CONVERSATION ANALYSIS: TURN-TAKING MECHANISM AND POWER RELATION IN CLASSROOM SETTING

Institutional conversation in the classroom has been known to be fully controlled by the teacher in order to achieve specific goals of the teaching and learning process. This study aims at finding out how teachers manage the flow of classroom interaction, how students may possibly take the floor and issue about power and hierarchy between teacher-students in a teacher-fronted whole classroom interaction. The result is expected to give an overview or a reflection on how teachers encourage learning to happen by the way they use their power to manage the turn taking mechanism in a whole class interaction. The data is in the form of unscripted classroom interaction in the field of language from YouTube. Specifically, the analysis is focussed on analysing the turn-taking rules in a whole class interaction using Conversation Analysis (CA). Gesture is also one means of communication which accompanied verbal communication, and therefore to enrich the data, gestures of the participants are also taken into consideration. This study found that teacher and students turn is asymmetrical. However, teacher possesses no absolute power in term of controlling the turn-taking as students appeared to overlap the teacher’s talk to take the turn and try to perform unfocalized effort to nominate themselves as the first speaker using gestures. The content of teachers’ TCU indicates that the teacher tries to stimulate the students’ critical thinking by posting open-ended question, and evaluates and responds students’ answers by using follow-up question.


INTRODUCTION
Research also found that opportunities to participate actively in lesson is advantageous in learning (Allwright, 2005;Walsh, 2011). For this reason, as the first speaker, teachers need to trigger the students to participate and engage in a whole class interaction by distributing the turn equally.
Nonverbal resources to manage turn allocation in classroom setting has also gain attention (Kääntä, 2012;Sahlström, 2002;Waring, 2014). In order to allocate turns to the students, Kääntä (2012) finds that teachers employ embodied actions, such as gazing, nodding head and performing hand gestures simultaneously with talk in whole class instructional interaction. Even though it is known that interaction in a classroom setting is asymmetrical (Brooks, 2016;Evnitskaya & Berger, 2017;Seedhouse, 2004), research has shown that students might also nominate themselves to take the turn (Kääntä, 2012;Sahlström, 2002;Waring, 2014). In multiparty institutional setting such as classroom, various multimodal actions might involve to enrich the interaction. It is undeniable that hand raising is a quite observable movement to indicate the students' willingness to take the turn. Sahlström (2002) conducted a research about hand-raising in classroom interaction and found that in general, students raise their hands at the teacher's turn or at the end of the teacher's TCU which is accurately projected as TRP to indicate their willingness to take the turn without disturbing the teacher's turn. However, Sahström (2002) underlines that the teacher's TCUs tend to be shorter when the students raise their hands while the teacher is speaking. These studies imply that students do influence teachers' next speaker selection. However, apparently teacher is not always yield the floor to the students who raised their hands as in Waring (2014) study, it is found that teachers sometimes "bypass" students' non-verbal bid such as hand raising to involve non-bidding students.
Apart from being responsible to manage the turn allocation, teachers' power may also visible through the structure of classroom talk between teacher and student. Brooks (2016) found an evidence that in a face to face classroom interaction, teacher maintains certain power structures over class discussion. She found evidence that teacher acts as "Questioner" who continuously throws questions and evaluates students' response. This finding correlates to Mehan (1979) in Brooks, (2016) teacher-students classroom interaction patterns: IRE (Initiation, Response, Evaluation) or IRF (Initiation, Response, Feedback) pattern. Not only shown by spoken discourse, teacher's power is also embodied in the spatial arrangement of a classroom in which the teacher has the absolute right to stand and move around the classroom while others can only do that when they are told by the teacher also reflect that the teacher has greater participation's right than the students (Mchoul, 1978).
Even though previous researches have examined teacher-students interaction during teacher-fronted classroom time, none of it discussed about the turn taking mechanism of the interaction in detailed, covering the approximate length or the characteristics of the teacher and students TCU, either when they took turn after being appointed or when they overlapped each other speech. In addition, this study also interested in examining the power and hierarchy in classroom interaction through the turn taking mechanism and the content of teacher's TCU and students' TCU. This becomes important to give overview or reflection on how should teachers encourage learning to happen by the way they utilize their power to manage the turn taking mechanism in a whole class interaction. In short, I seek to answer these following research questions. 1. What is the turn-taking patterns of the teacher-students interaction during teacherfronted classroom time under investigation of this study; including how the teacher signals the turn allocation and how the students indicate their intention to take the turn, and the length of the students TCU when they take turn after/without being nominated? 2. How power and hierarchy are being represented in the teacher-fronted classroom interaction under investigation of this study as representing by the content of teacher's TCU and students' TCU?

METHOD
The data used for this study is unscripted classroom interaction video recording which was uploaded by Wakefield (2010) on YouTube at the following URL https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tAz7TD02ytU. The total duration of the video is 9.59, but only approximately the first 6 minutes of the video was transcribed. The stretch of interaction under study begins at 0.01 and ends at 6.17. In this video, there was one female teacher engaged in a whole class interaction with approximately 17 students. Due to privacy reason, all identified names mentioned in the video were converted into pseudonym. From the video, the teacher circulated around the classroom while delivering teachers talk, whereas, the students sat on their seats. They learned and discussed about the meaning of some words and the root of words which were related to a language class genre.
The YouTube video was converted to a WAV file and exported to ELAN; a computer software to transcribe and annotate audio recording (ELAN (Version 4.9.4), 2016). The teacher's hand gestures when allocating the turn, such as pointing hand, and also the students' gesture, such as hand-raising are recorded in the transcription. Following Kääntä (2012), in the transcription, the gestures were written in between wavy brackets ({...}). Additionally, in an attempt to indicate the time when the hand gestures were performed, the explanation of the gesture was written underneath the stretch of speech which was produced at the same time as the occurrence of the hand gesture (see Appendix 1 for the complete key of the transcription convention).
CA (Conversation Analysis) coined by (Sacks et al., 1978) is applied in order to find the turn-taking's rule of the data under investigation. The Turn Constructional Unit (TCU) and the Transition Relevance Place (TRP) are analysed based on CA theory by focussing on the speaker's intonation (raising or falling), how the speakers yielded the floor to other speakers, how the speakers nominated themselves to take the turn, the content of the speakers' TCU and also the words that the speakers used to manage the turn allocation. All of these aspects were recorded in a detailed transcription (see Appendix 2 for the full transcription). In addition to the verbal cues performed by the speakers, the physical turn-taking regulating signals such as hand raising performed by the participants were also examined to reveal the teacher's way in allocating the turn and the student's strategies to perform turn-taking initiation.

FINDINGS Turn-Taking Pattern
Six extracts along with the explanation are presented to reveal the general turntaking rule of the investigated classroom interaction. Extract 1 and 2 are the examples of the most occurring turn-taking patterns. Extract 3, 4, 5, and 6 are the examples of the less occurring turn-taking patterns. From the presented Extracts, the overall rule is summarized at the end of this point. In Extract 1 (line 15), there are three students directly raising their hands at the completion of the teacher's TCU (line 14). This TRP can be accurately projected since the teacher clearly yields the floor by using the word "what" to pose a question to the students. Additionally, she lengthens the final syllable and drops the intonation a little bit at the end of her TCU (line 014). However, the students do not directly take the floor, they raise their hands until the teacher nominates the next speaker in line 017 by mentioning a student's name and pointing at the student. Then, the nominated student takes the floor by answering the teacher question. When the nominated student is speaking in line 019, the other students still indicate their intention to speak by raising their hands, but after the nominated student completed his TCU as indicated by the falling intonation, after 0.1 second gap the teacher self-selected herself to take the turn and produce stretch of speech in lines 023, 024, 025, and 028; she ignores the students' signals to take the turn until the students put their hands down in line 029. Other examples of this pattern can be found in Appendix 2, specifically, lines 050-062, lines 097-105, lines 151-168, lines 250-261. Extract 2 (line 219) shows that the teacher nominates the next speaker by only mentioning a student's name without gesture. After the next speaker is chosen, other students withdraw their hands (line 220) and the nominated student takes the turn (lines 222-225) without any interruption. Generally, during the 6 minutes whole class interaction, there is no evidence of students interrupting the nominated student's turn (see Appendix 2, specifically lines 233-242 and lines 281-290 for other examples which are the same as Extract 2). Extract 3, 4, and 5 show that in some parts of the interaction, the students do not wait until being nominated by the teacher to take the turn. In these examples, instead of raising their hands and waiting to be nominated, the students are calling out (Extract 3 line 085, Extract 4 lines 110-111, Extract 5 line 138). However, they do not overlap the teacher's speech. They call out at the end of the teacher's TCUs'. Extract 3 lines 083-084, extract 4 lines 106-108 and extract 5 lines 135-136 indicate that the teachers produce grammatically and syntactically complete TCUs with rising intonation. Additionally, the teacher also clearly yielding the floor to the students by posing questions to the students by using question words; what (line 083), do (107), and is (line Sari, C.C. (2020). Conversation Analysis: Turn-Taking Mechanism and Power Relation in Classroom Setting. Celtic: A Journal of Culture,English Language Teaching,Literature,& Linguistics,7(2),[118][119][120][121][122][123][124][125][126][127][128][129][130][131][132][133][134][135][136] 135). It is worth noting that the students' TCUs (lines 085, 110, 111, 138) only consist of one word.
Another example of the same pattern as these three Extracts can be found in Appendix 1, lines 275-278. In other parts of the interaction, there are also evidences off some students who call out and produce TCUs' consisting of two or three words (see full transcription in Appendix 2, specifically lines 113-115 and lines 202-207). In Extract 6, Gamelon (student) self-selects himself by calling out before the teacher completely finishes her turn (line 008). Line 007 shows that the teacher's TCU is in continuing intonation. This indicates that the teacher wants to continue her turn. Besides, the overlapping speech between the teacher and Gamelon (lines 008 and 009) shows that the teacher actually has not quite finished her turn. Yet, since Gamelon has already initiated to take the turn, the teacher then finally yielding the floor and clearly nominating Gamelon as the next speaker by pointing at him (line 010). After being clearly nominated to take the floor, Gamelon produces longer TCU (lines 012-013).
Through the full transcript in Appendix 1, it is noticeable that the overlapping speeches between participants do not happen frequently. However, the participants' speeches are sometimes overlapping with the other participants' hand gestures. For instance, other students put their hands up when one student is having his/her turn (Appendix 1 lines 019-022) and students put their hands up to show their initiation to answer the teacher's question before the teacher finishes her turn (see Appendix 2 lines 014, 023-027, 050-053, 215, 069-071).
Drawing from the explanations above, the summary of the turn-taking rule is as the following. 1. The teacher clearly nominated the next speaker either by mentioning the next speaker's name or pointing at the next speaker or even both. 2. Overwhelmingly students put their hands up to indicate their initiation to take the turn and wait until being nominated. 3. When the nominated speaker is speaking, other participants do not orally interrupt. 4. Overwhelmingly one party speaks at a time; overlapping mostly occurs between the current speaker's speech and the other participants' hand gestures. 5. Students also take the turn without being nominated by the teacher, but they only produce short TCU consisting of one to three words. Mostly, they always do that at the end of the teacher's TCU when the teacher is clearly yielding the floor by posing questions. 6. There is one interactional evidence found which is deviating rule number 5; student takes the turn before the teacher completely finishes her turn. When this happened, the teacher stopped speaking and let the student took the floor. 7. The students TCUs are longer (consisting of more than 3 words in one string of TCU) when they are nominated by the teacher to take the floor.

Participants' Power Relation in Classroom Interaction
From the finding in point 4.1, the teacher power is obviously higher than the students; the teacher does not need to compete with the students to take the turn and the teacher is the one who allocates the turn. Additionally, from the data, it is evident that the content of the students' TCUs is always about answering the teacher's question which are mostly in the form of open-ended question (See Extract 7). Line 255, shows that the teacher yields the floor by posing a question and directly mentioning the name of the next speaker who is responsible to take the floor. Then, the next speaker's answering the question without posing another question to the teacher (see line 259, Extract 7). After the students completed their TCUs, the teacher directly takes the turn and evaluates the student's answer by saying: "...that's an interesting one...I love how she's thinking..." (Extract 7 lines 261, 263). The teacher's evaluating the students' answer several times (see Appendix 1 line 080, lines 283-284 for other examples of teacher's evaluation). Yet, there is no evidence in the data which shows that the students also evaluating the teacher's statement. This shows that in the classroom under study, the teacher has prerogative right in the interaction to evaluate the other participants. It means the teacher has more power in the interaction.

DISCUSSION
The finding shows that the teacher appears to be the main speaker which allocate the turn and maintain the effectiveness of the teacher-students interaction. It agrees with Okata's (2016) (Sacks et al.'s (1978 findings that in a usual and effective conversation, overwhelmingly, there is only one party speaks at a time. In addition, the majority of classroom interaction in this study follows the rules of turn-taking outlined by Mchoul (1978) in which the teacher mainly acts as the main speaker who has the prerogative right to take the turn, continue the turn and/or select the next speaker, whereas the students as the teacher's interlocutors only take the turn when they are nominated. However, there are some interactional contexts where the turn taking's structure alters to that of McHoul's (1978) rule, specifically when one student self-selects himself and call out before the teacher finishes her turn, resulting in overlapping speech between them. worth noting that in the turn-taking mechanism, the power of the teacher is not absolute as there are some evident in which the student overlapping the teacher's speech and calling out before being nominated. Besides, the fact that the students are allowed to show their eagerness to take the turn by raising their hands is also one evident that students also possess power in the interaction. This study, however, does not include the analysis of silent; pauses or gaps of the classroom interaction under investigation, whereas silent may also affect the turn-taking patterns between participants. Thus, future study can be conducted to examine pauses or gaps in classroom interaction.  Sari, C.C. (2020)