Investigation of Turn-taking Strategies: The Case of Master Students of English

Abstract

The study aims at casting light on one of the main problems that English language university students face up when conversing. It attempts thus to explore the master English language students competence in managing turn taking strategies. To achieve this aim we audio recorded five conversations which occurred naturally and spontaneously among a sample of students who were randomly selected. These conversations were using a conversation analysis approach, and were transcribed in order to display how students participate in talk and to retrieve the data about the usage of turn taking strategies and their signals in real life interaction. The results obtained indicate that the students of Master have high competence when managing the talk in English language. Furthermore, the data suggest that there are some problems that appear in forms of overlaps, silences, and the high number of pauses, it shows also that not all of the students were capable of overcoming those problems. On the other hands, the students who were able to handle the problems succeeded in keeping their turns and jumping into conversations at the right time.