Conversation Analysis And Language Alternation

This volume brings together researchers in conversation analysis who examine the practice of alternating between English and German, Italian, Spanish, Swedish and Vietnamese in the classroom. The collection shows that language alternation is integral to being and learning to become a bilingual, and that being and learning to become a bilingual are accomplished through a remarkably common set of interactional objects and actions, whose sequential organisations are quite similar across languages and educational sectors. This volume therefore shows that having recourse to more than one shared language provides an important resource for getting the work of language learning and teaching done through an orderliness that can be described and evaluated. The findings and the suggested pedagogical applications described in the volume will be of significant interest to researchers and teachers in a range of fields including second and foreign language teaching and learning, conversation analysis, teacher education and bilingualism.

Code-switching and related phenomena have met with linguists’ increasing interest over the last decade. However, much of the research has been restricted to the structural (grammatical) properties of the use of two languages in conversation; scholars who have tried to capture the interactive meaning of switching have often failed to go beyond more or less anecdotal descriptions of individual, particularly striking, cases. The book bridges this gap by providing a coherent, comprehensive and generative model for language alternation, drawing on recent trends and methods in conversational analysis. The empirical basis is the speech of Italian migrant children in Constance, Germany.

Research into the relationship between conversation analysis (CA) and different areas of applied linguistics is increasing rapidly. The aim of this volume is to show how conversation analysis can make a significant contribution to the teaching of spoken language for specific purposes (LSP) and to provide a firm foundation for future research and practice in this area. The first-ever collection in this area, the volume provides a theoretical and methodological framework for applying CA to LSP, as well as a series of illustrations of practical applications of CA in specific domains including interpreting, journalism, service encounters, academic discourse and the language classroom. The chapters in this collection are all written by CA practitioners with experience in the teaching of language for specific purposes and will appeal to researchers and students in applied linguistics and the social sciences, particularly those working in LSP teaching and teacher training.

One of the most common phenomena of language use among bilingual speakers is language alternation. Theoretically this is impossible, both grammatically and socio-functionally. Drawing on Ethnomethodology this book addresses the crucial question of how to account for its actual possibility, and offers a critical reading of current approaches.

"This collection is the first to consistently adopt Conversation Analysis as an approach to second language interaction. By examining first and second language speakers' participation in a wide range of activities, it challenges the dominant view of 'nonnative speakers' as deficient communicators. Proposing instead to understand second language users' conversational participation as interactional achievement, the book makes a powerful case for 'ethnomethodological respecification' in second language research." Professor Gabriele Kasper, University of Hawai'i Conversations involving speakers whose first language is not the language in which they are talking have become widespread in the globalized world. Migration, increased travel for business or pleasure, as well as communication through new technologies such as the internet make Second Language Conversations an increasingly common everyday event. In this book Conversation Analysis is used to explore natural, casual talk between speakers in a second language. The contributors shift emphasis away from controlled contexts such as the classroom towards more sociable environments in which people go about their daily routines. English, German, French, Japanese, Finnish and Danish are all analyzed as second languages within a variety of professional, educational and sociable situations. This collection of essays aims to present naturally occurring Second Language Conversations in order to show what speakers in these situations do; how they utilize first language conversational practices, and whether or not grammar, vocabulary and pronunciation help or hinder the construction of meaning. >

Code Switching, the alternating use of two or more languages ation, has become an increasingly topical and important field of research. Now available in paperback, Code-Switching in Conversation brings together contributions from a wide variety of sociolinguistics settings in which the phenomenon is observed. It addresses not only the structure and the function, but also the ideological values of such bilingual behaviour. The contributors question many views of code switching on the empirical basis of many European and non European contexts. By bringing together linguistics, anthropological and socio-psychological research, they move towards a more realistic conception of bilingual conversation action.

This book is one of the first systematic studies to describe the linguistic repertoire and the communicative strategies adopted by Ghanaian immigrants in Italy. The linguistic repertoire of the Ghanaian community in Bergamo (Northern Italy) is described with a special focus on the different codes composing it. The author analyzes the role that each code plays in expressing the community members' ethnic and linguistic identity, and the speakers' attitudes towards each code. She draws on the results of qualitative analysis - adopting both a macro-sociolinguistic and a micro-sociolinguistic perspective - of a database of face-to-face interactions and of formal interviews involving a selected group of Ghanaian immigrants.

Analyzing Greek talk-in-interaction incorporates ten studies which focus on Greek Conversation Analysis (CA). Although still new, research on Greek talk-in-interaction is promising and pointing in many directions. This volume’s contribution is to fill in a bibliographical gap in Greek linguistics and in the field of talk-in-interaction by offering a book dedicated to studies on several aspects of talk-in-interaction, seen from a conversation analytic perspective. The studies included in the current volume have been selected mainly on the basis of their content since the intention is to cover a wide spectrum of topics in Greek talk-in-interaction. The ten chapters are grouped into thematic categories and are presented in the following four sections: (a) grammar and interaction; (b) reporting small stories; (c) analysis of code mixing and switching; (d) mobile and Facebook talk from a conversation analytic perspective. This book will serve as a point of reference for scholars and students interested in Greek talk-in-interaction, and will familiarize readers with CA research on the Greek language and its varieties and encourage further research into Greek CA.