A Descriptive Analysis Of Verbal Turn-taking Strategies In Group Discussion Of CET(â…£)-SET

Turn-taking is the fundamental organization form of conversation and theapplication of turn-taking strategies helps to make the process of conversation gosmoothly. However, previous researches on turn-taking are mainly carried on perfectingthe turn-taking theory, studying turn-taking in institutional settings and so on. Fewresearches have been conducted on investigating students’ usage of verbal turn-takingstrategies under test conditions as well as comparing the verbal turn-taking strategiesadopted by students who have various communicative competence levels.The present research takes ten videos of CET (IV)-SET as the study materials,using the turn-taking theory and conversation analysis methodology, to reveal theoverall condition of candidates’ application of verbal strategies for taking, holding andyielding a turn during the second part of CET (IV)-SET, namely, group discussion. Inaddition, candidates’ usage of verbal turn-taking strategies is compared based on theircommunicative competence levels.The research result shows that candidates are capable of using some verbalturn-taking strategies in group discussion of CET (IV)-SET. While taking a turn,candidates who are on higher communicative competence levels tend to resort to verbalstrategies uptakes and ritual remarks, but their use frequency of other types of verbalstrategies for taking a turn is very low. Level D candidate couldn’t get a chance to speakby using verbal strategies for taking a turn. During the process of holding a turn, level Band level C candidates tend to use utterance incompletors more frequently, and level Bcandidates are also capable of using incompletion markers to keep the floor. Whenyielding a turn, level B, level C and level D candidates are all inclined to adopt thedevice, phonological signals, but they seldom refer to the other verbal strategies forrelinquishing a turn. In conclusion, the present study not only contributes to enrichingthe research on turn-taking, but also sheds light on English teaching.