No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the authors.
Backchannel forms and functions in context and culture: The use of backchannels in Arab media discourse
Abstract
Forms and functions of verbal backchannels, that is, short tokens such as uh-huh, yeah, and mhm uttered by a listener to the main speaker – have been widely investigated in conversation analysis. Few studies have examined the use of backchannels in Arabic culture, particularly in the context of media discourse. This study stresses the importance of contextualizing the forms and functions of backchannels. Five Arabic television discussions were analyzed quantitatively and qualitatively to determine the used forms and functions of backchannels. The findings demonstrated that backchannels were used mainly by presenters, and rarely by guests, as they control interactions. The results further revealed that, similar to other cultures and contexts, non-lexical backchannels were most frequently used because of their minimal interference in the discourse of the main speakers. A major finding of this study is the presenters’ use of tayeb in Arabic, which is equivalent to alright in English, to regain the floor from the guest speaker and change the topic to address another guest. Backchannels are essential for maintaining cooperation in a variety of interactions and in various cultures. Backchannel universality, ease of use, and significance make them an important topic for further investigation in all cultures, particularly Arabic ones.
ResearchGate has not been able to resolve any citations for this publication.
In conversation, two channels operate simultaneously. Yngve (1970) refers that the ‘main’ channel is that through which the speaker sends messages, whereas the ‘back’ channel, such as okay, mm is that over which the listener offers response without claiming the speakership. Back channels are particular to languages and cultures. The present study aims to examine the naturally occurring conversations between Hong Kong Chinese (HKC) and native English speakers (NES) and to investigate how these culturally divergent participants manage to use different back channels. Two important taxonomies that describe variations in cultural patterns in the present study are Hofstede’s cultural differences and Hall’s high-context and low-context cultures. The results reveal that NES use more newsmarkers, change-of-activity tokens and markers of dispreference than HKC; while HKC use more continuers and acknowledgement back channels. The present study hopes to develop better culturally specific discourse strategies in intercultural encounters.
Keywords: back channels, Hong Kong Chinese, Native English Speakers, intercultural conversations
In everyday conversation, turns often follow each other immediately or overlap in time. It has been proposed that speakers achieve this tight temporal coordination between their turns by engaging in linguistic dual-tasking, i.e., by beginning to plan their utterance during the preceding turn. This raises the question of how speakers manage to co-ordinate speech planning and listening with each other. Experimental work addressing this issue has mostly concerned the capacity demands and interference arising when speakers retrieve some content words while listening to others. However, many contributions to conversations are not content words, but backchannels, such as “hm”. Backchannels do not provide much conceptual content and are therefore easy to plan and respond to. To estimate how much they might facilitate speech planning in conversation, we determined their frequency in a Dutch and a German corpus of conversational speech. We found that 19% of the contributions in the Dutch corpus, and 16% of contributions in the German corpus were backchannels. In addition, many turns began with fillers or particles, most often translation equivalents of “yes” or “no,” which are likewise easy to plan. We proposed that to generate comprehensive models of using language in conversation psycholinguists should study not only the generation and processing of content words, as is commonly done, but also consider backchannels, fillers, and particles.
An overview of the application of conversation analysis in the field of broadcast talk studies.
Brief addressee responses such as uh huh, oh, and wow, which are called backchannels, are typically considered reactive phenomena – devices that respond in various ways to what was just said. Addressees, in providing backchannels, actively shape story telling in spontaneous dialogue ( Bavelas et al., 2000). We contrasted generic backchannels with context-sensitive specific backchannels within a collection of face-to-face dialogues and in a narrative completion experiment. The analysis demonstrates that storytellers respond in distinct patterns to the two categories of backchannels. After generic backchannels, they provide discourse-new events. After specific backchannels, they provide elaborative information on previously presented events. Results from an experiment support this analysis, indicating that people reading transcripts of the conversation predict a similar pattern of story continuation following generic versus specific backchannels. We conclude that addressee responses are not only reactive, but proactive and collaborative in the shaping of narrative.
This article provides an empirically grounded account of what happens when more persons than one talk at once in conversation. It undertakes to specify when such occurrences are problematic for the participants, and for the organization of interaction; what the features of such overlapping talk are; and what constraints an account of overlapping talk should meet. It describes the practices employed by participants to deal with such simultaneous talk, and how they form an organization of practices which is related to the turn-taking organization previously described by Sacks et al. 1974. This constitutes a previously unexplicated component of that turn-taking organization, and one that provides solutions to underspecified features of the previous account.
The impressions we form of others during initial interactions are powerful. These impressions are a product of various implicit theories — mental representations of people and actions. This article investigates the structure of implicit theories of listening used when forming impressions of others after an initial encounter. Specifically, three studies are reported that, together, iteratively build an empirical database of the attributes (what competent listening is) and behaviors (what competent listeners do) associated with effective listening in initial interactions. The results help construct an evidence-based, preliminary model that can be used to investigate the role and structure of implicit theories of listening.
The phrase inshallah ‘God willing’ is well known, even to non-Arabic speakers, as a mitigator of any statement regarding the future, or hopes for the future. Here we use the methods of conversation analysis (CA) to examine a less salient but nonetheless pervasive and compelling interactional usage: in topic-transition sequences. We use a corpus of Levantine (predominantly Syrian) Arabic talk-in-interaction to pay detailed attention to the sequential contexts of inshallah and its cognates across a number of exemplars. It emerges that these invocations are used to secure possible sequence and topic closure, and that they may engender reciprocal invocations. Topical talk following invocations or their responses is subsequently shown to be suspended by both parties; this provides for a move to a new topic by either party. (Arabic, religious expressions, conversation, conversation analysis, topic)
The abstract for this document is available on CSA Illumina.To view the Abstract, click the Abstract button above the document title.
Issues of comparative theory are addressed through direct examination of acknowledgment tokens (e.g. Eh, Mm, Mmmm, Uh heh?) in American and Swedish conversations. Findings yield grounds for claiming universality across cultural members’placement and usage of acknowledgment tokens. This is especially evident in the ways interactants organize stories and topics by (a) working to preserve rights and privileges of tellers, and (b) moving toward more active speakership. A substairtiwe (i.e., reinspectable) basis for rendering comparative judgments about cross-cultural similarities and differences is thus offered. Attention is then given to the impact of research methods on understanding communication and culture. Contrasts are made with anecdotal and self-report findings depicting Swedes as conversationally inept, lacking the necessary skills in such activities as “offering feedback.” Explanations of findings indicating conversational universals and particulars are offered, and implications for comparative theory development are elaborated.
يعدّ حرف الجواب (نعم) من رموز الاستجابة التي يشيع استعمالها في محادثاتنا اليومية، ويؤتى به أساسًا للدلالة على الاتفاق أو الرد على سؤال سابق. ويرتبط التفسير الاستعمالي لـ(نعم) في التراث اللغوي القديم بوظائف خاصة، وهي: التصديق بعد الكلام الخبري، والإعلام بعد الاستفهام، والوعد بعد الطلب. لكن هذا البحث يكشف من خلال تحليله لحوارات محكية متلفزة عن دلالات إضافية تختلف عن تلك التي تقف عند أمثلة لغوية بعيدة عن الحوارات الحية. فاختيار هذه الحوارات الإعلامية وتفضيلها على الخطاب المكتوب يعود إلى أصالتها وعفويتها، فغالبًا ما يحدث التفاعل وإنتاج المفردات بشكل طبيعي دون أي مخطط محدد مسبقًا، وباستطاعتنا أن نرى تمثيلًا واقعيًا للاستعمال اللغوي بأصدق طريقة ممكنة. وبالاستعانة بمنهج مدرسة تحليل المحادثة، توصل البحث إلى أن العبارة الواحدة (نعم) في المحادثة العربية تفيد أغراضًا متعددة، ولا تنحصر دلالتها في الإعلام أو التصديق فحسب، وإنما تفصح عن عدد من الأغراض الجديدة: كافتتاح الكلام، أو طلب الإعادة، أو حتى مؤشراً من مؤشرات الانتباه ودعم استمرار الحديث
Gender and Politeness challenges the notion that women are necessarily always more polite than men as much of the language and gender literature claims. Sara Mills discusses the complex relations between gender and politeness and argues that although there are circumstances when women speakers, drawing on stereotypes of femininity to guide their behaviour, will appear to be acting in a more polite way than men, there are many circumstances where women will act just as impolitely as men. The book aims to show that politeness and impoliteness are in essence judgements about another's interventions in an interaction and about that person as whole, and are not simple classifications of particular types of speech. Drawing on the notion of community of practice Mills examines the way that speakers negotiate with what they perceive to be gendered stereotypes circulating within their particular group.
In the literature, an interlocutor’s active listening responses such as “hmh” are often defined as “continuers”, serving to prolong another interlocutor’s turn. However, to date, experiments on the effect of non-interruptive active listening responses on a conversational partner’s duration of talk have given contradictory results. Studies have shown one interlocutor’s active listening responses to correlate sometimes with longer and sometimes with shorter turns of another interlocutor. To investigate this contradiction, the effect of a confederate’s active listening on German participants’ (N=32) duration of speech was tested individually in an experiment simulating two significant conversational contexts extracted from the literature: explaining and socializing. The effect of active listening responses on the duration of talk interacted significantly with the conversational context. When socializing, the confederate’s active listening led participants to talk longer. Whereas in the explanatory context, this effect was absent, indicating that the function of active listening responses is context-dependent.
Cambridge Core - Semantics and Pragmatics - Pragmatics - by Stephen C. Levinson
Observing others in conversation is a common format for comprehending language, yet little work has been done to understand dialog comprehension. We tested whether overhearers use addressee backchannels as predictive cues for how to integrate information across speaker turns during comprehension of spontaneously produced collaborative narration. In Experiment 1, words that followed specific backchannels (e.g., really, oh) were recognized more slowly than words that followed either generic backchannels (e.g., uh huh, mhm) or pauses. In Experiment 2, we found that when the turn after the backchannel was a continuation of the narrative, specific backchannels prompted the fastest verification of prior information. When the turn after was an elaboration, they prompted the slowest, indicating that overhearers took specific backchannels as cues to integrate preceding talk with subsequent talk. These findings demonstrate that overhearers capitalize on the predictive relationship between backchannels and the development of speakers' talk, coordinating information across conversational roles.
Copyright © 2015 Cognitive Science Society, Inc.
The first part of this paper presents the view that ordinary conversation is the most basic form of talk, and that Conversation Analysis (CA) in the ethnomethodological tradition, whilst widely known in Australian applied linguistics, has been very little used here as a set of research tools. The distinctiveness of the CA approach is presented, and it is argued that CA has the potential to make a more substantial contribution to applied linguistic research than it has hitherto. Second, the paper considers how some basic CA research – into receipt tokens such as mm, yeah, oh and others in Australian English – might be applied to a language teaching, and specifically into the development of teaching materials in an adult ESL context. It is argued that CA has the potential for wider application in Australian applied linguistics alongside some of the more widespread and better known qualitative research methods.
This collection assembles early, yet previously unpublished research into the practices that organize conversational interaction by many of the central figures in the development and advancement of Conversation Analysis as a discipline. Using the methods of sequential analysis as first developed by Harvey Sacks, the authors produce detailed empirical accounts of talk in interaction that make fundamental contributions to our understanding of turntaking, action formation and sequence organization. One distinguishing feature of this collection is that each of the contributors worked directly with Sacks as a collaborator or was trained by him at the University of California or both. Taken together this collection gives readers a taste of CA inquiry in its early years, while nevertheless presenting research of contemporary significance by internationally known conversation analysts.
Backchannel signals in Arabic conversational exchanges are unaccounted for either in form or in function. The primary objective of this research is therefore to describe the structure and function of those naturally occurring uttered phrases used in conversational exchanges for expressing approval or active engagement in the interaction. To achieve this purpose a corpus consisting of spontaneous conversational exchanges were recorded. The recordings were meant to represent typical family settings in which interaction usually takes place between close relatives or friends: males or females. The conversations were classified into types which represent conversational exchanges between women and men, and children. Reference is made to difficulties experienced by Arab learners of English when talking to English- speaking interlocutors, as a result of the differences in backchannel signals.
Listenership (consisting of backchannel feedback) and its effect on intercultural communication were investigated in 30 dyadic conversations in English between Japanese and American participants. The findings of this study demonstrate several differences in how members of each culture used backchannels in terms of frequency, variability, placement, and function. This study also found evidence supporting the hypothesis that backchannel conventions that are not shared between cultures contribute to negative perceptions across cultures. Thus, the findings of this study support the conclusion that listenership warrants more attention in EFL classes in Japan. Further, toward creating a pedagogical framework, this study also provides EFL professionals with a comprehensive account of the listenership of Japanese EFL speakers. Finally, this study also offers potential insights into the linguistic variation of native English speakers. That is, the negative perceptions that the American native English speakers reported of their Japanese EFL speaking interlocutors' listener responses in this study were not as pronounced as those reported by the British native English speakers in a previous study conducted by the same researcher.
Routledge English Language Introductions cover core areas of language study and are one-stop resources for students. Assuming no prior knowledge, books in the series offer an accessible overview of the subject, with activities, study questions, sample analyses, commentaries and key readings—all in the same volume. The innovative and flexible ‘two dimensional’ stricture is built around four sections—introduction, development, exploration and extension—which offer self-contained stages for study. Each topic can also be read across these sections, enabling the reader to build gradually on the knowledge gained. Each book in the series has a companion website with extra resources for teachers, lecturers and students. Discourse Analysis: Provides an accessible introduction and comprehensive overview of the major approaches and methodological tools used in discourse analysis Introduces both traditional perspectives on the analysis of texts and spoken discourse as well as more recent approaches that address technologically mediated and multimodal discourse. Incorporates practical examples using real data from conversational interaction, ceremonial vows, dating adverts, social media such as facebook, blogs and msn, films such as When Harry Met Sally, popular music lyrics and newspaper articles on areas as diverse as international political incidents and Lady Gaga. Includes key readings from leading scholars in the field, such as James Paul Gee, Michael Halliday, Henry G. Widdowson, Dell Hymes, Harvey Sacks and Ron Scollon Offers a wide range of activities, questions and points for further discussion Is supported by a companion website featuring extra activities, additional guidance, useful links and multimedia examples including sound files, YouTube and videos. This title will be essential reading for students undertaking research within the areas of English Language, Linguistics and Applied Linguistics.
The news interview has become a major vehicle for presenting broadcast news and political commentary, and a primary interface between the institutions of journalism and government. This much-needed work examines the place of the news interview in Anglo-American society and considers its historical development in the United States and Britain. The main body of the book discusses the fundamental norms and conventions that shape conduct in the modern interview. It explores the particular recurrent practices through which journalists balance competing professional norms that encourage both objective and adversarial treatment of public figures. Through analyses of well-known interviews, the book explores the relationship between journalists and public figures and also how, in the face of aggressive questioning, politicians and other public figures struggle to stay 'on message' and pursue their own agendas. This comprehensive and wide-ranging book will be essential reading for students and researchers in sociolinguistics, media and communication studies.
Quantitative and qualitative methods of analyzing discourse, while producing some pertinent findings, suffer from a number of limitations. Such limitations have become apparent in studies of doctor‐patient communication but also manifest themselves in research on other forms of spoken, interpersonal communication. Quantitative methods alone do not deal with complexities of discourse, usually are not helpful in analyzing the social context in which discourse arises, do not clarify underlying themes and structures, and are costly and tedious to use. With qualitative methods, the selection of discourse for analysis is not straightforward, quality of interpretation is difficult to evaluate, and textual presentation is not clear‐cut. Several criteria of an appropriate method offer reasonable compromises in dealing with these limitations: a) discourse should be selected through a sampling procedure, preferably a randomized technique; b) recordings of sampled discourse should be available for review by other observers; c) standardized rules of transcription should be used; d) reliability of transcription should be assessed by multiple observers; e) procedures of interpretation should be decided in advance, should be validated in relation to theory, and should address both content and structure of texts; f) reliability of applying interpretive procedures should be assessed by multiple observers; g) a summary and excerpts from transcripts should accompany the interpretation, and full transcripts should be available for review; and h) texts and interpretations should convey the variability of content and structure across sampled texts. An ongoing study applies these criteria to research on ideology and social control in medical encounters, as illustrated by excerpts from two encounters between older patients and their physicians.
Listener responses (called backchannels) and their effect on intercultural communication were investigated in eight dyadic conversations in English between Japanese and British participants. The findings of this study revealed several differences in the way each culture used backchannels: the Japanese participants used slightly more backchannels per interlocutor word, the British participants displayed greater variability in the types of backchannels they used, and there were several differences in the lexical items making up these backchannels. Japanese participants sent noticeably more backchannels in three discourse contexts: at or directly after a pause, directly after a primary speaker's nonverbal gesture, and directly after a tag question or an utterance ending with the lexical items 'ya know'. This study found evidence supporting the hypothesis that backchannel conventions, which are not shared between cultures, contribute to negative perceptions and stereotyping. The findings of this study support the conclusion that backchannels warrant more attention in EFL classes in Japan.
The abstract for this document is available on CSA Illumina.To view the Abstract, click the Abstract button above the document title.
This paper proposes a methodological framework, C(ontrastive) C(onversation) A(nalysis) within which some of the listener back-channel expressions in Japanese conversation are analyzed in contrast with those observed in American English. Back-channel expressions examined are limited to uh-huh's and the like, brief comments, punctuated head movements and laughter.After analyzing data consisting of 40 dyadic casual conversations videotaped in Japan and the United States, it is concluded that in Japanese casual conversation, listener's response such as brief comments and head movements occur far more frequently than in comparable American situations. Relevant contexts for listener back-channels in each speech community are found to differ significantly. In Japanese, grammatical completion, sentence-final particles and speaker's vertical head movement provide the relevant context while in English grammatical completion provides the single most significant context.The results of the contrastive study are evaluated and assessed in light of the potential problems of CCA, with the issue of ‘equivalence’ being the most serious and problematic. Additionally, as a step beyond CCA, four intercultural conversations by American and Japanese speakers are examined.
The abstract for this document is available on CSA Illumina.To view the Abstract, click the Abstract button above the document title.
Good listeners generally produce back-channel feedback, that is, short utterances such as uh-huh which signal active listening. As the rules governing back-channeling vary from language to language, second-language learners may need help acquiring this skill. This paper is an initial exploration of how to provide this. It presents a training sequence which enables learners to acquire a basic Arabic back-channel skill, namely, that of producing feedback immediately after the speaker produces a syllable or two with a sharply falling pitch. This training sequence includes an explanation, audio examples, the use of visual signals to highlight occurrences of this pitch downslope, auditory and visual feedback on learners' attempts to produce the cue themselves, and feedback on the learners' performance as they play the role of an attentive listener in response to one side of a pre-recorded dialog. Experiments show that this enables learners to better approximate proper Arabic back-channeling behavior.
The paper investigates a sample of 'backchannels', a kind of response item, in the Cobuild Corpus. Its object is to chart the occurrence of backchannels in modern English speech, and especially to find out if they can indicate how much of a language sequence is needed for a listener to understand the intended message. The sequences into which backchannels are inserted and their insertion points are therefore classified, and the fairly numerous sequences where backchannels "interrupt" a linguistic unit are singled out for special study. A general conclusion is that in the cases where there is no explicit information about the part of the message following the inserted backchannel, the message will nevertheless mostly be understood even at the backchannel insertion point. A comparison between male and female speakers shows that women use backchannels more than men and that, unlike men, they prefer unemphatic backchannels.
The first section of this article argues for an approach to interruption as a participant's, not an analyst's, phenomenon. For analysts, interruption is best treated as a topic, not a resource. The second section examines how participants go about making interruptions OBSERVABLE events in the flow of interaction - in particular, the ways in which they claim violations of speaking rights. The third section considers some of the ways in which such claims are responded to. In the final section, it is suggested that there is a general need for a more systematic approach to the methods through which acts are constituted in terms of the responses they receive. (Interruption, conversation analysis, interaction)
The structure of speaker–auditor interaction during speaking turns was explored, using detailed transcriptions of language, paralanguage, and body-motion behaviors displayed by both participants in dyadic, face-to-face conversations. On the basis of certain observed regularities in these behaviors, three signals were hypothesized: (a) a speaker within-turn signal, (b) an auditor back-channel signal, and (c) a speaker continuation signal. These signals were composed of various behaviors in language and in body motion. It was further hypothesized that the display of appropriate ordered sequences of these signals by both participants, served to mark ‘units of interaction’ during speaking turns. (Conversational analysis; speaking turns; back-channel behaviors; interrelations of verbal and nonverbal behavior; American English (Chicago)).
The frequency of listener responses, called backchannels, was studied in English conversations within and across two cultural groups: Americans from the midwestern United States and Japanese who were born and raised in Japan. The findings reveal that backchannels of several types are displayed far more frequently by Japanese listeners. This appears to be related to the greater use by Japanese of certain discourse constructions that favor backchannels, and to the Japanese culture. The Japanese listening style remains unchanged in cross-cultural conversations, but Americans alter listening style in the direction of their non-native interlocutors. The study found no evidence for the hypothesis that backchanneling conventions that are not shared contribute to negative personality attributions or stereotyping. (Conversational analysis, intercultural communication, Japanese and American English discourse)
The mechanisms by which people take turns speaking in a conversation are both spoken and nonverbal, open and subconscious. A child of five enters a room where his mother and another woman are talking. T h e child tugs on his mother's skirt for attention and, without waiting for her t o respond, he begins talking t o her. T h e mother be-comes irritated and scolds the child for interrupting while she is talking. Fiue college students are sitting in a dorm room talking. O n e of the five students has been talking for about ten minutes when another member of the group says, "Jim, why don't you shut up! Z can't get a word in edgewise." I n each of the preceding stories, the central figure is guilty of violating a communicative norm in our culture. And, in each case, the response was in the form of a reprimand. At least two explanations account for the repri-mands given to the central figures in the stories: (a) they did not provide for a smooth transition of the speaking turn from one person to the next, and (b) they forced a definition of the situation that the other interactants present were not willing to accept. The nature of this conversational "turn-taking" or "floor apportionment" will be the focus of this essay. T h e phenomenon by which one interactant stops talking and another starts in a smooth, synchroniLed manner is considered the most salient feature of face-to-face conversation by some researchers (12, 19, 20). T h e fact that we usually make judgments about people based on the way they interact argues that the structure of a conversation-the way it "comes off"-is at least as important as the content.
Listener responses (LRs) have been found to appear far less frequently among children than among adolescents and adults, and the initial explorations of this finding, both empirical and theoretical, are reported in this paper. Observations of children in first, third, and fifth grade in school (but not in school-like situations) showed LRs to be almost absent except under the strongest social “pull,” and to be very variable from child to child. Video taped sessions in the laboratory showed older children to make small movements which may not be communicative, to make the more definite ones a bit late compared with adults, and confirmed the wide individual variability. Discussion focuses on two functions of LRs, the linguistic and the social.