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Pragmatics > Telephone Conversation Openings
Telephone Conversation Openings
Jean Wong
The College of New Jersey, United States
Level: College or adult students, high intermediate - advanced
ESL learners
Time: 2-3 lessons (45-60 minutes per lesson)
Resources: Telephone, device for recording telephone conversations
(purchasable at electronics stores) or answering machine (many of which
are capable of recording telephone conversations), ESL textbook telephone
dialogues
Goals: To develop awareness and understanding of the nature of
telephone conversation openings from a social, interactional perspective
Description of the Activity
In this series of lessons, students will develop an awareness and
understanding of the nature of genuine American English telephone openings.
Students will serve as discourse analysts, recording and transcribing
real telephone conversation openings between native and nonnative speakers
of English. They will juxtapose the findings of their telephone data with
a discussion provided by the teacher on the nature of telephone openings
in American English. To prepare for this discussion, the teacher consults
the literature on telephone openings in conversation analysis (see Rationale
section below) and prepares a handout that illustrates sequence types
typically found in American English telephone conversations. These sequence
types are summons-answer, identification-recognition, greeting, and "how
are you" (see Teacher Resource). It is important that the teacher
underscore the interactional and collaborative nature of these opening
sequences and the coordinated character of social actions on a turn-by-turn
basis. Students should not view the opening of a telephone conversation
as something that just happens or dismiss it as merely the segment of
talk preliminary to an interaction. Rather, they must understand that
the real function of openings in telephone interaction is to pave the
way for the introduction of the first topic, the place at which substantive
talk begins.
Procedure
- Warm-up activity: Discussion of difficulties, problems, or concerns
ESL students face in making telephone calls in English.
- Have students record and transcribe the opening segment of two to
three actual telephone conversations between native and nonnative speakers.
The teacher may need to explain how to transcribe, perhaps by providing
a sample of a transcribed telephone conversation. (It is better if the
student data collector is not a participant in the conversation being
collected and transcribed.) The data collector will need to secure permission
of the person whose phone call is being recorded; this is most easily
done when the recording is between close friends. However, students
are not to divulge to participants that the reason for the data collection
is to examine telephone openings until after the data are collected,
as this may affect the nature of the talk produced.
- The teacher discusses with students the four types of American English
telephone conversation: 1) summons-answer, 2) identification-recognition,
3) greeting, and 4) how-are-you? Particular attention should be paid
to how identification and recognition is accomplished in telephone conversation
openings. There are nine basic types of caller's first turns (Schegloff,
1979, see Teacher Resource), but ESL learners often rely on only one
of them, namely, "May I speak to _____________?"
- The teacher should point out that in telephone openings, callers
typically position themselves to be the asker of the first "How
are you?" sequence in order to assume the position of being the
answerer of the second one. This is because it is from the position
of being the answerer of the second "How are you?" that callers
tend to move toward the first topic, or reason for the call. The teacher
may briefly address those responses to "How are you?" that
lead to further talk and those responses that tend to end the sequence.
ESL textbook dialogues often include only "How are you?" sequences
to end the opening sequence. (See Sacks,1975).
- The teacher collects the students' transcriptions and makes copies
for all members of the class, assembling a collection of native-nonnative
speaker telephone openings for all students to analyze.
- Students examine the compilation of telephone openings, comparing
and contrasting them with the structural organization of real native
speaker English telephone conversations. The teacher asks the students:
Are the sequence types characteristic of real telephone conversations
found between native and non-native speakers? If not, what occurs instead?
How are the interactional tasks of summoning of the parties, identification
and recognition of the parties, greeting, and "How are you?"
accomplished in such conversational openings? Are there telephone conversation
openings between native and non-native speakers that diverge from those
typically found between native English speakers? Are the differences,
if any, due to language problems or cultural variation?
- Summarizing activity: The teacher returns to the discussion of problems,
difficulties, or concerns in telephone interaction (item 1 above), asking
students to reconsider how the telephone activities performed clarify
or contribute to their understanding and awareness of telephone conversations
between native speakers of American English.
Rationale
Telephone interaction is perhaps not taught enough in ESL classrooms,
nor is textbook treatment of telephone conversation adequate (Wong 2002).
These deficiencies pose a serious problem for ESL learners, given how
much everyone relies on the telephone in our everyday lives. Telephone
talk appears to be one area in which ESL learners are particularly sensitive,
since they frequently state that it is difficult to talk on the telephone
and they either avoid or limit such interactions.
Textbook writers increasingly use authentic spoken language data in developing
their language teaching materials. However, although a communicative approach
to language teaching has been touted for years, not much progress has
been made in incorporating this approach into pedagogical materials, particularly
those related to telephone interaction. Hence teachers will need to ensure
that they understand this important area of language learning and, when
necessary, develop their own teaching material. The lessons described
below offers some suggestions on how to teach about telephone interaction.
The proposed activities help teachers connect discourse analysis to language
education and view language as a social process (Celce-Murcia and Olshtain,
2000; McCarthy and Carter 1994).
Alternatives and Caveats
If it is difficult for students to record authentic native to non-native
speaker telephone conversations, item 2 may be omitted from the lesson
plans. Instead, the teacher could collect the telephone conversation data
for the students to use.
Another warm-up activity (item 1) involves asking ESL students to jot
down the opening segment of what they imagine a typical telephone conversation
between Americans would be like. They then can compare this imagined conversation
with the real telephone openings they later collect or with telephone
openings in their ESL textbook.
For an enrichment activity, comparison of authentic telephone conversations
between native and non-native speakers can be expanded to include ESL/EFL
textbook telephone dialogues. In this activity, students compare the four
types of American telephone conversations with those found in ESL textbooks.
(The teacher may need to supply samples of ESL textbook telephone dialogues
for students to review.) The teacher directs the students to consider
the following questions: How do ESL textbook telephone dialogues open?
How do authentic textbook telephone openings differ, if at all, from those
discussed in the literature for American English conversation? How do
ESL textbook telephone conversations differ from openings that native-nonnative
speaker dyads produce in telephone interactions? What interactional issues
are relevant in telephone openings? …in ESL textbook telephone dialogues?
Teacher Resource
Telephone Openings: Four Sequence Types
[ Note: R stands for the recipient/answerer and C stands for the caller.]
Summons/answer sequence 1 [Schegloff, 1986, p. 115,
#247]
(ring)
01 R Hello.
02 C Hello, Jim? [identification sequence]
03 R Yeah.
04 C It's Bonnie.
05 R Hi. [greeting sequence]
06 C Hi. How are yuh? [first How are you? sequence]
07 R Fine. How're you? [second How are you sequence]
08 C Oh, okay, I guess.
09 R Oh, okay.
Summons/answer sequence 2 [Schegloff, 1986, p. 114,
#1]
(ring)
01 Nancy: H'llo:?
02 Hyla: Hi. [identification and greeting]
03 Nancy: Hi.
04 Hyla: Hwaryuhh? [first how are you]
06 Nancy: Fine. How'r you? [second how are you]
07 Hyla: Okay.
08 Nancy: Good.
09 Hyla: hmmm
10 Nancy: What's doin?
Caller's First Turn: Nine Basic Types
(The nine types of caller's first turn shown below are adapted from Schegloff,
1979):
(1) Greeting Terms:
R: H'llo?
C: Hi.
R: Hello.
C: Hello.
(2) Answerer's, presumed answerer's, or intended answerer's name in varying
combinations of first name, title plus last name, or nickname in a range
of interrogative tones
R: Hello.
C: Miz Parsons?
R: Hello.
C: Irene?
(3) Answerer's, presumed answerer's, or intended answerer's name in varying
combinations of name components in a range of assertive, exclamatory,
or terminal intonations.
R: Hello?
C: Charlie.
R: Hello.
C: Uh, Tony.
(4) Question or noticing concerning answerer's state
R: Hello.
C: Are you awake?
R: Hello.
C: Hello. You're home.
(5) "First topic" or "reason for the call"
R: Hello.
C: When will you be done?.
R: Hello.
C: Hi, are my kids there?
(6) Request to speak to another person
R: Hello.
C: Is Jessie there?
R: Hello.
C: May I speak to Bonnie?
(7) Self-identification
R: Hello?
C: Hi Bonnie. This is Dave.
R: Hello?
C: Hello. It's me.
(8) Question about identity of answerer
R: Hello.
C: Hello. Is this Kitty?
R: Hello.
C: Hello. Who's this?
(9) A joke, or joke version of one of the above (e.g., mimicked intonation,
intentionally incorrect identification, funny accent, etc.)
R: Hello?
C: Helloooooo
References
Celce-Murcia, M., & Olshtain, E. (2000). Discourse and context
in language teaching. New York: Cambridge University Press.
McCarthy, M., & R. Carter (1994). Language as discourse. London:
Longman.
Sacks, H. (1975). Everyone has to lie. In M. Sanches & B.G.
Blount (Eds.), Sociocultural dimensions of language use (pp. 57-80). New
York: Academic Press.
Schegloff, E. (1979). Identification and recognition in telephone
conversation openings. In Psathas, G. (Ed.), Everyday language studies
in ethnomethodology (pp. 23-78), New York: Irvington Publishers.
Schegloff, E. (1986). Sequencing in conversational openings. American
Anthropologist, 70(6), pp. 1075-1095.
Wong, J. (1984). Using conversational analysis to evaluate telephone
conversations in English as a second language textbooks. Unpublished
master’s thesis, University of California, Los Angeles.
Wong, J. (2002). “Applying” conversation analysis in applied
linguistics: Evaluating dialogue in English as a second language textbooks.
International Review of Applied Linguistics, 40, pp. 37-60.
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