30.3103, Review: Discourse Analysis; Pragmatics: Filipi, Markee (2018)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-30-3103. Tue Aug 13 2019. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 30.3103, Review: Discourse Analysis; Pragmatics: Filipi, Markee (2018)

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Date: Tue, 13 Aug 2019 12:13:31
From: Xuan Wang [wxinspain at gmail.com]
Subject: Conversation Analysis and Language Alternation

 
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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/30/30-402.html

EDITOR: Anna  Filipi
EDITOR: Numa  Markee
TITLE: Conversation Analysis and Language Alternation
SUBTITLE: Capturing transitions in the classroom
SERIES TITLE: Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 295
PUBLISHER: John Benjamins
YEAR: 2018

REVIEWER: Xuan Wang

INTRODUCTION 

The methods of conversation analysis (CA) have been well-established and
consolidated in scholarship, which contributes to our understanding of human
interaction; recently researchers’ attention is being shifted to the
organization of talk-in-interaction in a number of languages besides English.
This volume, edited by Anna Filipi and Numa Markee, aims to enrich the
scholarship on how language alternation is organized in bilingual talk and to
analyse the language alternation between English and German, Italian, Spanish,
Swedish and Vietnamese in classroom settings. In general, this volume consists
of three main parts with eleven chapters written by thirteen researchers in
this area: the first part offers an overview explicating the CA, language
alternation and overall order and local order in bilingual talk; the second
part focuses on the language alternation in the small group of languages from
both teachers’ and students’ talk in the language classroom settings; and in
the last part of this volume, the editors discuss the pedagogical implications
drawn from the empirical studies on interventionist conversation analysis.
Following the structure of this volume, this review will summarize the main
contents of the three parts with a critical evaluation at the end of this
article.  

SUMMARY

Part One: Overview

This part contains three chapters: in Chapter 1 titled “Transitions in the
language classroom as important sites for language alternation,” Anna Filipi
and Numa Markee reviewed two important terms in CA, i.e. talk-in-interaction
and context, and pointed out that the language classroom is of centrality in
CA and that the pedagogical context is a key aspect in classroom interaction.
As stated by the authors, transition points are important sites where
interactional work will occur, involving the talk at the boundaries of speech
exchange systems, thus the language classroom is a fertile site for CA studies
and language alternation. In the language classroom, language policing often
requires teachers and learners to use the target language; yet the L1
continues to be used in the actual language learning context, which has
triggered a large body of work on language alternation and language pedagogy;
and the sequential organization and orderliness of language alternation from
the perspective of teachers and learners has been a growing interest in CA
research. In the end, the authors also provided us with an overview of this
volume’s organization and main contents. 

In the second chapter, titled “Analysing bilingual talk: Conversation analysis
and language alternation,” the authors Nigel Musk and Jakob Cromdal present
some main ideas and guiding principles and compare some terms in language
alternation; the authors provide a historical account of the development of an
organizational approach to language alternation, and summarize the five main
strands and foci of CA studies on language alternation, including bilingual
identity, language (dis)alignment in classroom, bilingual peer talk on
educational tasks, language policing and the determination of the medium of
classroom interaction. The chapter ends with some suggestions and promising
directions for future research on CA and language alternation.    

The third chapter, “Overall order versus local order in bilingual
conversation: A conversation analytic perspective on language alternation” by
Joseph Gafaranga, focuses on the conversation analytic perspective on language
alternation. Two types of order, i.e. overall order and local order which
build up the foundation of conversation analysis, are compared in great
detail. The authors explore how CA mentality was adopted and how these two
order models were employed in studies on language alteration in the
literature. And the authors argue that these two models of order are not
competing against each other but should be integrated so as to have a full
account of language alternation. 

Part Two: Language Alternation in the Language Classroom

In this part, seven empirical studies in language alternation are presented in
relation to six languages. The title of Chapter 4 is “Language alternation in
peer interaction in content and language integrated learning (CLIL),” the
study was conducted by Tom Morton and Natalia Evnitskaya in the context of
content and language integrated learning (CLIL) in Spain. The aim of the study
is to examine the practices of language alternation in group activities at the
local order level, as well as the overall order level in the context of CLIL.
Participants were Year 8 students who studied in a CLIL chemistry class in
Madrid, Spain. A laboratory session with a small group activity was observed
and recorded for data analysis at both the turn-constructional unit and the
sequence organization level. From the local-order perspective, three main
categories of language alternation practice were identified, namely the
expression of emotion in a positive or negative way, doing cognitive or
perceptual activities and coping with subject-specific terminology. From the
overall-order perspective, the findings were surprising in the sense that
students in this CLIL class seemed to resort to the target language rather
than their L1 to complete the group tasks, which suggested that students tend
to draw on their linguistic repertoires or use translanguaging to complete the
classroom tasks.  

Chapter 5, “What is it in Swedish? Translation requests as a resource for
vocabulary explanation in English mother tongue instruction” by Kirsten
Stoewer is another empirical study which seeks to explore the language
alternation in English mother tongue instruction (MTI) from the teachers’
perspective. The study was carried out in a Swedish MTI primary school and
focused on how translation requests emerged in the classroom interaction
between teachers and students on vocabulary learning and teaching. A corpus of
30-hour recordings was analysed through two main strands, that is, how
translation requests were employed by the teachers to check students’
comprehension and how translation could work as a way to elicit the production
of the target language from the students. The findings have shown that despite
the monolingual language norms in the classroom, the teacher would refer to
the shared languages with the learners and initiated translation requests for
pedagogical purposes, such as comprehension check of the specialised
vocabulary, intersubjectivity establishment, and elicitation of the production
of Swedish and English, etc. 

Chapter 6 “L1/L2 alternation practices in students’ task planning” by Silvia
Kunitz is concerned with the patterns of language alternation in classroom
task planning by students at a tertiary level. The study, conducted at a
university in the U.S, involved four groups of college students who were
learning Italian as a foreign language. The participants were enrolled in two
Italian courses of two levels and were required to prepare and plan a group
presentation. In this planning session, students were allowed to use L1
(English) or the target language (Italian). The main purpose of the study is
to investigate how students alternate the two languages at the local
interactional order and how the alternation of L1 and L2 differ between the
planning process (English) and product (Italian). According to the analysis of
the recordings, the distinction between the process (English) and product
(Italian) was embodied and maintained at a local order when learners were
engaged in the planning task, which represented that language alternation is
discursive and can function as a structuring device for performing certain
actions. 

The study in Chapter 7 titled “Transitions with ‘Okay’: Managing language
alternation in role-play preparations” was carried out by Tetyana Reichert and
Grit Liebscher among learners of German as a foreign language in an
English-speaking city of Canada. The authors paid attention to the use of okay
at the transition points of the language alternation in learners’ preparation
and rehearsal of a role-play activity. The meeting of the preparation of the
roleplay outside the classroom as well as the in-class English test was
videotaped and analysed from a CA approach and positioning theory. From the
analysis, German is the dialogue language and English transitions between the
sections of the dialogue. More importantly, okay has a variety of functions
such as management between dialogue scenes, creation of the German use
opportunities, navigation between scenes and new roles and associated
languages and task-management.  

Chapter 8 was written by Hoang Thi Giang Lam and was titled “Recurring
patterns of language alternation practices by EFL novice teachers in Vietnam.”
The study aims at investigating the recurring patterns of language alternation
between English and Vietnamese by novice teachers at a tertiary level in
Vietnam. Three teachers of English at one university in Vietnam participated
in the study and were observed and videotaped in their English class to
first-year non-English major students. Two main recurring features were
identified from the classroom data: First, English was first used in the task
introduction and instruction-giving, then Vietnamese was referred to for the
sake of elaboration, and English was again used once learners responded.
Second, before the occurrence of language alternation, the length of the pause
was decreasing with several efforts and scaffolding by the teachers.  

Chapter 9, “Language alternation during L2 classroom discussion tasks”, is an
empirical study conducted by Huong Quynh Tran at a university in Vietnam. As
stated by the author, there is still limited research from the micro
perspective on how learners alternate languages to complete tasks in the EFL
context; thus the study examines the language alternation practice by
university EFL students when doing group discussion in the English class.
Participants were nine undergraduate students at a Vietnamese university, who
were audio-and video-recorded when engaged in a small group discussion in
class. From the analysis of four extracts, we can see language alternation
from English to Vietnamese occurred in word searches with L1 as a backup
source when word retrieval could not be easily achieved. The language
alternation exists in both independent and collaborative word searches. And
the switches to L1 can be due to the use of Vietnamese translation in new
English vocabulary teaching in the EFL class.    

The study in Chapter 10 “Making teacher talk comprehensible through language
alternation practices” by Anna Filipi was carried out in the context of
Italian as a foreign language, and it reports how teachers and students
resolved the problems from interaction due to the target-language-only policy
in the language class. The study aims at revealing the interactional problems
resulting from the L2 only policy, the distribution and ascription of expected
knowledge states, and the way students draw on multimodal resources to enhance
understanding and participation. Participants were a teacher and students in
an Italian class in Australia, where the L2 Italian was required to be used in
teaching. Two lessons of this class were analysed through the conventions of
CA and the analysis shows that the L2-only policy would result in learners’
lack of understanding, that teachers would multimodally package the
instruction with gestures, facial features, etc. and only alternate to L1 at
the last resort, and that students would not admit the non-comprehension but
would refer to the teacher’s actions to help them understand the Italian
instruction so as to participate in the class.  

Part Three: Conclusions: Pedagogical Implications for Teacher Development

The concluding chapter “From research to applications: Pedagogical
considerations in language alternation practices” by Anna Filipi and Numa
Markee attempts to analyse the applications to teacher education and student
learning from the empirical studies reported in this volume. This chapter
provides a review of the six distinctions of applied CA and relevant
investigations in varied educational settings. It discusses some insights of
innovations literature on managing change as well as the ways that
interventionist conversation analysis perspectives have been employed in the
language classroom. Based on the empirical chapters, the author summarizes the
applications of the findings and discusses how they can contribute to teacher
development, with references to a set of pedagogical examples. At the end of
this chapter, the author reiterates the overarching theme i.e. transition in
language alternation, and concludes how this volume contributes to our
understanding of transition.  

EVALUATION

This edited volume provides state-of-the-art studies and research on CA and
language alternation in a range of educational and linguistic contexts.
Thirteen well-known researchers and early-stage researchers in this field
contributed to the collective writing of this volume, which fulfils the aim of
enriching the literature and scholarship on CA and language alternation in
classroom interaction. This volume is well structured and designed from the
theoretical background to empirical studies and pedagogical implications: it
first provides a clear theoretical framework in conversation analysis and
language alternation, which is followed by a section of seven empirical
studies and another section on the pedagogical implications drawn from these
empirical studies; thus this volume will be an invaluable resource for
graduate students, novice or expert researchers in conversation analysis and
language alternation, as well as language teachers in different educational
contexts.

This volume features many merits from different perspectives. First of all,
readers who are new to or have already involved in this area will benefit from
the theoretical basis in CA and language alternation presented in the first
three chapters. These theoretical chapters discuss, compare and clarify the
important terminology and also present a historical account of the development
of the research in this domain. What’s more, the provision of the theoretical
foundations will enable the language educators to have a better understanding
of the rationales behind the language alternation phenomena in the language
classroom interactions. Second, this volume contains empirical studies that
are typical in this area. Each of these seven empirical chapters was clearly
structured with detailed explanations and extracts of the conversation
analysis, thus making them very reader-friendly. More importantly, these
empirical studies function as successful examples for researchers. In
particular,early stage researchers can be offered some research ideas or
become inspired to replicate such studies in similar or different contexts.
Moreover, these successful studies were properly conducted from the sense of
methodology, thus the audience will learn how to implement a scientific
research design, how to carry out similar investigations, and how to be
critical in analysing data from the conversational approach. These studies
were not limited to a specific language but concern six different languages in
different contexts; thus researchers can relate such studies to their own
linguistic and pedagogical contexts. Last but not least, a strength of this
volume is that it includes one chapter offering pedagogical implications that
arise from the empirical chapters. In my opinion, research should address
practical issues in real life, and this chapter is written for such a purpose.
Some pedagogical implications and recommendations for language teachers are
provided for teacher education.

Notwithstanding the aforementioned merits, there are still some issues of this
volume. In my opinion, the chapters, especially in the second part dealing
with empirical studies, need to be more coherent; in these seven studies, the
educational contexts range from primary, secondary to tertiary levels, and
these chapters may better be organized and classified in accordance with these
levels. Some studies focus on the perspective of teachers, some on students
and some contains both perspectives, so the chapters could also be organized
in this regard. Another issue is that there are very few chapters offering
future directions for research. Recommendations for future directions would
add value, especially to the empirical chapters. What’s more, as this is an
edited volume with different authors, the divergent writing styles may cause
some difficulty for readers. 

In summary, this volume is of theoretical, empirical and pedagogical
significance in the study of conversation analysis and language alternation.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Xuan Wang has obtained his master’s degree in TESOL at the University of Bath
(UK) with a full scholarship and another master’s degree in applied
linguistics at the University of Barcelona in Spain. Currently, Xuan is
furthering his study and research in first and second language acquisition,
bilingualism and multilingualism and working on several related projects in
these areas.





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