Offering Exchanges: From Research Data to Classroom Practice

This paper addressed the under-investigated question whether speech act moves can be identified and classified in conversation by examining the content, positioning, and strategic role of utterances in turns and turn sequences. To this end, offering exchanges were analysed in the transcripts of 31 open role-plays. These were elicited from American native speakers through written prompts, and exemplified dialogues between interactants differing in terms of social distance and degree of power. In the data examined, the offerers and the offerees produced conversation management moves for opening, closing, and sustaining the interaction (e.g., summoning vs responding to summons), and goal-furthering moves for negotiating the offering exchange in line with their complementary initiating vs responding discursive and speech-act roles (e.g., motivating the offer vs the reaction to it). The study revealed that: the strategies realizing offers and reactions to them were similar across interactional role-relationships; clusters of moves showed preferred sequencing patterns; the interlocutors actively cooperated towards the co-construction of their interaction; and function-detecting heuristic prompts were particularly useful for the identification of moves in turns. Pedagogical implications were drawn from the findings, showing how model scripts may help language learners become familiar with the interactional strategies called for in goal-oriented communication.