Cross-Cultural Turn-Taking, Yielding, and Holding Strategies Used in Talk Shows.

Abstract

The study aims at casting light on one of the main problems that speakers face up in cross-cultural conversations. It attempts to explore the difference between Arab and Anglo-Saxon speakers’ turn-taking, yielding, and holding strategies. To achieve this aim, two morning talk shows conversations were selected, namely “Sabah El-KheirYa Arab” and “This Morning”. Conversation analysis was chosen to carry out this research. The scripts of the talk shows were analyzed to identify the use of turn-taking strategies ( i.e., turn-taking, turn-yielding ,and turn-holding ) and their identifiers(i.e., overlaps, back-channels ,and adjacency pairs). The results indicate that Arab and Anglo-Saxon speakers use turn-taking, yielding, and holding strategies with different interpretations ( e.g.,Anglo-Saxon’s speakers consider interruption as a sign opposing. However, Arab speakers cooperate with each other through interruption) Furthermore, the data suggests that there are some problems related to conversational turn-taking strategies, in forms of overlaps, silences, number of pauses (i.e., misunderstanding of cross-cultural turn taking identifiers could lead to faulty interpretations among speakers) . It also shows that British speakers have the tendency to control the floor, regardless of the next speaker position. On the other hand, Arab speakers tend to value turn-taking strategies with regard to their culture.