Discourse analysis

Turn taking One of the features of spoken language (outside of the classroom) is that it is spontaneous interaction, and participants never wait until somebody will ask question or invite them to speak or their turns. They can interrupt each other, by using hmm, mm, ah-ha, eh-eh, or ask questions where they need to clarification and etc. or speak at the same time. Spoken Discourse seems “chaotic”, but we cannot say it is in disorder. Speaker and listener take turn to speak and in this piece of natural English discourse, turns change smoothly, with only little overlap and interruption, and only very brief silences between turns (on average, less than a second). Without this features speech will not be natural. Think about turn taking in L1 (Uz) bo’pti, mayli, voy, rostan a?, nimaga, kachon, e-e-e, oho.

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  Natural conversational data can often seem chaotic because of back- channel, utterance-completions and overlaps, e.g.
  

(A and В are discussing domestic pets.)

A: Well, of course, people who go to the vets are
B: Mm.
A: interested in the cats and dogs, [B: Yeah, but the people that first B ] ain’t they?
Back- Channel- are noises ( not full words) and short verbal responses made by listeners which acknowledge the incoming talk and react to it, without wishing to take over the speaking turn. Typical back channels in English are Mm, Hum, Yeah, No, Right, Oh, etc. they usually occur during speaker’s turn, though sometimes it is difficult to distinguish between back- channels and full speaking turns. Here is an example with back channels from speaker < S 02>, shown with square brackets [ ]
< S 01> Oh yes, yes, yes mind you my parents were really quite well off when we lived in Ireland but the Education in England was very expensive
[< S 02>mm] and I can remember my mother had jewelry and silver and she used to keep selling it
[< S 02> Really] to pay for our extra music lesson and tuition in this and that
[< S 02> Mm] and err I it was, must have been difficult.