Turn-Taking in German as Foreign Language Classroom

Turn-Taking in German as Foreign Language Classroom Iman Santoso1, Syihabuddin Syihabuddin2, Aminudin Azis2 and Iwa Lukmana2 1Jurusan Pendidikan Bahasa Jerman, Fakultas Bahasa dan Seni, Universitas Negeri Yogyakarta, Jl. Colombo 1, Yogyakarta, Indonesia 2 Program Studi Linguistik, Sekolah Pascasarjana, Universitas Pendidikan Indonesia, Jl. Setiabudhi 229, Bandung, Indonesia iman_santoso@uny.ac.id Keywords: Turn-taking, Unit of Turn, Turn Allocation, German as a Foreign Language. Abstract: Turn-taking is an important aspect in institutional talk such as in German class as a foreign language. The organization of turn-taking can effectively facilitate transfer of knowledge in a classroom when it is managed appropriately. The aims of this study were to find the forms of turn-taking allocation, and to observe factors that potentially influence the occurrences of turn-taking during the course of German as a foreign language. The simplest systematics for the organization of turn-taking (Sacks et al., 1978) was used as a theoretical basis. This study was conducted in the Department of German Education at Universitas Negeri Yogyakarta. The recorded videos from two lectures with native and non-native lecturer were transcribed. Based on this transcription, turn-taking was classified, and the factors that led to turn-taking were revealed. The results showed that the forms of turn-taking that occurred were self-select, followed by current-speaker select and lastly current-speaker continue. Furthermore, the factors that motivated speakers to take turns were when evaluating students’ understanding, starting an explanation, reinforcing students’ opinions, doing repairs, and questioning about grammatical concepts, general knowledge and procedures. 1 INTRODUCTION Human interaction in the form of conversation is an important aspect of human life, because it is the most fundamental resource through which the business of all societies is managed, their cultures are transmitted, the identities of their participants are affirmed, and their social structures are reproduced (Heritage, 2001). Talk produced in everyday situations of human interaction is called talk-ininteraction (Hutchby and Wooffitt, 1988), and has been the object studies of Conversation Analysis (CA) for a long time. CA at first only examined the talk-in-interaction in ordinary conversations. In its development, CA has also studied institutional talk. An example of institutional talk is talk-in interaction between teachers and students in the language classroom. There are six domains of institutional interaction which can be studied by researchers, one of which is turn-taking organizations (Heritage, 1998). Turntaking is a mechanism in which the participants in a conversation know when to take a turn to speak and when to end it, including giving other interlocutors an opportunity to talk. Therefore, turn-taking is the key to the viability of a conversation. The turn-taking process can be accomplished by involving two components: the turn-constructional component and turn-allocation component (Sacks et al., 1978). Turn-constructional component encompasses three things. First, Turn Construction Unit (TCU). TCU is an utterance construction composed by speakers using certain elements in a structured manner, so that the interlocutors will be able to recognize and anticipate anexchange of turn. The TCU can be a sentence, a clause, a phrase, and a lexical item which complete a communicative act (Wong and Waring, 2010). Second, Possible Complete Point (PCP). PCP is a point which indicates that a turn is possibly complete. The transition of speech between speakers is relevant to do in PCP. Third, the place where the transition process or turn to speak usually takes place is called as Transition Relevance Place (TRP). 689 Santoso, I., Syihabuddin, S., Azis, A. and Lukmana, I. Turn-Taking in German as Foreign Language Classroom. DOI: 10.5220/0007173306890694 In Proceedings of the Tenth Conference on Applied Linguistics and the Second English Language Teaching and Technology Conference in collaboration with the First International Conference on Language, Literature, Culture, and Education (CONAPLIN and ICOLLITE 2017) - Literacy, Culture, and Technology in Language Pedagogy and Use, pages 689-694 ISBN: 978-989-758-332-2 Copyright © 2018 by SCITEPRESS – Science and Technology Publications, Lda. All rights reserved CONAPLIN and ICOLLITE 2017 - Tenth Conference on Applied Linguistics and the Second English Language Teaching and Technology Conference in collaboration with the First International Conference on Language, Literature, Culture, and Education There are three levels to estimate the completeness of TCU (Ford and Thompson, 1996), namely: (1) syntactically complete, (2) complete in intonation, and (3) pragmatically complete. The second aspect is a turn allocation component. Sacks et al. (1978) has compiled a basic set of rules governing turn construction, providing for the allocation of a next turn to one party, and coordinating transfer so as to minimize gaps and overlaps. Here is the simplified rule (Wong and Waring, 2010): a. At a transition-relevance places (TRP) a set of rules apply in quick succession: (a) Current-select-next (b) If not (a), next speaker self-select (c) If not (b), current speaker continues b. Rule 1(a) – 1 (c) reapplies at each next transition relevance place. This simplest systematics for the organization of turn-taking was used as a theoretical basis for analysing the turn-taking in German as a foreign language lectures. The organization of turn-taking in a classroom is an important aspect of language teaching because it facilitates the transfer of knowledge. The lecturer controls the communication pattern by arranging the conversation topic and turn-taking. Meanwhile, the students take their lecturer’s signature by giving an appropriate response (Walsh, 2011). Response in the form of linguistic patterns is the evaluation subject for lecturers. In this context, language has a unique role. Language is not only a “tool” to transform knowledge and language skills, but also a “goal” of learning. This aspect is one of the properties which characterize language learning in the classroom (Seedhouse, 2009). Several studies reviewing turn-taking have been conducted by a number of scholars. Mc Houl (1978) examined the mechanism of turn-taking in geography classes. Jenks (2007), Bell and Elledge (2008), Xie (2011), and Gagné and Parks (2012) examined the association of speech variables with the participation rate of learners and learning opportunities in the classroom. Overlap, interruption, and silent in the interaction between lecturers and students were examined by Maroni, Gnisci, and Pontecorvo (2008). In the meantime, Ingram and Eliot’s (2014) study focused on the turntaking and silence that emerged in the interaction of mathematics learning. Based on the explanation, it appears that research on turn-taking in German as a foreign language course has not been undertaken, especially in Indonesia. 690 The aim of this study is to investigate: (1) the allocation forms of turn-taking in the interaction of lecturers and students’ conversations; (2) revealing potential factors which influence the realization of turn-taking in German lectures as a foreign language. 2 RESEARCH METHODS This case study, which used a CA approach was undertaken in the German Education Department of Universitas Negeri Yogyakarta. The data source in this study was lectures from a native German speaker lecturer named SV and a non-native speaker lecturer named YS. Data collection was conducted by recording a lecture from each lecturer on December 8 and 16, 2015. These lectures were given in the third semester of the academic year of 2015/2016. Data analysis was done through several stages. First, the recorded conversation was transcribed using notes arranged by Gail Jefferson and also used by Atkinson and Heritage (in Heigham and Crocker, 2009). Second, the turn-taking allocationoccurrences were classified. Quantitative analysis was also done to calculate turn-taking occurrences. Third, the factors that led to turn-taking were revealed. The results of data analysis are presented in narrative form supported by quantitative data description. 3 FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION 3.1 Turn-taking in German as a Foreign Language Course Based on the conversations’ recording and transcription, it appears that the interaction between lecturers and students in German language lectures as a foreign language was good and not rigid. Each party, namely lecturer and students contributed relevant utterances to the topics of conversations. The opportunity to speak was organized and controlled by the lecturers. The control was not dominant. The students had a chance to take a turn, either because the opportunity was given by the lecturer or on the students’ initiatives. As in an ordinary conversation, the linguistic realizations that marked speech exchanges between the lecturers and students were lexical items, phrases, clauses and sentences. Somewhat different from ordinary conversations, talk-in interaction in the lecture of German as a foreign language was Turn-Taking in German as Foreign Language Classroom primarily marked by the emergence of adjacency pairs, especially in the form of questions – answers. Based on the simplest systematics for the organization of turn-taking (Sacks et al., 1978) it can be identified that the turn-taking allocations which appeared in the class were generally in the forms of current-speaker select next (CSSN), selfselect (SS) and current-speaker continue (CSC). Quantitatively, the turn-taking allocation with the highest frequency was self-select. That form of turntaking can be further explained based on the speakers, as shown in Table 1. Table 1: Turn-Taking in German as a foreign language course. Lecturer Turn-taking allocation CSSN SS T-C T-S S-T S-S S-Tc S-Tu T-Su T-Sc S-Sc S-Su CSC T S Lecturer as current-speaker selected class as next -speaker Lecturer as current-speaker selected student as next -speaker Student as current-speaker selected lecturer as next-speaker Student as current-speaker selected another student as next-speaker Student selected himself as next-speaker after the lecturer completed his turn Student selected himself as next-speaker before the lecturer completed his turn Lecturer selected herself as next-speaker before a student(s) completed his turn Lecturer selected herself as next-speaker after a student (s) completed his turn Student(s) selected himself as next-speaker after another student completed his turn Student(s) selecting himself as next-speaker before another student completed his turn Lecturer continued her turn Student continued his turn Table 1 shows some interesting phenomena associated with the opportunity to take turns. During grammatical training, YS gave special opportunities to the students to select the next speaker. This was one thing that SV did not do. This resulted in the number of turn-taking among students in the YS class (4.58%) was higher than SV class (0.38%). Thus, compared to SV, YS gave more opportunity for every student to be actively involved in classroom interaction. It was also supported by the data, showing when YS became a current-speaker, she frequently selects a class or certain students as the next speaker. A phenomenon where a student as a current-speaker selected another student as the next-speaker, was not found in McHoul’s (1978) research. Turn construction organized by SV as a native speaker was generally longer than YS. On several occasions, the SV’s utterances were in the form of multi-unit turns. A multi-unit turn is a conversational turn that consists of more than one TCU. This was supposed to happen because the information submitted by SV was not only about the rules of the language but also German culture. Quantitatively CSC performed by SV is more than YS. This proves that the turn construction organized by SV was longer than YS. On the other hand, although during teaching SV did not have a “student select another student” special program, the students still had the courage to SV (%) YS (%) 9.56 4.12 2.06 0.36 22.03 7.87 3.75 30.15 6.54 10.76 8.95 2.76 4.58 18.25 6.84 5.45 25.75 6.76 2.30 1.45 11.14 0.12 7.64 0.80 take a turn to speak. Quantitatively, the number of turn-taking occurrences ‘Student selecting him self as next-speaker after the lecturer completed his turn” in SV class was more than YS class. By comparing the number of turn-taking occurrences in YS and SV classes, it can be concluded that the students in the YS’s class taking more turns (41.5%) than in the SV class (41,2%). Nevertheless the difference was not significant. 3.2 Factors that Motivate Turn-taking To identify factors which motivate participants to take turns or to give a turn to co-participants, the existing utterances must be seen as a sequence. There are various factors that encourage or motivate participants in the class to take turns to speak. First, the lecturer evaluates students’ understanding of the concepts that have been taught, both grammar and vocabulary. Excerpt 1 shows this evaluation when YS chose the class as the next speaker caused by the desire to evaluate the students' understanding. YS wanted to know whether the students already mastered the three forms of imperative sentences in German or not. At line 318, 319, 321 and 323, she asked the students about these grammatical construction. 691 CONAPLIN and ICOLLITE 2017 - Tenth Conference on Applied Linguistics and the Second English Language Teaching and Technology Conference in collaboration with the First International Conference on Language, Literature, Culture, and Education Excerpt 1. 318 319 320 321 322 323 324 325 T : also, wir kennen dann drei Arten vom Imperativsa:tz, nämlich(.)yang So, we know then three kinds of imperative sentence, namely pertama tadi adalah, the first is S : Sie form T : Sie form und dann, Sie-form and then SS: du[form T : [du form, dann Du-form, then SS: IHR [form T: [i:hr form (3.0) ((walk to the whiteboard)) Ihr-form The next factor is Repair. In the context of foreign language learning, repair can also be a correction because the lecturer or students find deviations from the prevailing linguistic rules. This is also called as pedagogical repair. It refers to repair practices that address problems of comprehension and producing in a learning context (Wong and Waring, 2010). In excerpt 2, Ri had practiced making imperative sentences in ihr-form. In line 301 and 303, Ri ordered Li and Wa to enter the class and take a seat. The first utterance in line 301 is grammatically correct. However, the next line (line 303) is not grammatically correct, because it was said in a du-form not in ihr-form. This was a trouble source. YS then initiated a correction using a selfselect technique (line 304), despite only an interjection hm. Ri accepted this initiation and quickly repaired his previously uttered sentence (line 305). This repair process was called other-initiated self-repair. In line 306, YS asserted that the correction had been made by Ri (line 305) was correct. Therefore, YS immediately gave a reinforcement by taking a turn despite overlapping Ri’s utterance. Reinforcement is another factor that motivated YS as the lecturer to take a turn. Excerpt 2. 301 302 303 304 305 306 Ri: hh LIDA UND WAHYU eh: (1.1) KOMMT HEREIN. ((Li and Wa enteredinto Lida and Wahyu eh come in the classroom)) Re: Nimmst Platz. Take a seat T: HM= Ri: =Nehmt Platz,[Platz- ya nehmt. Take a seat, take a seat T : [Ya bagu:s Yes, good Turn-taking had also done by the lecturer when he intended to give an explanation of the concept being studied. In excerpt 3 SV gave an explanation, while saying something in the past, the students had to be consistent using certain tenses, i.e Präteritum or Perfekt (line 173 – 175). Previously, she asked the students, whether they know if someone use Präteritum that mean he/she tell about the past. The explanation of the learning procedure was frequently occurring too. Excerpt 3. 172 173 174 175 176 692 Ri:lampau past T :lampau,genau. benutzen wir das, und wir <können nicht> (.)plötzlich Past, exactly. We use that, and we cannot suddenly ins präsens.(.)Das geht nicht, ne. Also,(.) wenn wir einmal anfa↑ngen in Present tense. It can not, ne. So, if we begin (.)mit Perfekt, muss das bei Perfekt bleiben oder bei[Präteritum,ne. with perfect, this must be remain with perfect or past tense SS: [o:h Turn-Taking in German as Foreign Language Classroom One of the things that encouraged students taking a turn to talk was asking about the concept which had already been taught or asking German culture aspects. This can be seen in excerpt 4. In line 530, Vi suddenly called the lecturer’s name by raising his hand as a sign to ask permission for asking a question. After SV responded with a word ja, a sign that SV accepted the question, Vi continued the question, and asked what the Sauerkraut meant, namely German cuisine. Excerpt 4. 530 531 532 533 534 Vi:((raising the hand)) Oh ja Frau Völ[kert, Oh yes Miss Volkert T : [Ja? Vi: Was ist <Sauerkraut>? What is Sauerkraut? T : heh heh((laugh)) Sauerkraut, >sauer sauer< Sauerkraut das ist ein Heh heh Sauerkraut, acid acid Sauerkraut that is typisches(.)Gericht aus Deutschland, masakan a typical cuisine from Germany, dish Another factor that encouraged students to take turns was that he understood what was explained by the lecturer. When the students understood or knew the concepts they were studying, they often produced overlapping utterances toward their lecturer’s. The lecturer did not consider this phenomenon to be violence. This finding can be seen in excerpt 5. At that time, SV explained adverb bequem (comfortably) is not compatible with das Wetter, weather in English (line 105). Then he shifted his utterance to the class by asking what couldbe used with bequem (line 108). After a short pause, SV gave an example that the word bequem was compatible to be paired with Situation (situation) noun. At the same time, Ri performed a self-select and mentioned another noun that can be paired with bequem, that is,Kleid (dress). In spite of an overlapping, Ri’s utterance can be accepted by SV. It was confirmed by uttering ein Kleid ist bequem (line 110). Excerpt 5. 105 106 107 108 109 110 4 T:=sehr. Das Wetter ist kalt aber-(.)ehm BEQUEM? Ehm das geht nicht. Very. The weather is cold but ehm comfortable? That cannot so Man kann leider- das Wetter ist nicht bequem.(.)Das Sofa ist beque:[m. You can not the weather is not comfortable. The sofa is comfortable Ri: [ehm T :ode:r was ist auch bequem?(.)Eine [Situation ist bequem, Or what is comfortable? A situation is comfortable Ri: [kleid dress T :ein Kleid ist bequem. aber das Wetter ist nicht bequem A dress is comfortable. But the Weather is not comfortable CONCLUSIONS Talk-in interactions between lecturers and students in German as a foreign language lectures can be classified as institutional talk. One of the characteristics is the pre-allocated setting of turntaking. In this case, the teacher has the full right to organize the allocation of turn-taking in the classroom. The framework used for the management of this turn-taking is a predetermined pedagogical goal. The lecturer directed the turn taking to be applied in line with the objective. Based on the results of the study, it was found that the turn taking in SV’s and YS’s classes was running smoothly. Although the arrangement for the opportunity to take turns or giving turns was on the lecturer, they did not dominate. Students were actively involved and able to change the role as a speaker or hearer well. The most common form of turn-taking allocation in German as a foreign language lecture was selfselect, followed by current-speaker select-next and current-speaker continue. During the German grammar training, YS specifically gave the students opportunity to choose another student as their next speaker. That way YS involved the students to participate in arranging the turn-taking. This was not done by SV as a native speaker while teaching. 693 CONAPLIN and ICOLLITE 2017 - Tenth Conference on Applied Linguistics and the Second English Language Teaching and Technology Conference in collaboration with the First International Conference on Language, Literature, Culture, and Education However, this does not mean that students while attending SV courses were more passive. They were actually active enough to take turns with the selfselect technique. There were several factors that motivate participants to took or gave a turn. These factors were the evaluation of student knowledge, explanation and application of grammatical rules by the lecturers, as well as the students’ questions to the lecturers about the concepts being taught or questions about German culture. Other factors that motivated participants to take turns were repairs, reinforcement, learning procedures, and students’ performance, which showed their understanding about the concepts being taught. This study certainly cannot provide a comprehensive account of the interaction of lecturers and students. Further research needs to be done to examine other aspects that have not been studied. Some things that need to be further investigated are whether turn-taking organizations in German as a foreign language lecture correlate with the level of students' language skills in German. In addition, it is also necessary to explore the opinions of the lecturers and students on the phenomenon of turn-taking that occurs in the lectures to determine whether the turn-taking is influenced by the cultural background of the speaker. REFERENCES Bell, D. C., Elledge, S. R., 2008. Dominance and Peer Tutoring Sessions with English Language Learners. Learning Assistance Review, 13 (1), pp.1730. Ford, C. 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