Franco Pauletto & Silvia Kunitz (Stockholms universitet)

Discourse markers in an oral discussion task in L2 Italian

This pilot study adopts the methodology of conversation analysis (CA) to explore the use of discourse markers (DMs) by Swedish learners of L2 Italian, who are enrolled in a second-term preparatory course of Italian at a Swedish university and are at an A1/A2 proficiency level (CEFR). The data consist of audio recordings of an oral activity that the students, divided in groups of three, accomplished at the end of the semester. The students were instructed to summarize and comment on a novel. Our analysis focuses on the range of DMs that were used by the students and on the actions that the participants achieved through the use of these linguistic resources. Preliminary results indicate that these students use DMs in a timely manner, thus showing that they are able to parse the turn in progress. However, their repertoire has proven to be limited: in particular, learners use eh and ehm in word-searches and, more in general, to indicate uncertainty in the formulation of the current turn, while mhm and mh mh (with various prosodic contours) and sì (‘yes’) are used in responsive contexts. In particular, mhm and mh mh appear to be used as: (a) acknowledgement tokens (to receipt and, in some cases, agree with) the previous turn; (b) continuers; and (c) open-class repair initiators. While the responsive tokens mhm and mh mh and the uncertainty tokens eh and ehm seem to have similar usages in Swedish and Italian, some of the participants also use the Swedish responsive token a: to express affiliation/agreement. These findings show how beginner level students, who have never received explicit instruction on the use of DMs in L2 Italian, accomplish active listenership and the display of uncertainty through the use of a limited range of markers. Such findings indicate that it might be worthy to introduce DMs as explicit objects of instruction, in order to increase the students’ awareness of how these particles are used in L2 Italian and in order to develop the students’ interactional competence.

Biodata

Franco Pauletto earned his PhD in Italian Linguistics at the University of Stockholm, where he is currently working as a lecturer. He adopts the theory and methods of Conversation Analysis to study human interaction both in the family and in the classroom context. Over the past three years he has also carried out research in the field of L2 acquisition.

Silvia Kunitz completed her PhD at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She currently works as a lecturer at Stockholm University. In her research she adopts a conversation-analytic approach to study how L2 students and teachers do learning/teaching/testing as socially situated activities in and through embodied talk-in-interaction. So far she has focused on group work, multipart oral exams, computer-mediated teaching for the hearing-impaired, and instructed interactional competence.