A Contrastive Study Of Teachers’ And Students’Interruption In American University Seminars

Interruption, as a common phenomenon in daily conversations is a crucial feature of conversations. Because interruption is often considered as an act of threatening other’s face, in an attempt to mitigate the face threat and show politeness to mitigate the face-threat to others, the interrupter will often adopt appropriate politeness strategies and such politeness strategies have an impact on the formal organization of conversation.Previous studies show conflicting results regarding the correlation between interruption and power relations in different discourses, such as daily conversations, tutorial talks, business meetings and medical interviews. However, seldom do we have studies investigating academic discourse like university seminars. The university seminar is an important context for both researchers and EFL learners. For researchers, it will be a good opportunity to see whether the classic conclusion that interruption as an indicator of dominance and power would be the same in academic situations. For EFL learners, it will be a great chance to study how native speakers make interruptions in seminars.In order to investigate how power relationship between teachers and students influences the way they make interruptions in university seminars, we look at how native speakers in American university seminars interrupt each other.The data were selected from the MICASE corpus. This paper first re-defines interruption in terms of both the structure and function criteria. By defining interruption in a strict and narrow way, I regard interruption as negative behavior with intention to take the conversational floor.85interruptions were identified from the corpus according to the working definition. Based on Brown and Levinson’s Face Theory, a new model for interruptions strategies was also given. Seven interruption strategies were identified. Then, a comparison was conducted between the teacher and students regarding the frequency of interruptions, types of interruption strategies and the frequency of each strategy.Through an quantitative analysis, the study found that a.) students interrupt more than the teacher; higher power does not necessarily lead to a higher frequency of interruptions; b.) students do not interrupt with more politeness strategies than the teacher; higher power does not necessarily lead to a lower frequency of interruption politeness strategies. It is also revealed that, after the qualitative analysis, c.) the teacher uses more linguistic realizations than the students and with different functions from the students, which is not necessarily caused by power differences.Expectations and conventions of the genre seem to override power, taking first place in determining interruption behaviours. It is suggested that the Model of Face Theory as used in this study may prove to be efficient and applicable to the study of similar data. This study may also shed light on EFL students’learning of turn-taking skills and help EFL learners have a better understanding of how to make interruption in academic context.