Essential production strategies of verbal support turns in ELE students. Preliminary results

Abstract

Conversation is an interactional achievement which involves speaker and listener collaboration. The present study was designed to examine the role of the listener in conversation and point out the fact that in conversational interaction, both the speaker and listener play an important role, because conversation is a cooperative effort. To carry out research on listener behavior could help raise the awareness of the importance and complexity of conversation phenomenon. In any conversation the interlocutors reach a point where one speaker will take the floor and the other will focus on listening. Through verbal and nonverbal listener responses those listening to another’s speaking indicate that they are listening, they acknowledge that the other speaker has the floor and they want the interaction to continue in this vein. The main aim of this paper is to investigate the listener verbal responses mechanisms engaged in Taiwanese non-advanced Spanish foreign language learners in natural dyadic Spanish conversations. Empirical methodology based on the theoretical framework of Conversation Analysis will carry out. It is noteworthy that many studies have been conduced to understand the listener responses strategies in American English and Japanese conversations, but few studies have been carried out to analyze the listener responses in Spanish. Besides, no study has been carried out to determine the mechanism involving Taiwanese Spanish foreign language learners. In this regard our project has some important features that make it especially relevant: (1) The corpus data and results of this project should become a valuable linguistics resource and tool of understanding for some caveats in Conversation Analysis. (2) Researchers underline the knowledge of listener responses as pedagogical resource and its application in the foreign language classroom. Our interest is in enhancing teaching and learning by applying CA and listener responses to the foreign language classroom.