Strengthening students’ interactional competence

in Italian L2 by exploiting a corpus of video-

recorded spontaneous interactions.

ALIAS – Archivio di LInguA Spontanea

Maria Eleonora Sciubba

Stefania Marzo

Elwys De Stefani

22/08/2014

EUROCALL2014

Groningen

Overview

2

• Introducing ALIAS – Archivio di LInguA Spontanea

• Examples of interactions in coursebooks and in ALIAS

• Aim of the project ALIAS

• Exploitation of video-recordings in ALIAS

• Conclusion – Advantages of ALIAS exercises

ALIAS – Archivio di LInguA Spontanea

Informal Didactic Professional Total

Italy

Lazio 1 5 1 7

Lombardy 1 3 3 7

Piedmont 1 0 4 5

Campania 1 2 0 3

Calabria 1 1 1 3

Belgium

1 2 1

TOTAL 29

3

A database of videos of spontaneously occurring interactions in Italian

speaking settings, recorded in Italy and Belgium: 29 interactions, ca. 60 hr.

recordings.

In a bar 1 (ALIAS)

4

A: salve Hello

B: buonasera Good evening

A: un caffè A coffee

A: salve Hello

B: salve. due caffè, grazie. Hello. Two coffees, please.

A: buonasera Good evening

B: buonasera Good evening

A: salve. Prego… Hello. Please…

B: ‘sera. … due caffè. Uno

decaffeinato macchiato.

‘evening. … two coffees. One decaf with a drop of

milk

A: sì yes

What are we having? (Nuovo Progetto Italiano a1)

5

• A-contextual

(greetings? morning/

afternoon?)

• Misleading cultural

cues (menù/tables-

restaurant)

• Unclear sequences

• Unnatural speaking

pace

• Non-prototypical, i.e.

shuffle in all the

structures from the

unit

• Smoothly proceed

from one turn to the

other

• There is no

interruption, little so

called “disfluency”,

limited use of speech

management

strategies.

In a bar 2 (ALIAS)

6

A: ‘sera ‘evening

B/C: buonasera Good evening

A: salve. Me lo fate un

caffè macchiato da

portare via per

favore?…

Hello. Could you please make a

coffee with milk to take away?

B: sì yes

A: salve Hello

B: solo un caffè ci

prendiamo noi?

Are we taking only a coffee?

C: sì Yes

B: eheh hehe

C: eheh hehe

A: prego. Please

B: ehhhh [incomp.] Ehhhh [unclear]

B: un caffè d’orzo? A barley coffee?

A: un caffè d’orzo? A barley coffee?

C: un caffè normale,

grazie.

A normal coffee, thank you.

Aim of the project ALIAS

Developing Speaking and Interactional Skills

7

• Learners of a Foreign Language need to be able to master at least the

following strategies, when developing their speaking skills:

o The recognition of “scripts”, or sequence structures in conversation;

o The recognition of points in the conversation when it is appropriate to

interrupt people (and how to do it) to ask for clarification;

o The use of minimal responses, repeats, self-repairs, hesitations, discourse

markers, etc.

o In short, the use of speech management strategies which contribute to

an impression of naturalness in the learner’s spoken production (Biber et

al., 1999; Gilquin, 2008; Hasselgren, 2002; Müller, 2005; Rühlemann,

2006; Saville-Troike, 2006).

Ordinare al bar 1

8

In class – Listening comprehension

Guarda il primo video. Cosa ordinano i

clienti? [Watch the first video. What are the

clients ordering?]

a. Due caffè (two coffees)

b. Un caffè (one coffee)

c. Un caffè macchiato (one

macchiato)

Guarda il secondo video. Cosa ordinano

i clienti?

a. Due caffè

b. Un caffè

c. Un caffè macchiato

Guarda il terzo video. Cosa ordinano i

clienti?

a. Due caffè

b. Un caffè

c. Un caffè decaffeinato macchiato

(one decaf macchiato)

At home – consolidation

Salutare 1 (CEFR - A1)

9

Salutare 2

10

Salutare 3

11

1. B: bene. ciao luigi.

fine. hello luigi.

2. C: ciao

hello →3. B: cosa mi dici?

what are you telling me?=

=how are you?

Salutare 4

12

Speech management strategies (CEFR – B2)

13

Conclusion

14

• ALIAS intent is to build students’ conversational and interactional skills:

o communicative language excercises:

• listening comprehensions,

• interactional practices (Wong & Waring, 2010): ordering food, taking part in a

conversational storytelling, expressing feelings, etc., CEFR).

o Students are asked to pay attention to interactional devices that help the interaction

proceed smoothly and to which ‘real-life’ participants orient during conversations :

- Turn taking: how participants select the next speaker, how to hold the floor, when to

end and to begin the next turn (including overlaps and listener responses);

- Boundaries: openings and closings of activity types;

- Organization, initiation and change of topic;

- Adjacency pairs (e.g. greetings, leave-taking, invitations, requests, compliments,

and so forth) and their preference organization;

- Repair, the ways in which participants respond to interactional trouble in a given

activity/practice.

References

15

• Biber, D., Johansson, S., Leech, G., Conrad , S. & Finegan, E. 1999 Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written

English. Harlow: Pearson Education.

• CEFR, Common European Framework of Reference for Languages, Council of Europe 2001.

• Gilquin, G. 2008 “Hesitation markers among EFL learners: Pragmatic deficiency or difference?”. In J. Romero-Trillo

(Ed.), Pragmatics and Corpus Linguistics: A Mutualistic Entente. Berlin/Heidelberg/New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 119-

149.

• Hasselgren, A. 2002. “Learner corpora and language testing: Smallwords as markers of learner fluency”. In S.

Granger, J. Hung & S. Petch-Tyson (Eds.), Computer Learner Corpora, Second Language Acquisition and Foreign

Language Teaching. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 143-173.

• Müller, S. 2005. Discourse Markers in Native and Non-native English Discourse. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John

Benjamins.

• Nuovo Progetto Italiano 1a. Marin T. & S. Magnelli. 2013. Roma/Atene: Edilingua.

• Rühlemann, C. 2006. „Coming to term with conversational grammar: ‚Dislocation‘ and ‚dysfluency‘“. International

Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 11 (4), 385-409.

• Saville-Troike, M.2006. Introducing Second Language Acquisition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

• Wong, J & H.Z. Waring, 2010. Conversation Analysis and Second Language Pedagogy. A Guide for ESL/EFL

Teachers. New York, N.Y: Routledge.