A Contrastive Analysis Of Verbal Backchannels In Academic Conversation-A Study Based On MICASE

During the process of conversation, listeners produce verbal or non-verbalbackchannels to show their attention to speakers. Backchannels play a significant rolein conversations, which do not take over speakers’ turn and maintain the smooth ofconversation. At present, although much attention is paid to backchannels inlinguistics, less is involved in academic contexts.Guided by the conversational analysis (CA), the present study conducts acontrastive method to investigate verbal backchannels. Four study groups’ materialsof the study corpus from MICASE are collected (61,408words in total). According toDuncan and Fiske’s (1985) classification of backchannels and based on six featuresprovided by Liu Hong (2004), this study adopts qualitative and quantitative analysismethods to investigate the similarities and differences of the use of verbalbackchannels from the perspective of forms, distribution features among differentdisciplines and between genders in academic conversations and analyze the pragmaticfunctions.Through the qualitative and quantitative analysis methods, the study finds that:(1) the frequencies of six forms of verbal backchannels including vocalizations,lexical items, sentence completion, repetition, brief statement and request forclarification in four disciplines (“biological and health science”,“humanities and arts”,“physical sciences and engineering” and “social science and education”) differ fromeach other, which may be due to the different characters of disciplines. The frequencyof verbal backchannels in this study is far below the result of previous researches ofdaily conversation. Females utter slightly more verbal backchannels than males intotal;(2) Verbal backchannels occur more often at turn-internal place apart from thesein biochemical and health science, especially in physical science and engineering andsocial science and education. Females are more involved than males incommunication since females tend to use more turn-internal verbal backchannels thanmales. Verbal backchannels display a lower overlap tendency than no-overlap exceptin social science and education. The frequencies of part overlap are relatively rare infour disciplines. Both females and males utter more no-overlap verbal backchannelsthan overlap and part-overlap ones, especially of males;(3) seven types of pragmaticfunctions including listening, understanding, approval, appraisement or evaluation,confirmation or clarification, assistance and concession emerge in the current research.