Reformulations in Multi-Party interactions in English as a Foreign Language in a Turkish Higher Education Context

Abstract

Reformulations are “forms of talk which attribute to some prior speaker words and/or ideas purported to have been authored or implied in some prior talk” (Gonzales 1996, p. 158) and are effective devices for describing, explaining, re-stating or summarising the prior talk (Waring, 2002). Although they have been investigated in a variety of contexts such as psychotherapy (e.g. Davis, 1986; Perakyla & Vehvilainen, 2003; Kurri & Wahlstrom, 2007), radio call-in programmes, (e.g. Hutchby, 1996; Drew, 2003), seminar discussions (e.g. Waring 2002), and other educational contexts (e.g. Kapellidi, 2015; Hauser, 2006), the interactional function of reformulation in L2 learner-learner interaction remains a gap in L2 literature. Keeping this gap in mind, this study aims to document the characteristics of reformulation and learners’ orientation to reformulation in an out-of-classroom group discussion task in English as a Foreign Language (EFL). Track the phenomenon in multi-party L2 interaction in a Turkish higher education context, this study will investigate the phenomenon through the robust methodological underpinnings of ethnomethodological Conversation Analysis. To provide a micro-analytic investigation of sequential unfolding of reformulation in multi-party L2 interaction, 20 extracts based on a collection of 84 episodes, which were analysed in alignment with the data-driven nature of conversation analytic research methodology, were involved in the study. The audio data comes from discussion tasks designed as outof-classroom activities for students taking the Oral Communication Skills 1 and 2 classes at Hacettepe University Division of English Language Teaching. The data was collected by Assist. Prof. Dr. Olcay Sert and labelled as L2 Discussion Tasks Corpus (L2DISCO, Sert, 2016; 2017a; b). Participants were all non-native speakers of English except one who was born in Australia, a bilingual Turkish-English speaker. The dataset includes the participants’ audio recorded conversations at 6 different times over 1 year and consists of a total of 174 multi-party conversations (average 20 minutes each), which amounts to 58 hours of audio recording. For this study, a sub-corpus of 60 recordings (approximately 1200 minutes) were analysed. The analysis shows that the sequential position of reformulation constitutes three viii categories: adjacency pairs (Sacks, 1967; Schegloff, 1968), independent Turn Constructional Unit (TCU) in the second turn and triadic sequence. Additionally, the analysis illustrates that learners employ reformulation to index a variety of actions (i.e. agreement, confirmation, recipiency) as they primarily demonstrate their understanding. In addition, reformulation is produced to provide other-repair and other-correction when a party signals a trouble which can be a word search, a codemixed utterance, a grammatical mistake or difficulty in formulating an appropriate turn. The findings also suggest that learners’ orientations to reformulation bring evidence for their novice and expert roles displayed through reformulations. Reformulations expose learners to the linguistic varieties in a target language and they create their own learning by providing opportunity for a potential uptake of reformulated utterances. Thus, the findings of this study also have some implications for reformulation practices of learners as they can create their learning opportunities through reformulations.