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Publication detail

The use of response elicitors in learner conversation

Authors: Ježková Šárka

Year: 2014

Type of publication: ostatní - přednáška nebo poster

Page from-to: nestránkováno

Titles:

Language	Name	Abstract	Keywords
eng	The use of response elicitors in learner conversation	This paper presents one aspect of a bigger multidimensional project aimed at the second language acquisition processes (with financial support from the Czech Science Foundation), in which one part of the research is focused on the syntactic, grammatical and discourse analysis of corpus of learner spoken English. The discourse of conversation is co-constructed by both sides that must dynamically react to the ongoing communication and this interactive character of such communication influences the choice of interrogative structures, as first halves of adjacency pairs. The analysis primarily deals with three groups of response elicitors: full regular questions, non-clausal questions and all the types of question tags (which also include typically spoken one-word expressions like right, okay, etc.), but it also explores other means functioning as interaction initiators. The corpus of almost 75,000 words includes oral performances of 112 students from three Czech universities at the very beginning of their study of a TEFL Programme. The research has been motivated by the question how far the patterns of distribution of individual elicitor forms correspond to conversational maxims and if they adopt the arrangement of a natural native speaker dialogue. The findings are discussed in the context of second language acquisition and will be used to modify the content of some courses in study programmes.	interview structure; conversation; L2 language; response elicitors