new discourse-topic, pivoting from one topic to another, or summarising prior propositions as concluding a topic.