Eric Hauser documents one of those rare moments when the learners correct the expert speaker
Eric Hauser
University of Electro-Communications
Near the start of a one-day visit to TGG of a group of university students, these students and their agent engage in team-building activities, as they are labeled within the institution. The group consists of five visiting students, all male, and their agent. Four of the five students, the ones who appear in the transcript, have been given the pseudonyms Enmei, Daiki, Nagi, and Keita. The agent has been given the pseudonym Mikey. The first team-building activity, introduced by Mikey, is for each participant to introduce himself by stating his favorite movie and favorite food. In explaining the activity, Mikey also states that he will test them on their memory of each one’s favorite movie and food. Through his instructions, he thus builds into the activity a motivation to listen.
The transcript shows what happens when Enmei is nominated by Mikey to go first. In order to preserve readability, the transcript focuses on the talk and only a few features of mostly Mikey’s embodied conduct are noted.
As shown in this transcript for Enmei, across the five students, the reference to that student’s favorite movie makes relevant either a demonstration by Mikey of understanding the reference or work to achieve this understanding. As a result, this activity becomes a locus for repair work related to reference. As pointed out by Sacks (1995), one feature of a demonstration, in contrast to a mere claim, of understanding is that is that the former is amenable to correction. Unsurprisingly, the reference-related repair work sometimes also involves other-correction of Mikey’s demonstration. The transcript shows an exemplary case of demonstration of understanding and the associated (corrective) repair work.
When Enmei states the Japanese title of his favorite movie in line 03, he marks this as a try through slightly rising intonation and by then waiting for a response (Sacks & Schegloff, 1979/2007). In lines 04 and 05, Nagi and Mikey produce response tokens which can be said to claim understanding, following which Mikey produces a stronger demonstration of understanding through giving the English title. This is accompanied by an open-hand pointing gesture to Enmei, with this gesture being held as Mikey waits for Enmei’s response. Mikey’s demonstration of understanding makes relevant a confirmation from Enmei, with this relevance being indexed by the held gesture. However, rather than confirm, Enmei initiates repair (line 07). Mikey treats the trouble as Enmei’s recognition of the English title and attempts to complete the repair by repeating the English title (line 08). The continued relevance of a confirmation is indexed by Mikey’s held pointing gesture, though it also involves two slight beats as the English title is repeated. Again, though, Enmei initiates repair, this time by attempting to repeat what Mikey has said (line 10). Mikey continues to treat the trouble as one of recognizing the English title (line 11), as he starts to repeat the title, while retracting the gesture, and then self-repairs to make it explicit that what he has said is the English title.
Mikey’s demonstration of understanding, then, occasions (up to this point) two cycles of other-initiated self-repair, with Mikey treating the trouble as Enmei’s non-recognition of the English title. The students, though, from line 13, take a different view of the trouble, treating it as Mikey’s incorrect understanding of the original movie reference. First, Keita and Enmei claim recognition of the actual trouble source and reject Mikey’s incorrect understanding (lines 13 and 14). Next, Keita and another student, Nagi, state the correct English title (lines 15 and 16). It is primarily Keita’s rejection and correction that Mikey orients to as he shifts his gaze to Keita (line 15). He then shifts his attention back to Enmei as he repeats the correct name and apologizes (line 17), while Keita, for his part, partially disengages by slightly shifting his body position and clasping his hands behind his back. Finally, in line 21, Mikey again apologizes, acknowledges through talk and gesture that Keita has corrected him, and once more repeats the correct English title, with his gesture indexing that it is the title of the movie that Enmei first mentioned.
Though extended, the repair work related to the reference is not particularly complex. It consists of two cycles of other-initiated self-repair, followed by other-correction of Mikey’s demonstration of understanding and finally the establishment of intersubjective understanding of both the initial reference and the source of the trouble. As a result of Mikey’s demonstration of understanding, a demonstration that turned out to show this understanding to be incorrect, (some of) the students do indeed build a team. While the first two cycles of other-initiated self-repair involve just Enmei and Mikey, other students, primarily Keita but also Nagi, step in to re-diagnose the source of trouble and use other-correction to successfully fix it. These three students thus work as a team to correct Mikey’s demonstrated misunderstanding. While it seems unlikely that Mikey intentionally got the English title wrong, his mistake ends up serendipitously occasioning the sort of team-building that the activity was introduced to promote.
References
Sacks, H. (1995). Lectures on conversation. Blackwell.
Sacks, H., & Schegloff, E. A. (1979). Two preferences in the organization of reference to
persons in conversation and their interaction. In G. Psathas (Ed.), Everyday language: Studies in ethnomethodology (pp. 15-21). Irvington.
Sacks, H., & Schegloff, E. A. (2007). Two preferences in the organization of reference to
persons in conversation and their interaction. In N. J. Enfield & T. Stivers (Eds.), Person reference in interaction: Linguistic, cultural and social perspectives (pp. 23-28). Cambridge University Press.
Commenti