"Affordances of the Teller’s Turn Design for the Recipient’s Display of Affective Stances in Conversations During Study Abroad" by Midori Ishida

Presentation

Affordances of the Teller’s Turn Design for the Recipient’s Display of Affective Stances in Conversations During Study Abroad

American Association of Applied Linguistics (AAAL) Annual Conference (2018)

Midori Ishida, San Jose State University

Abstract

Speakers’ competence as recipients can be seen in their ways of indicating affective stances toward the teller’s story through nodding, collaborative completion, assessments, and commentaries (e.g., Dings, 2014; Stivers, 2008). Such an aspect of interactional competence is not a self-standing individuals’ trait, but is locally contingent and co-constructed. As found in Shimako Iwasaki’s study (2015), a recipient’s stance display within a turn-construction unit is prompted through the teller’s turn design, and it also shapes the teller’s continuing story. Affordances of the teller’s turn design for recipients’ stance-taking actions has been documented also in L2 talks (e.g., Ishida, 2011).

With the aim of exploring interactional contingencies that prompt or inhibit recipients’ stance-taking actions, I conducted multimodal conversation analysis of 20 video-recorded casual conversations that 4 American speakers of L2-Japanese had with interlocutors of their choice during their one-year study abroad.

The analysis reveals various interactional contingencies for the focal L2-Japanese speakers’ display of their affective stances as recipients. Displays of affective stances are found ater the teller’s assessment, some exchanges of minimal tokens, the teller’s prompt for a stance-taking action, and so on. However, there are also cases in which the teller does not prompt the recipient’s display of affective stance and instead treats the recipient’s affective-stance display as not a relevant action. In one of the cases, when an L2-Japanese speaker elicited a talk about a past experience from his L1-Japanese interlocutor, the interlocutor designed his telling as an informing rather than storytelling. Such design ascribes the novice identity to the L2 speaker and constrains his way of participating in the social interaction (cf. Kinginger, 2013). Thus, this study uncovers various ways in which affordances and constraints for L2 speakers’ interactional competences as recipients are locally and interactionally co-constructed and that the process may involve participants’ negotiation of identities.

Keywords

interactional competences,
study abroad

Disciplines

Publication Date

March, 2018

Location

Chicago, IL

Comments

Part of colloquium, EMCA Approaches to Study Abroad Research

Citation Information

Midori Ishida. "Affordances of the Teller’s Turn Design for the Recipient’s Display of Affective Stances in Conversations During Study Abroad" American Association of Applied Linguistics (AAAL) Annual Conference (2018)
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/midori-ishida/17/