CONVERSATIONAL BEHAVIORS OF MONOLINGUAL AND BILINGUAL CHILDREN: A STUDY ON EPISODES AND INITIATIONS

Öz Conversations shape social interactions and conversational rules shape understanding among the participants. Among these conversational rules, initiations, verbal or non-verbal, are one of the basic rules. Initiations are important in the sense that they signal where a certain stretch of discourse, in other words, episodes, starts and ends in long stretches of discourse. Each episode in a conversation continues the same topic and contributes to topical coherence. Therefore, applying conversational rules are important at all stages of language development since it will prevent communication breakdowns. In this study, the focus is on the type of episodes that take place in conversations and how episodes are initiated by both monolingual Turkish-speaking and bilingual Turkish-Danish-speaking children. For this purpose, group conversations of monolingual and bilingual children were analyzed in terms of episodes and how these episodes are initiated. The results show that conversational skills continues to develop at school age. Being a monolingual or bilingual also makes a difference in conversational skills.

Anahtar Kelimeler:

Conversational Skills, Episodes, Initiations, Monolingual, Bilingual

PDF

___

Gee, J. P. (2014). An Introduction to discourse analysis: Theory and method. (4th ed.). New York: Routledge. Hamilton, C. and Creel, B. (2016). Communicating for success. New York: Routledge. Hutchby, I. and Wooffit, R. (1998). Conversation analysis. Blackwell, Oxford. Korolija, N. and Linell, P. (1996). Episodes: coding and analyzing coherence in multiparty conversation. Linguistics. 34, (4), 799-831. Liddicoat, A. (2007). An Introduction to conversation analysis. London: Continuum. Linell, P. and Korolija, N. (1997). Coherence in multi-party conversation episodes and contexts in interaction. In T. Givon (Ed.) Conversation: Cognitive, communicative and social Perspective. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Özcan, F. H., Keçik, İ. and Jørgensen, J. N. (Eds.). 2010. A text collection of Turkish grade school students’ conversations. Copenhagen: University of Copenhagen. Schiffrin, D. (1994). Approaches to discourse. Oxford: Blackwell. Sidnell, J. (2010). Conversation analysis: An introduction. London: Blackwell. Sidnell, J. and Stivers, T. (Eds.). (2012). Handbook of conversation analysis. Boston: Wiley-Blackwell. Stephens, G. and Matthews, D. (2014). The communicative infant from 0-18 months: The social-cognitive foundations of pragmatic development. In D. Matthews (Ed.) Pragmatic development in first language acquisition. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Siegal, M. and Surian, L. (2007). Conversational understanding in young children. In E. Hoff and M. Shatz (Eds.) Blackwell handbook of language development. Oxford: Blackwell. Turan, F. (1999). A text collection of Turkish-Danish bilingual grade school students’ conversations. Copenhagen, Danmarks Laererhojskoles Reproduktionsafdeling. Woofit, R. (2005). Discourse analysis and conversation analysis. London: Sage.