Abstract
Over the course of four decades of research, listenership has become a central object of linguistic research in theoretical and applied linguistics. Listenership Behaviours in Intercultural Encounters focuses on the crucial role that listening plays in conversation by investigating the turn-taking structure of academic supervision sessions. Through a comparison of exchanges between British participants with those of British tutor–Japanese student dyads, Tsuchiya explores aspects of intercultural communication, integrating conversation analysis and a time-aligned corpus-based approach.
The book comprises eight chapters. Chapter 1 reviews some key theories and fundamental notions which are critical for the research, including listenership, turn-taking, backchannels, discourse framework, discursive practice, and discourse strategies.
Chapter 2, in turn, is devoted to an overview of previous studies on listenership behaviours and response tokens in English and Japanese conversation. Theories in intercultural communication, politeness, cultural values, identities and pragmatics are also reviewed. Tsuchiya argues that listenership behaviour is related to cultural values and identities(p. 13). The use of response tokens may vary for participants with different cultural values (English, Japanese, etc.) or with different identities as native or second-language speakers. Some interesting discussions are made in this chapter on how language is related to culture, context and identity. It is argued that the structure of turn-taking may be different in different cultures, and the values behind them can be seen from the perspective of collectivism versus individualism. Context is viewed as a social and cultural container which affects interlocutor behaviours in conversation (p. 25); speakers can construct and reconstruct their identities continuously, either in their native or second language.
Chapter 3 systematically presents an overview of four critical themes of the book: conversation analysis, discourse analysis, conversational gestures and discourse framework. Tsuchiya provides an especially detailed overview of the characteristics of conversational structure, introducing a classification of conversational gestures into head nod (HN), head shake, head turning, head back, hand gesture (HG) and self-comfort, all of which have been captured in the video-recorded data used for the subsequent analyses.
Chapter 4 deals with the research methodology. Tsuchiya first reviews and classifies existing spoken corpora, before explaining the nature of the 20,000-word time-aligned multimodal corpus of spoken English used in this project. For a detailed analysis of turn structure and the physical movements in conversation alongside verbal utterances, she employs multimodal transcripts of conversation data, allowing her to describe the conversational exchanges in a novel manner. For instance, turn transcription points (TTPs) are points where either of the participants has taken the floor of the conversation, and leadtime can be used to measure the time distance between the point where particular response tokens are uttered and the point where floor exchanges occur. Analysing not only verbal but also visual response tokens with the concept of leadtime makes the analysis unique (p. 171).
Chapter 5 defines the scope of the work on the basis of a preliminary study of two aspects in a small subsection of the corpus: a global pattern analysis (i.e. a quantitative study) and a turn-taking structure analysis (i.e. a qualitative study), placing focus on the placements and the forms of target response tokens, respectively. With categorisations of discourse function and conversation function of response tokens related to turn-taking structure, five turn-taking patterns are recognised. This chapter sets an example for the further detailed analysis of four other sets of conversation data in Chapters 6 and 7. These two chapters constitute the empirical core of the book, exploring respectively global patterns and turn-taking patterns of listenership behaviour. In Chapter 6, the author employs leadtime to measure the length of speaker states and pauses, and analyses the use of verbal response tokens, such as erm, yeah, mm and mhm. She finds that the tutors take the floor of conversation more than the students, HGs are often observed at TTP and HNs are observed soon before TTP, and the tutors rarely use mm and mhm.
The book ends with a conclusion in Chapter 8. The author offers a synthetic summary of the analyses and major findings, discusses contextualisation and multiple identities in listenership behaviours in intercultural settings, points out the limitations of the research and suggests some future research directions for discourse-pragmatic research with corpora.
Innovative in methodology and rich in description, the book offers fine exemplars of how to describe the characteristics of listenership behaviours in intercultural settings and how to integrate conversation analysis and corpus analysis for linguistic research. Although the author acknowledges that the size of the corpus is adequate for a preliminary study but ‘not enough to establish the reliability of the findings’ (p. 172), the new perspective it offers on listenership behaviours can bring new theoretical richness to the interpretation of listenership behaviours, and excels as a unique method for the practical exploration of such behaviours in spoken discourse.
Turn-taking and response tokens are only a part of the structure of conversation, and a detailed and in-depth conversation analysis – considering features such as overlapping, repair, preference structure, etc. – would be necessary to confirm its discoveries. Nevertheless, Tsuchiya’s volume offers a detailed, coherent and accessible introduction to the different theoretical and practical traditions of linguistics, conversation analysis and discourse analysis, presenting readers with divergent research approaches to spoken discourse and various types of spoken corpora, and should appeal to those readers who are interested in the intersection of conversation analysis, spoken discourse and corpus linguistics.