English Language Teaching in its Social Context

CONSTRAINTS AND RESOURCES IN CLASSROOM TALK 99(unite the given and the new, the topic and the comment, the foregrounded and the backgrounded).Contingent language use encourages, justifies, and motivates grammaticalization.Noncontingent language use - or, rather, less contingent, since the quality ofcontingency exists on a continuum ~ proceeds more statically and encourages a treatmentof language as either form or function instead of as an organic whole.Contingent features are most visible in the kind of talk usually referred to asconversational. Of all forms of talk, conversation is perhaps the hardest to define. It is, in asense, a catchall concept that can contain other kinds of talk - such as instructions, requests,stories, business deals. A complication is that other kinds of talk can have conversationembedded in them. Interviews, lessons, or sales transactions may suddenly become chatty,then after a while switch back to business. So neat boundaries cannot be drawn around thephenomenon of conversation. Yet we usually know when a conversation is taking place.In conversation, every utterance is connected by many links ~ some of them overt,many more of them covert - to previous utterances and through them to the shared (orto-be-shared) world of the participants. Every utterance sets up expectations for what willbe said next. Utterances in conversation are thus, at the same time, predicted and predicting;in this way the interactants’ mutual engagement (what Rommetveit (1974) callsintersubjectivity) is achieved and maintained.When talk is contingent, utterances are constructed on the spot rather than planned inadvance. In addition, there is symmetry, that is, equal rights and duties of participation, atleast ideall~.~ I say “ideally” since it often happens that one person monopolizes theconversation and does not let the others get a word in edgewise. But the orientation towardsymmetry still holds, since the participants will note that the conversation was one-sided,that so-and-so monopolized it, and that it was therefore not a “good” conversation.To illustrate what makes an interaction conversational, I quote two extracts fromnonnative speaker interactions. In the first there is a high level of contingency; in the second,a much lower level:Speaker 1:Speaker 2:Speaker 1 :Speaker 2:Speaker 1 :Speaker 2:Speaker 1:Speaker 2:Speaker 1:Speaker 1:Speaker 2:Speaker 1:Speaker 2:Speaker 1:Speakcr 2:Speaker 1 :Speaker 2:Speaker 1:Speaker 2:Speaker 1:From my room 1 can see the ocean viewwowAnd -[And how many room do you have?Two bedroom two full bathroomWhat what whatTwo bedroom=[Two bedroom=and two full bathroomI never askedyou, what didyou do in Japan b$oreyou came here?Uhm ~ afterjnish high schoolUhuhI work -for. . . . . . . . . three yearsHmmAnd ~[Where did you work?It - this is very - d@cult for explainfiYI use . . .the computerUhuh