Encouraging Learners' Conversational Participation: The Effect of Content Knowledge

Abstract

This study investigated the influence of interlocutors' relative content knowledge on conversational participation in interactions between native speakers (NSs) and normative speakers (NNSs) with limited oral skills. Forty‐five male NS‐NNS dyads were audio taped having two conversations; in the second conversation, which concerned students' major fields, 15 of the dyads included NNSs who had relatively more content knowledge, in another 15, the NSs had more knowledge, and in 15, participants were considered equal. Measures of conversational participation included amount of talk, pause fillers, back‐channels, topic moves, and several measures of interactional negotiation. Outcomes of log linear analyses indicated that both NSs and NNSs appeared conversationally active, but there were different patterns of participation that could to some extent be explained by relative content knowledge. As such, this study extends our understanding of the dynamics of NS‐NNS interchange.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 45 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.