ALS 2010 Annual Conference Programme - Australian Linguistic ...

Al-Gahtani
Saad Al-Gahtani (University of Melbourne)
saasmm@gmail.com
Sequence organization and L2 learners
Keywords: pragmatics and conversation analysis.
In recent years, a growing number of studies on speech acts have adopted a
more holistic approach when examining interactions in which a request is performed
(e.g. Al-Gahtani & Roever, 2010; Schegloff, 2007; Taleghani-Nikazm, 2006).
Moving away from the CCSARP coding scheme (Blum-Kulka et al., 1989), primarily
designed to examine data collected by Discourse Completion Tasks (DCTs), these
studies have examined both natural and interactive data from a Conversation
Analysis (CA) perspective. Despite these developments, however, these studies
have predominately centred on NS’s interactions in languages such as English.
As a result, further work on sequence organization in interactions produced by L2
learners and in languages other than English is needed.
The present study thereby examines the sequence organization in participants’
interactions on making requests performed by L2 learners of Arabic, whilst also investigating
the influence of learners’ proficiency on sequence organization. There
were 166 participants (aged 18 to 25), divided into five groups: beginner, lowintermediate,
high-intermediate, advanced and Arabic NS. The participants were
recorded while asking an administrator to reschedule the timeslot of a subject or
postpone an exam date. Drawing from Schegloff’s (2007) work, the data of this
study was analyzed in terms of the production of: pre-expansions, pre-pres, insertexpansions
and post-expansions.
The results reveal that whilst pre-expansion appeared across all groups, its rate
of occurrence increased with the increase of proficiency level. Likewise, only
high-level learners and Arabic NSs tended to produce multiple pre-expansions.
Although the occurrence of the pre-pre was infrequent across the corpus, its use
also increased with learners’ proficiency. Two types of insert-expansion were found
in the corpus: post-first insert-expansion and pre-second insert-expansion. Somewhat
unexpectedly, learners’ proficiency was seen to influence the production of
insert-expansion; symptomatic of the administrator’s tendency to perform postfirst
insert-expansion with low-level learners, and use pre-second insert-expansion
with high-level learners and Arabic NSs. Two kinds of post-expansion were also observed:
minimal and non-minimal post-expansion. The former was used rarely by
low-level learners, but frequently among high-level learners and Arabic NSs. The
latter, however, seldom appeared in low-level learners despite being occasionally
produced by high-level learners and Arabic NSs.
It can be concluded therefore that learners’ proficiency does play a key role in
sequence organization. The more proficient the L2 learners are, the more likely
they are to extend the interaction and be capable of producing different aspects
of sequence organization. In addition, the occurrence of all aspects of sequence
organization by Arabic NSs is indicative of their universality.