Keiko Tsuchiya

Listenership Behaviours in Intercultural Encounters: A time-aligned multimodal corpus analysis

How do people listen in a conversation, especially in an intercultural setting, and how do they shift from listener to speaker in the particular context? This book investigates listenership behaviours of a tutor and a student in the context of academic supervision sessions at a university in the UK, comparing British tutor - British student conversations with British tutor - Japanese student conversations in English. A new research methodology, a time-aligned multimodal corpus analysis , is introduced for analysing listenership and turn-taking structure, synthesising visual data with verbal data in timeline. The method also integrates discourse-pragmatic and conversation analytic approaches with the corpus-based analysis. This work reports strategies in use of response tokens for framework shifts and multi-functional nature of hand gestures observed in the conversations. Therefore, this book is highly relevant for researchers and postgraduate students, who study pragmatic and discursive practice in intercultural settings using multimodal corpora.

Simulated patients versus manikins in acute-care scenarios.

Manikins and simulated patients (SPs) are commonly used in health care education and assessment. SPs appear to offer a more realistic experience for learners than ‘plastic’ manikins, and might be expected to engender interactions that approximate real clinical practice more closely. The analyses of linguistic patterns and touch are methodologies that could be used to explore this hypothesis. Our research aims were: (1) to compare verbal interactions and the use of procedural touch by health care workers (HCWs) in scenarios with SPs and with manikins; and (2) to evaluate the methodologies used to inform a large‐scale study.

Focusing on Content or Language?: Comparing Paired Conversations in CLIL and EFL Classrooms, Using a Corpus

This preliminary comparative study examines two dyad interactions of Japanese learners of English in a Content and Language Integrated Learning classroom (CLIL) and a General English class (GE) at a Japanese university, focusing on discourse framework and the use of repair. Three research questions are addressed here: between these two settings, (1) are there any similarities and differences in numbers of words, turns and speaking time in the learner-learner dialogues?, (2) how do the learners frame discourses, and (3) what repairables are marked and what repair strategies are used in the respective contexts? The findings indicate longer but fewer turns were characterised in the interaction in the GE interaction, while shorter and frequent turn exchanges occurred in the CLIL one, which relates to discourse frameworks in the interactions in the two settings. Endorsement framework (topic initiation → suggestion for decision making → (dis-)alignment) was observed in the CLIL conversation with the frequent use of joint production, whereas the learners in GE adapted narrative framework (topic initiation → narrating → acknowledgement). The students in both contexts paid attention to linguistic/factual repairables. However, procedural repairables were marked only by the participants in the CLIL interaction. To repair the trouble sources, both self-repair and other-repair were used in the CLIL students although the GE participants only used the former. The distinct features in the two learner interactions might derive from differences in types of communicative action (c.f. Habermas J, Some further clarification of the concept of communicative rationality. In: Cooke M (ed) On the pragmatics of communication. The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, pp 307–382, 1996).

Adolphs, S. and Carter, R. (2013). Spoken Corpus Linguistics: From Monomodal to Multimodal. London: Routledge

Svenja Adolphs and Ronald Carter’s ‘Spoken Corpus Linguistics: From Monomodal to Multimodal’ (2013, Routledge) is one of the innovative and advanced volumes in the fields of corpus linguistics and pragmatics. It illuminates the emergent areas of spoken corpus linguistics and covers a variety of issues from practical guidelines for designing spoken and multimodal corpora to some pedagogic implications derived from the analyses using these corpora. It also offers several case studies on discursive practices, prosody, listener responses, and gestures in talk. With these areas of focus, this volume makes a distinct contribution to the series, Routledge Advances in Corpus Linguistics. The book is divided into two parts: monomodal spoken corpus analysis and multimodal spoken corpus analysis. Monomodal spoken corpus analysis focuses on one mode, spoken language, in other words, ‘textual dimension of communication’ (p. 1), while multimodal spoken corpus analysis deals with plural and diverse aspects in spoken interaction which include ‘textual, prosodic and gestural representations’ (ibid). The former introduces a practical framework for design and development of spoken corpora, and includes case studies of monomodal spoken corpus analysis on multi-word units and discourse markers. In the latter part, the book moves from monomodal corpus analysis to multimodal corpus analysis, where studies on prosody and gestures are presented. This cutting-edge work will stimulate its readers’ ingenuity, and take corpus research forward into its next stage.