Interruption In English Academic Spoken English:A Case Study Based On The Office Hour Interaction From Michigan Corpus Of Academic Spoken English

Interruption is a common phenomenon in conversation and it has been widely investigated by scholars(Sacks et al.,1974;Zimmerman & West,1975;McCloskey,1996;Kohonen,2004;Drew,2009;Jacobsen,2019;Li & Shen,2003;Kuang,2005).The study of interruption has covered different types of interactions,for example,doctor-patient conversation(Sakamoto & Okub,2019;Shen & Zhang,2013),courtroom interaction(Bgoch,2003;Jiang et al.,2016),and family conversation(Daigen & Holmes,2000;Han & Zhang,2011).However,interruption in English academic discourse has been less discussed by scholars.Therefore,this study aims to examine the interruption in English academic spoken discourse,focusing on the position,manner of interruption and the reasons for the interruption.Office hours,as one of the important sub-genres of English academic spoken discourse,were selected as the data of this study in the Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English(MICASE),including 6 related transcripts.Based on the selected data,three questions are addressed in this study:(1)Where do interruptions occur in a sequence in office hour interaction?(2)What devices are used to realize the interruption in office hour interaction?(3)Why does interruption occur in office hour interction?After conducting both quantitative and qualitative analysis of the collected data,the study yields the following results:(1)There are three positions of interruption appearing in a sequence: at the beginning of a sentence,at the middle of a sentence and at the end of a sentence.Interruption at the middle of a sentence appears most.(2)Interruptions in the selected data can be divided into two categories in terms of the linguistic devices used: interruption with discourse markers and interruption without discourse markers.The former appears more than the latter.Discourse markers often used to label interruptions are causal markers,contrastive markers,additive makers,choosing markers,summative markers,temporal markers,filling markers with semantic meaning,filling markers without semantic meaning and other type of markers.(3)For the reasons of interruption,the present study concludes ten ones as follows:expressing the speaker's own opinion,presenting the question,answering the question,seizing the turn,helping compose the turn,putting forward the rhetorical question,interjecting the echo word,rectifying the speaker,encouraging the speaker to continue,require others to listen to the speaker.Among these,expressing the speaker's own opinion appears most.(4)This study also examines the distribution of interruption in terms of the power relations between two parties in interaction.The two parties / sides are: the side with high personal power(HPPS)(i.e.,instructor,advisor,facilitator and researcher in office hours)and the other side with low personal power(LPPS)(i.e.,student).Thus,the interruption can be divided into three types: HPPS interrupting LPPS,LPPS interrupting HPPS,LPPS interrupting LPPS.Among these,HPPS interrupting LPPS occurs most.Theoretically,this study examines the manner,position and reasons of interruption in academic spoken English,thus enriching the study of interruption.Methodologically,the study combines conversation analysis and quantitative method,which may contribute to the further research on interruption.In practice,the study helps communicators use interruption as a pragmatic strategy to achieve their goals in communication.In addition,this study can enhance our understanding of the discourse features of academic spoken English,thus helping communicators avoid embarrassment while interrupting and being helpful for the teaching of English academic spoken discourse.