Pragmatic competence in multi-party talk: Teaching EAP students turn-initial language.

One gap in EAP research is the language needed for turn-taking in multi-party academic talk. This language is important for pragmatic competence in speech, since it is used to manage the relationships within the discourse (Aijmer, 2011; Evison, 2013; Viana and O’ Boyle, 2021). While studies by Evison (2013) and Bardovi-Harlig et al. (2015) investigate useful turn-taking language in academic speech generally, they do not investigate the use of such language specifically in multi party settings. The purpose of the current study is therefore to determine which vocabulary used at turn openings in more interactive academic talk needs to be taught so that EAP students can both understand the stance of the other interlocutors and take the floor in multi-party talk on their academic courses. To this end, the data sets proposed by both Evison (2013) and Bardovi-Harlig et al. (2015) are re-evaluated using only the seminars and study groups in the Michigan Corpus of Spoken Academic English. The results of this evaluation show that the most prevalent turn-initial lexes are multi-faceted and semantically nuanced words such as yeah and well. These words, however, tend to be used either inappropriately or not at all by language learners (Aijmer, 2011; Polat, 2011; and Lo, 2013). Thus, EAP teachers need to be cognisant of both the appropriate words to teach and strategies for teaching them (see Bardovi-Harlig et al., 2015; Heron, 2019; Tomlinson, 2020; Williams, 1988; Wong and Waring, 2010). This paper therefore concludes with a brief overview of pedagogic strategies suggested in the literature, such as providing class time for students to notice the target language in context along with scaffolded practice (Ryan and Forrest, 2021).