1

Name: Dwi Mahmud Riza Maulana

180210401084

TURN TAKING

In conversation, two or more people participate in exchanging ideas. It means

that there are at least two individuals who take part in the conversation as the speaker
and the listener and the two participants have to take turn of speaking. Each
participant has the power to control the floor in ongoing conversation. However, there
will be only one participant who speaks at a time. Since there will be two or more
participants in a conversation, we could not estimate who will take the turn because
each participant has the same right to speak. Therefore, each participant has the same
opportunity to take the turn. The exchange of turn occurs orderly. The reason is that
there are rules which govern our conversation. When someone talks, the others will
listen to him and wait for their turns. Those rules are called turn taking system.

There are three features that have breakdown the turn taking process in
conversation. Those are Overlap, repair, and backchannel.
1. Overlap

One example of features which is breakdown in turn taking is when there is

two people attempt to speak at the same time. Actually, the ideal model of
conversational turn taking stressed the exchange of turns with minimal gap and
overlap between them. In fact, in actual conversations both gap and overlap are
frequent. Where there is overlap between turns it has some particular significance:
signaling annoyance, urgency, or a desire to correct what is being said.
Example:
A: Mary's invited us to lunch. Do ya wanna go?
B: Sure. I'm not busy right now.
A: Good.
B: Think we oughta bring anything?
In this example, in row three speaker A expects Speaker B to complete its turn
and Speaker A self selects himself, but speaker B doesn't and continues the turn, so
the next speaker overlaps the current speaker. Speaker A puts speaker B on line four
and stops talking to correct a mistake in the conversation.

2. Repair
There is a wide problem in conversation, such as incorrect word selection,
slips of the tongue, miss-hearings, misunderstandings and so on. To solve this
 2

problem, sometimes the speaker modifies, replaces, repeats a turn or does not take a
turn which is called repair. So when someone fails to speak, the speaker usually stops
and the other person starts talking. Another option is to reopen the opportunity by
pausing and repeating what was said to give the target speaker another chance if they
don't hear or don't understand the point the first time.
Example:
A: “Do you want to play this game?”
(Pause)
A: “Do you want to play this game?” (Repetition)
B: “No, thank you.” (Catch the point)
Repair is also often done through self-repairs and others repairs. For example,
“I’m going to Jakarta tomorrow... I mean, Surabaya.” And the other person/ the
listener might repair what we have said, that is called other repair.

3. Backchannel
Back-channel is used to make conversation smoother because it has the ability
to minimize gaps and overlaps. While the speaker is talking, the listener does not
remain silent, but rather provides verbal and non-verbal response without the
intention to take the turn. Back-channel is used by the listener to give signals that
show that the messages are delivered. It is important because it indicates that the
listener pays attention to the speaker and still in the conversation. There two kinds of
back-channel; it can be verbal like " Right", "cool", "great" and "really. It can be also
verbal but not lexical such as "um", "Oh", "ah", and "mm". The other kind is the non-
verbal like laughing, crying and shouting.
Example:
A: Every weekend, the children sort of expect chocolate cake.
B: Hmmm…
A: and this was a bind especially when I was working up till late.
In this conversation, Speaker B uses backchannels to acknowledge what the current
speaker says and generally encourage her/him to go on.