The Identification Of Exchange Structures In Chinese EFL Learners' Conversations In A Testing Context

This thesis reports the study which investigates exchange structures in Chinese EFL learners'conversations. The main questions addressed are: (1) What are the general characteristics of exchange structures used by Chinese EFL learners in their conversations in a testing context? (2) What are the acts in the different moves that are likely to facilitate the variety of exchange structures in their conversations? The purpose of the study is to describe L2 learners'preference for the use of exchange structures in their fabricated conversations in testing situations.The materials employed in this study were based on the data retrieved from SWECCL, a Chinese EFL learner corpus. The sampled data were 33 conversations driven by the task of role play between test-takers, which requires one of the speakers to provide to the other the information about college life. The conceptual framework followed in the data analysis is based on Tsui's analytic framework of exchange. The qualitative data analysis generated the following findings:Firstly, of 464 exchanges identified in the sampled data, the test-takers'exchanges follow Tsui's classical exchange structure of I-R-F (Initiation-Response-Follow-up) with 4 major variants of I-R, I~1-I~2-R, I-I~1-R~1-R and I-R-F~1-F~2.Of all the types identified, I-R enjoys the highest frequency of occurrence, indicating that I-R is the exchange structure shared by Chinese EFL learners in the testing setting, and meanwhile suggesting that L2 learners are cognitively shaped in the schema of this exchange structure. Possible reasons for the higher percentage of I-R than I-R-F are related to L2 learners'discourse competence and the anxiety produced by the testing context.I-R-F~1-F~2 was the least frequently used variant, in which, as the case analysis indicated, very few test-takers tended to use the second follow-up as a means of relinquishing the floor, which partially reflects that most test-takers were eager to make more contributions to the conversation. Secondly, the initiating move was found to be a determinant leading to the variety of exchange structures, which confirms Tsui's claim in her theory. Of 4 acts (informative, elicitation, requestive and directive) identified in the initiating move, informative accounts for the biggest percentage in facilitating I-R structure, which is likely to be related to the effect that the testing task requirements produce. Elicitation makes the biggest contribution to establishing I-R-F structure, in which the exchanges between the speakers started with the initiator's demand for the information, followed respectively by the other speaker's response and the initiator's acknowledgement.The in-depth analysis reveals that the complex relations of acts and their variants combine to produce the variety of exchange structures, such as I-I~1-R~1-R, which is, to the greatest degree, brought about by the act of elicit: clarify, a variant of elicitation.Theoretically, the identified variants of I-R-F in this study more or less confirms and even expands the conceptual assumption about conversation structures made by Tsui, who holds that conversation is organized in terms of a potentially"three-element"exchanges. Practically, the findings yielded in this study may raise L2 teachers'awareness of developing L2 learners'discourse competence.