Issues in Applied Linguistics

This paper expands conversation analytic notions of recipiency by considering recipient proactivity. At issue are the methods by which an unaddressed participant of a story-in-progress makes claims on a teller's attention through a series of upgraded responses to the story. These claims range from gaze direction toward the teller, to displays of knowledge of particular story components. The recipient's displays of knowledge regarding the story provide a resource for her to elicit the teller's attention, thereby providing her a method of challenging the participation framework of the ongoing talk.

Within the framework of conversation analysis (Sacks, Schegloff, & Jefferson, 1974), this paper investigates how Mandarin speakers negotiate their participatory roles in multi-party conversation through the use of linguistic and non-linguistic resources. Specifically, the present paper focuses on two sequential contexts: (1) parties who have otherwise been playing a marginal role try to make themselves focal, and (2) others incorporate a previously not actively participating party.

Close examination of video- and audio-recorded naturally occurring ordinary conversation reveals that one of the linguistic resources recurrently employed in these two contexts is a turn-initial discourse particle plus an additional turn component. The data also show that different particle-plus-other component structures are regularly accompanied by different body movements, which seem to embody the speaker's orientation to the degree of disjunctiveness of what is going to be projected in the particle-prefaced turn and how it relates to the current organization of interaction and its topic.

This paper investigates the role of gesture in instruction giving and in instruction receiving during a cooking lesson. Gestures and embodied actions are not entirely a speaker's phenomenon but are oriented to and also used by listeners as well. We will focus primarily on the recipient and his/her orientation to verbal and embodied instruction giving.

Instructions are broken down into smaller sequences (Wright & Hull, 1990). This paper analyzes three relevant next actions which can follow the instruct turn: (1) embodied instinct receipt tokens (head nod); (2) embodied repetition of the embodied instruct; and (3) repair.

In general, an embodied action can be coined as an "embodied instruct". And once understood as such by all participants, it is available to all participants in subsequent sequences. Thus an embodied gesture can "travel" from one participant to another.

The paper examines parent children interaction in Mexican and Central American familes. The paper focuses on the forms of discourse parents adopt to correct children's speech and non-verbal behavior. The majority of the time parents employ unmodulated corrections and bald imperatives to direct children's behavior. When modulated forms of language are employed, it is done in the context of teasing. The paper also illustrates how children respond to corrections of their speech and behavior. Children exhibit an epistemological stance i.e., a display of knowledge most of the time and do not necessarily model correct forms of behavior in their subsequent turns.

The current political atmosphere surrounding literacy education in the United States pits whole language and phonics-only instruction against each other. Whole language teachers, already besieged by parents and district administrators clamoring for evidence of rising standardized test scores, are coming under increasing public pressure to abandon meaning-based language arts curricula in favor of basic-skills instruction. Using ethnographic methodology, the study from which data for this article are drawn examines how local language arts pedagogy is instantiated in classrooms. In particular, this project focuses on documenting how teachers use an ecology of social practices to form a comprehensive literacy curriculum. The analysis will show how one first grade teacher creates a context for learning in which the whole and parts of text are in dialogic relation. By gaining an understanding of current practice, this study may help teachers construct literacy curricula that more effectively addresses the tension they have experienced within language arts pedagogy. By understanding the practices of real teachers, we will be in a better position to enter the public debate over the strengths and weaknesses of both whole language and phonics pedagogies by providing evidence of how teachers merge process and skills in their classrooms.

In this paper I demonstrate how a man, in real time interaction, makes relevant his social identity as teacher and African American as he tries to get the students to adopt stylistic and strategic aspects of educated middle class rhetoric, which I call the abstract/ speculative inquiry style.

When the teacher asserts certain institutional classroom interactional privileges associated with being a teacher (e.g., interrupting a student's turn) he highlights his identity qua teacher (and his interlocutors' identities qua students), and therefore highlights the power asymmetry of the social interaction. Insofar as the teacher exploits (and the students allow him to exploit) these power-asymmetrical interactional resources as he promotes abstract/speculative rhetorical inquiry, and attempts to silence concrete/empirical rhetorical inquiry, he and they imbue the character of teaching abstract/speculative inquiry with hegemonic, even coercive, political significance.

When the teacher foregrounds his shared African American social identity with the students he 1) does not assert those institutional classroom interactional privileges associated with being a teacher, and 2) uses more concrete/empirical features in his own rhetoric —even as he attempts to promote abstract/speculative inquiry. As a consequence of these co-occurrence facts, the teacher marks both a particular rhetorical style (abstract/speculative inquiry) as well as a hierarchical classroom interactional ecology with non-African Americaness or whiteness, while imbuing concrete/empirical inquiry and a more symmetrical conversational ecology with African-Americaness.