Topic Negotiation in Peer Group Oral Assessment Situations: A Conversation Analytic Approach

By Zhengdong Gan, C. Davison, L. Hamp-Lyons. 2009

96 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This study examines the production of topical talk in peer collaborative negotiation in an interactive assessment innovation context. The ability to stay on topic, to move from topic to topic and to introduce new topics appropriately is at the core of communicative competence. Applying conversation analysis (CA), we describe and analyze how one group of secondary ESL students orient to and construct what they take to be relevant to the assessment task as interaction proceeds. We found that in the context of group oral discussion described in our study, in the course of turn-by-turn interaction which was characterized by intensive engagement and active participation between peer participants, this group of students were able to pursue, develop, and shift topics to, on the one hand, ensure the successful completion of the assigned task, and on the other, to display individual contributions. Topical transitions appeared to be the result of participants constantly monitoring the content of talk for relevance to the assessment task agenda. Such negotiation of topical talk among the participants indicates that peer group discussion as an oral assessment format has the potential to provide opportunities for students to demonstrate ‘real-life’ interactional abilities to relate to each other in spoken interaction.

Subfields: Language and Linguistics, Literature and Literary Theory

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/fb901006d4a60d4a165cc8d1df5e833ed4dc6d31

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Language and Linguistics

1. Daniel M. K. Lam
2. L. Taylor
3. E. Galaczi
4. Lyn May
5. Frank Giraldo
6. Larry Davis
7. L. Harding

In Literature and Literary Theory

1. Daniel M. K. Lam
2. L. Taylor
3. E. Galaczi
4. Frank Giraldo
5. Lyn May
6. Larry Davis
7. L. Harding

Citations in the corpus

• Interactional Competence across Proficiency Levels: How do Learners Manage Interaction in Paired Speaking Tests? (2014, background): “As Gan et al. (2009) note, analysis of the interactional organization of speaking test discourse could provide interactional ‘can do’ statements acting as learning targets for interactional competence.”
• What counts as “responding”? Contingency on previous speaker contribution as a feature of interactional competence (2018, background): “This resembles the pattern of “stepwise topic transition” identified in Gan et al. (2008), where the current speaker refers to the content in the previous turn and introduces new elements as something relevant, as well as the collaborative pattern identified in Galaczi (2008), through which…”
• Interactional Competence: Conceptualisations, Operationalisations, and Outstanding Questions (2018, background): “Gan et al .”