Turn-taking strategies in Vietnamese and English casual conversations

Abstract

Abstract. Sacks, Schegloff, andJefferson [1] stated that “the organization of taking turns to talk is fundamental to conversation, as well as to other speech-exchange systems.” Since these scholars developed a systematic mechanism of turn-taking in English conversations in 1974, much research has been conducted on the field and turn-taking has become a central issue in pragmatics and conversation analysis. Under the scope of conversation analysis, this study was conducted to discuss the turn-taking mechanism in general and the turn-taking strategies in particular in casual Vietnamese conversations. Video ethnography and stimulated recall were applied to collect data for analysis, with which a system of turn-taking signals in Vietnamese conversations were developed. The system included both verbal and non-verbal signals, namely adjacency pairs, name nomination, appositionals, recompleters, overlaps, syntactic cues, prosodies, pause, gaze directions, head movement, kinesics, and postures. These strategies were, then, compared and contrasted to those applied by the English speakers to detect any patterns that stand out. On the whole, many strategies applied in the two languages are identical; whilst differences were spotted in the use of prosodies, pause between turns, lexicons, and overlap in the two languages. With such findings, implications for teaching English inVietnam are discussed to wind up the study.

Keywords: Conversation analysis, turn-taking organization, turn-taking strategies, transition relevant places, turn constructional units.