Investigating cross-cultural turn-taking strategies;a contrastive study between english and arabic mechanisms

Abstract

The present study sheds light on Cross-cultural Turn Taking strategies; a contrastive study of Arabic and English mechanisms, as a central issue in pragmatics and conversation analysis. Under the scope of conversation analysis, this study is conducted to discuss the Turn-taking mechanisms across culturally. The latter is carried out through transcribing videos taken from TV shows from both cultures -English and Arabic- namely BBC English, Al-djazeera TV and Saudi2 to collect data for the analysis. The system of Turn-taking includes both verbal and non-verbal signals namely: pauses, overlaps, discourse markers, adjacency pairs, intonation, and body language. These strategies are compared and contrasted in order to find out the main differences in terms of Turn-taking strategies between the two cultures. On the whole, the treatment gives that Turn-taking cues differ across- cultures and this validates the stated research hypothesis which is: if people knew that Turn-taking strategies differ from one culture to another, cross-cultural pragmatic failure would be reduced. The present research consists of two chapters: one theoretical and another one is practical. The theoretical chapter consists of two sections; the first section will be about teaching culture, while the second section will be about Turn-taking strategies across-cultures. The practical chapter describes the tools of research, displays the findings, and ends up with some recommendations