Helping Students Pass the Turing Test

Page No.: 
150
Writer(s): 
John Campbell-Larsen, Momoyama Gakuin University

 

Spoken language consists of more than just correctly formed propositional utterances placed one after another. Rather, speakers orient towards an interactional role and construct turns that are delicately shaped by the previous speaker’s turn and designed to move the interaction forward. In this paper I describe some of the ways in which students can orient away from an institutional identity towards a more interactional, natural way of speaking. I refer to video data of student conversations to show some of the characteristics of Japanese students’ speaking and discuss the content and methodology of lessons designed to promote a more interactional kind of talk. I conclude by suggesting that a focus on such interactional skills as backchanneling and use of discourse markers set within a framework of autonomy in speaking can help students to create an interactional identity in English.

会話はただ正確な発話から成り立つだけとは限らない。それどころか話し相手との繊細な対話によってやり取りは進んでいく。本論は、自然な会話をするには、学生的な(決まりきったやり取りをする)アイデンティティーから離れて、もっと双方向で自然な言葉のやりとりをする方法をいくつか示す。生徒のビデオデーターを基に日本人生徒の特有の話し方を引用し、授業でのより双方向な言葉のやり取りなど推進した内容と方法を論じる。最後に、本論は、会話のやり取りの知識として、自立性のある会話の枠組みの中での相づちや談話標識(つなぎ言葉)などに焦点を合わせることが、生徒が独自の英語のやり取りを作る上で役立つと提案する。

 
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