Interaction in a Chinese as a foreign language classroom: A conversation analysis approach

Abstract

The following research involves the use of Conversation Analysis (CA) in the analysis of classroom discourse within a year-long university level Chinese as a Foreign Language (CFL) course. The goals of the research were: (a) to look at how a specific, two-part activity within a CFL classroom is bounded by a pre-allocated instructor turn, (b) how the turn-taking structure of the activity is organized in terms of question/answer adjacency pairs, (c) how repair occurs within the data and whether, as well as in what form, uptake exists, and (d) how students orient to the on-going speech in general by incorporating the lexical and grammatical elements of the conversation within their turn-taking strategy. Findings show that though the instructor provided little repair, learners were generally receptive to it and produced uptake, and that the on-going classroom interaction provided linguistic input rich enough that participants were able to incorporate lexical items from it for use in their own talk.