(Page 1 of 1) - Conversation Construction Behavior during Highly-Scripted Pair Work Activity authored by He, Yunjuan. and Shen, Cynthia.

Conversation Construction Behavior during Highly-Scripted Pair Work Activity

in the Beginning Mandarin Chinese Classroom

This study was designed to investigate conversation construction behaviors that
American students performed to finish highly-scripted conversation activities in pair
work. The testing materials were two highly-scripted mini dialogues in English with
the learned vocabulary and grammar patterns from the most recently introduced
chapter in the textbook.

Three participating students were paired up with their classmates to perform a mini
dialogue first, (NNS-NNS pair) and they did a similar mini talk with their Chinese
instructor later (NS-NNS pair). All three students have studied Mandarin Chinese for
only three months. None of them had Chinese learning experience prior to the current
Chinese learning. Their performances were videotaped.

Three research questions were: 1) What kinds of conversation construction behaviors
did American student performed during the activity? 2) Did they perform differently
when they did the activity with speakers with different language backgrounds and 3)
What is the effect of highly-scripted conversation on the quality of L2 used during the
activity? Compared with the frequencies of certain types of behaviors between NNS-
NNS pair and NS-NNS pair during the conversations, we found that: 1) the tested
students made more confirmation checks in NS-NNS pair, 2) They also made more
self-corrections on grammars when they did the activity with the native speaker. 3)
They did more eye-contacting in NS-NNS pair, and 4) only the native speaker
provided help on correcting grammar mistakes made by tested students. However,
there was no obvious increasing or decreasing tendency of using English of the three
tested students with different speakers. In terms of the quality of L2 used during the
activity, we found that: 1) the tested students in NNS-NNS pair paid more attention on
the correct use of vocabulary than the correct pronunciations and grammar
expressions, 2) students in NS-NNS pair focused only on preparing their own
translation part and ignored the production from their counterpart, and 3) students in
NS-NNS pair tended to be more careful about their perception of the native speaker’s
talk and their production of their own part. In other words, students treated the highly-
scripted conversation activity in NNS-NNS pair like a translation task, and took the
activity in NS-NNS pair more like a conversation task.

Based on the behavioral patterns observed during the activities with non native
speakers and native speakers, we are proposing a teaching method with greater
learning effectiveness. We first pair students in classroom in order to make them
recall the vocabulary and get familiar with the content of the mini dialogue. After that,
the instructor must give a follow-up check with at least one student. This step is an
essential part to ensure that the student makes efforts on producing correct sentences
in NNS-NNS pair; it is also a step to provide the correct example in front of all
students. However, the highly-scripted conversation activity can result in limited
practice of perception skill. In the future, we need to leave rooms for more
simultaneous talking in the activity for developing participants’ perception skills.