A01 cohe4573 01 se fm. Qxd

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F I G U R E 9 . 1 Tea at breakfast
she is producing her response pursuit, David looks at her with a quizzical
expression on his face, since when Americans give second assessments, they
usually downgrade.
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Also, after Christiane’s response pursuit marker, there
is a brief pause (line 3) after which David continues with a hesitation marker
(“Uh”) followed by a cut-off (line 4). He then continues with an explanation
of what he likes, followed by the confirmation “yeah.” The researcher sees
this as a possible indication that David treated Christiane’s response pursuit
as a question for clarification (i.e., as “you think this is great?”), or as a
confirmation check. David then goes on to produce what an American
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Golato (2002: 566–7).

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T H E N U T S A N D B O L T S O F P R A G M A T I C S I N S T R U C T I O N
might have expected as Christiane’s response, namely a second assessment
which is downgraded (“It’s quite nice”) – a practice that is for compliment
receiving but not for compliment giving in American English. The
researcher interprets Christiane’s delivery of “Yeah, we like it too” with a
smile (line 5) as an indication that she also noticed that there was pragmatic
failure in the conversation, prompting her to diverge from the expected
German ja ‘yes’ response and instead to give a second assessment (“we like it
too”). Next, there is a short pause in which neither David nor Christiane
speaks (line 6), after which Annette continues the conversation (line 7).
As well as using CA to better understand pragmatics in discursive behav-
ior, the results from empirical work in CA have been applied to the teaching
of L2 pragmatic discourse. For example, differences in a particular discourse
– such as patterns of discourse that are likely to follow the question “Did
you have a good weekend” in French and Australian English respectively 
– were explicitly taught to Australian university learners of French. In
Australian English, this question is ritualized and generally elicits a short,
diplomatic answer, whereas in French it is usually a genuine question 
followed by extended conversation with details, opinions, and feelings.
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Learners’ role-plays immediately after and one year after the instruction
showed learners’ accommodation to French discursive norms especially in
terms of the content of the talk (rather than the language form).
15
The
researchers concluded that interactional norms of the L2 are amenable 
to instruction. (See below for the instructional procedures used in this
study.)
These examples – the telephone opening, the compliment response, and
response to a question about the weekend – illustrate how CA can reveal the
complex structure of natural conversation and provide an analytic frame-
work with which to closely examine pragmatic and discursive practices of
L1 and L2 speakers. The argument made is that CA allows researchers to
trace whether L2 speakers come to avoid transfer from L1 pragmatics over
time, or whether over the course of repeated interactions, their conversa-
tional partners come to view their L1-influenced pragmatic behavior as
more or less acceptable.
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In addition, given its focus on sequential organ-
ization and close attention to verbal and non-verbal interactional conduct,
CA helps us to see how discourse is structured across multiple turns. The
case is made that through the analytical tools of CA and discourse analysis,
14
Béal (1992), cited in Liddicoat and Crozet (2001).
15
Liddicoat and Crozet (2001).
16
Kasper (2007).

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D I S C O U R S E , I N T E R A C T I O N , A N D L A N G U A G E C O R P O R A
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researchers can notice, collect, and examine such discursive occurrences.
Furthermore, these insights can be applied to the teaching of, for example,
conversational openings and closings, turn-taking, interrupting, topic-shift,
adjacency pairs (i.e., speaker’s utterance and the listener’s preferred or dis-
preferred answer), and conversational repairs.
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In the following section, 
we will take a look at some instructional techniques which have adopted a
CA approach.
Instructional activities using CA in the teaching of
L2 pragmatics
Here, we introduce three sets of instructional activities that detail how 
conversation analytic insights can be incorporated into the teaching of
pragmatic and discursive conventions. (For more activities, see Chapter 8
for teaching the closing of conversation.
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) Because CA is normally conducted
with naturally occurring data,
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instructional materials incorporating such
data provide more authentic L2 models than materials written on the basis
of intuition or based on elicited language. The awareness-raising approach
(see Chapter 6) used in these procedures facilitates learners’ noticing of the
typical structure of talk-in-interaction presented through CA.
In the first example, the instructional focus was the conversation that
follows the question, Did you have a good weekend? in French. As mentioned
above, the way Australians would answer this question in their L1, English,
differs dramatically from how they might be expected to respond in their
L2, French.
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In cases such as these and others similar to it – where there is a
clear disparity across cultures – the instructor could take advantage of uni-
versity learners’ analytical skills and whatever prior knowledge of the target
culture they may have. Activities could include the following: