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 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?
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.
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