Conversation skills

Consider these scenarios:

1. You are attending a professional networking event where you know no one. However, you need to make brand new contacts because it is crucial for your job duties.

2. Your boss sends you and an unacquainted co-worker on a business trip. You will be taking a rental car together and will be driving eight hours each way to your destination.

3. You are on a first date with someone whom you met in passing on a public transit. You and your date plan to have dinner at a nice sit-down restaurant before going miniature golfing.

There are times when we must be able to make conversation with “strangers.” While we can certainly choose to just sit in silence, imagine the repercussions in each of the above scenarios. You will have a hard time making new contacts in scenario 1, you will have a very awkward road trip in scenario 2, and your date might lack the emotional “chemistry” to lead to a second one in scenario 3.

Even if you feel confident in the above three scenarios, the ability to converse is a skillset. Just like the ability to play tennis, paint, or speak a foreign language, our conversation skills take years of practice to master, and we can always learn more to improve them. There is no state of perfection in conversation skills, just as there is no “perfect” tennis player. Just like how art students learn color theory and then apply it to their paint canvasses to become more sophisticated painters, you too can learn conversation theory and apply its techniques to your everyday conversations to become a more capable conversationalist.

In this Unit, you will learn the art of conversation through the lens of a field called Conversation Analysis. In Module 1, you will learn some foundational concepts to the idea of “conversation.” In Module 2, you will learn how to “open” a conversation with an unacquainted person by learning the typical greeting sequence. Then in Module 3, you will learn how to elicit topics so that your conversations “go somewhere.” Finally, you will learn how to terminate conversation in Module 4, so you don’t “get stuck” in one. In the next section, you will begin with principles of conversation.

Grice’s Maxims

Consider the three statements below:

1. My car broke down. 2. Joe is home. 3. Do you have a phone?

Upon first glance, these three statements appear to not have any relevance to each other. One is about a car breaking down. Another is about whether someone is home. And the other is a question about a person is possessing a phone. Taking the sentences literally, there is no connection between them.

However, now suppose I present the three sentences in the following format:

John: My car broke down.

Mark: Joe is home.

John: Do you have a phone?

Chances are you, read the three statements as if John and Mark were having a conversation where John is requesting help from Mark. John’s car has broke down and now he is telling Mark, an acquaintance. Mark is suggesting that Joe is home, perhaps implying that Joe can help Mark. John then asks Mark if he has a phone, perhaps because he wants to use it to call Joe. Although we cannot confirm the accuracy of this interpretation without further information, it is a plausible one.

What conversational scholars find fascinating is that we are able to make sense of the three statements in the context of a conversation, whereas we could not if they were presented independently.

Paul Grice (1975) was a philosopher who argued that there is an implicit logic that enables us to make sense of conversations like the one above, and that logic is based on the belief that both participants are cooperating with each other. He called this assumption the cooperative principle. According to the cooperative principle, the basis of cooperation is the norm that one should make their interactional contribution fitting for the point in time and for the purpose of the engaged conversation.

When you review the conversation above, you probably assumed that Mark was cooperating with John when he suggested that Joe is home, and that John was cooperating with Mark when he asked if he had a phone. You didn’t assume that Joe was just a random stranger who lives across country whom Mark knows but John does not. And you probably did not assume John was asking if Mark had a phone just out of pure curiosity.

Based on the cooperative principle Grice argues that there are four conversational maxims (rules) that speakers and listeners use to conversationally cooperate:

1. Quantity: Say just enough to make your contribution informative, but not any more informative as to become excessive or “TMI.”

2. Quality: Do not say things that you know to be false or lack adequate evidence for.

3. Relation: Make your contributions relevant to the immediate conversation.

4. Manner: Avoid obscurity and ambiguity. Make sure to say your contribution briefly and orderly.

Some scholars argue that the most essential of the four maxims is relation (Sperber & Wilson, 1996). The fact that we can make the above statements between John and Mark relevant to each other is what makes conversational logic work.

Grice proposed the four maxims as both descriptive and prescriptive principles. They are descriptive because they describe the norms by which we actually converse and make sense of others’ utterances. They are also prescriptive because they tell us how we ought to converse to ensure our contributions are received as we intend.

Overall, Grice’s maxims serve as a foundation for understanding how people do and should converse. But simply knowing the principles of cooperation alone does not necessarily make you a good conversationalist. Moreover, there are many aspects of conversation where these principles come into play. In the next sections, we will go deeper into basic conversational structure.

What Is A Conversation?

According to Svennevig (1999), conversation is a joint activity consisting of participatory actions (verbal and nonverbal) between at least two participants that are sequentially organized, locally managed, and improvised. There are several aspects to unpack in this definition.

First, conversation is a joint activity. It requires at least two different persons to act cooperatively. Though there is such thing as “intrapersonal” communication where people do talk to themselves, it is unlikely that they hold conversations with themselves in the same sense that two different people hold one. For this unit, we will focus exclusively on conversation with exactly two participants, but some principles can still apply to multi-party interactions (conversations involving three or more people).

Second, the participatory actions are sequentially organized; there are mutual expectations about the order in which action are supposed to occur. For example, we would find it normal if a conversation started with someone saying “hello” at the beginning of the conversation and then moving toward to a topic. It would be strange to us if we were conversing with someone and right in the middle of the topic, the person says “hello.” There is a normative sequential order to conversation.

Third, conversations are locally managed. In your daily conversations, there is no referee or adjudicator who decides whether someone broke a conversational rule, nor is there a third-party enforcer of rules. Any “rules” that are broken must be called upon and enforced by the participants themselves. If your friend interrupts you while you are talking, you will have to let your friend know and attempt to take back your turn. It is comparable to the difference between a game of pick-up basketball where players call their own fouls, and a NCAA basketball game where highly trained referees adjudicate them. Conversation is more like the former, unless it occurs in some institutional setting like a courtroom where a judge manages the turn-taking and conduct of talk.

Fourth, conversational actions are improvisational in nature. Though there might be mutual expectations about how a conversation should proceed, there are no scripts nor joint pre-planning about how a conversation will go. Before you ask your friend for a ride, you do not tell your friend: “Friend, I am going to ask you a question. Once I finish asking the question, it will be your turn to answer ‘yes’ or ‘no’…” Instead, you just ask your friend for the ride, and your friend knows to answer it with a “yes” or “no” (or some strategic answer that suits your friend’s goal of maintaining the relationship while answering the task). Conversations are distinct from theatre or film scripts, where every single turn and word is pre-planned for the actors. Metacommunication (discussion about how you converse) is not the norm unless something goes unexpectedly. If you think about your daily interaction, most are probably improvisational in nature.

Grice’s Maxims tie to the definition of conversation because we define interactants as cooperative when we presume that their actions are contributing to the furtherance of the conversation topically. Their actions should be relevant to our actions, in sequence with what we expect to occur, and responsive/improvisational in response to us.

Basic Concepts

Now that you know what a conversation is, you will now learn some basic concepts commonly studied in the field of conversation analysis. Conversation analysis focuses on analyzing two foundations in conversation: actions (what people do in talk) and sequences (how they go about accomplishing it) (Clift, 2016). Each of the concepts that you will be introduced to in this section have a deep literature behind them, so I encourage you to explore the additional readings. For now, you’ll get a basic understanding of four key conversation concepts: turn-taking, adjacency pairs, preference organization, and repair.

Turn-taking is the foundation of conversation. Humans do not have the cognitive capacity to listen to language and speak it simultaneously. In order to have a conversation, the conversationalists must therefore take turns where one speaker talks while the other listens, and vice versa. How do speakers know when it’s their turn to speak in a conversation? While there is no formally established signal that guarantees that we have finished our turn (consider radio communications where each turn ends with the speaker saying “over”), there are several cues that we implicitly give each other to signal it: pauses, intonation, eye contact, or by the implications of what was said. Our partners must also project when they think we have finished our turns. If our partners project correctly, we let them begin their turn. If they project incorrectly, then you may seek to take back the turn using different strategies.

While it may be tempting to think that all conversation follows the one-at-time rule, there are certainly exceptions to this practice. For example, we might engage in simultaneous laughter at a joke; you do not take turns laughing when you and your partner see something funny. When you first greet someone, you might also engage in a simultaneous greeting of delight, or you might be engaging in backchannel feedback as you listen to your partner tell a very riveting story that causes you to express emotions, sympathy, and awe. In such cases, you and your partner “overlap” each other, but it’s not a problem to be fixed as if you had rudely interrupted your partner. We will discuss “repair” later in this module.

There are many issues that you can explore with turn-taking. How do parties manage turn-taking? What happens when two parties want to speak at the same time? What happens when we want to take back our turn? These are all issues that Conversation Analysts explore in depth under the term “turn allocation” (Ford, 2013). Overall, turn-taking is not a hard-and-fast rule like a board game; it is a guideline that partners use to project when their opportunity to speak should occur.

Now that we understand the timing of the participatory actions via turn-taking, we can now explore the basic composition of conversation which often occurs in adjacency pairs. Adjacency pairs are a pair of utterances that are expected to go together (ten Have, 2010). For example, a “hello” is expected to be met with a “hello,” an “invitation” is expected to be met with a “reply,” the word “thank you” is expected to be met with “you’re welcome,” a “question” is supposed to met with an “answer,” and so on. The first utterance in an adjacency pair is called a first-pair part (FPP), and the response is called the second-pair part (SPP).

Think of a time when you invited a friend through text-message to have lunch with you, and that friend never replied. You might feel wronged because your friend did not complete the adjacency pair of your invitation, or more colloquially, they “left you hanging.” Your friend not replying is not just a problem conversationally, it is a problem relationally. Is your friend mad at you? Is your friend just not a reliable person? We draw inferences about our relationships based on how we converse.

Adjacency pairs can be expanded (Schegloff, 2007). For example, before you ask your friend to lunch, you can do a pre-invitation where you ask your friend “are you doing anything this weekend?” Once your friend says no, then you can issue the invitation. Once your friend hears the invitation to lunch, your friend might want to know when and where the lunch will take place before giving an official “yes” or “no.” Asking “what time and where?” would be an insert expansion within the adjacency pair since it occurs between the invitation (FPP) and the reply (SPP). Once you give an answer that it would be at Applebee’s at 12:00, your friend can then reply with a “yes.” Once your friend says “yes”, you might then say “cool, see you there” which would count as a post-expansion since it speaks to what occurred after the invitation has been replied to.

Here is a conversation that demonstrates each adjacency pair:

A: Hey, do you have any plans this weekend? [Pre-invitation, FPP1]

B: No. [Pre-invitation answer, SPP1]

A: Do you want to go see a movie at 5:00 on Saturday? [Invitation, FPP2]

B: What movie? [Insert Expansion: Question about invitation, FPP3]

A: Star Wars. [Insert Expansion: Answer to question, SPP3]

B: Ok, sure. [Invitation Answer, SPP2]

A: Great, I’ll pick you at 4:00. [Post-expansion: Reply to invitation answer, FPP3]

Adjacency pairs can be studied and explored in many ways too. Keep in mind that when you first teach a child “manners,” you teach them basic adjacency pairs like saying “thank you” after receiving a favor, or saying “hello” back to someone who says hello. Are there other adjacency pairs that you recall being taught as a kid?

Preference Organization is the concept that there are sequences that are “preferred” and do not require explanation for their occurrence, and there are actions that are “dispreferred” that do require explanation for their occurrence. For example, suppose your friend invites to his/her wedding. If you said “yes,” you would not need to explain why you said “yes.” Accepting an invitation is a preferred action. However, if you said “No” to the invitation, your friend will probably expect an account for why you will not attend. Declining an invitation is generally a dispreferred action that then requires some accounting for why the preferred action did not occur. Generally, preferred responses are ones that enable an action to be completed, dispreferred are ones that prevent it from doing so (Schlegoff, 2007).

More abstractly, conversations work on a preference for agreement. When our response is in agreement with our partner, then our actions are in “flow” of the conversation and do not require justification. Consider the phrasing of the question, “Did you win?” The question is phrased to where the expected answer is “yes” to winning. Compare that phrasing to “Did you lose?” The latter question is phrased to where the expected answer is a “yes” to losing. In the former phrasing, if you did win, you can just say “yes.” If you lost, then you might need to explain what happened. In the latter phrasing, it is the opposite.

There is much deeper theory and research behind what a preferred action is, how culture impacts these norms, and what constitutes preference for agreement. For now, just know that conversation rests on participants “going with the flow” with each other’s actions. If there is a “bump in the road” regarding a dis-preferred response, then it may require the participant to explain his/her actions. Or it just might require “repair” which we will discuss next.

Conversational repair is a set of methods that we use to fix problems that arise with conversing. These methods can either be self-initiated or other-initiated (Kitzinger, 2013). For example, you can self-repair a mistake that you make in your own turn. You might say, “I’ll see you Thursday...I mean Friday.” Or a partner might correct you after you say, “I’ll see you Thursday” by saying “Do you mean Friday?” Repair is a way of “correcting’ someone. There are risks to constantly correcting someone; you might come across as condescending, rude, or disagreeable. You might be afraid to correct someone like your boss or a person who exercises significant power over you. What do you do in those situations?

There are strategic ways that you can repair as well. You can just simply repeat what the person said and let that person catch the error and self-correct accordingly. Or you can implicitly correct the person. Suppose you are walking your dog and passer-by asks “What’s her name?” If your dog is actually male, you might just say, “His name is Jack.” By doing that, you are implicitly correcting the passer-by without making it too much of an attack. The passer-by can then correct their language choice accordingly. Overall, turn-taking and repair have been two large topics widely studied by Conversation Analysts (Mortensen & Wagner, 2012).

Conclusion

Overall, you have learned about four basic concepts of conversation theory; turn-taking, adjacency pairs, preference organization, and repair. Each of these concepts has unique issues and theoretical underpinnings that can you can explore deeply outside of this book. But each of these tools will help you achieve the objective of this unit which is to be able to effectively open, elicit, and close conversation with both acquainted and unacquainted partners. We will start with opening in the next module.

Activity 1: Questions Only Game

Have the class form into pairs. Suggest a conversation topic like shopping, sports, etc. Then have the students hold a conversation where they can only ask questions. No statements nor answers to questions. See how long the students are able to hold a conversation with questions only before one of them answers or makes a statement. This helps teach the idea of adjacency pairs. You can also YouTube Questions Only Game to see clips of improvisational troupes playing this game.

Activity 2: Turn-Taking Demonstration

Have the class form into pairs. Suggest that each pair hold a normal conversation. However, to manage turn taking, each partner will be tasked with pointing at the other partner when it is their turn to speak. If a partner speaks when they have not been pointed to, they lose the game. Then have the pairs keep trying to see how long they go with this turn-taking system. This drill teaches the complexity of turn-taking and how it is not just a “one-at-a-time” principle and how awkward it can be to formalize turn-management with signals like pointing.

Clift, R. (2016). Conversation analysis. Cambridge University Press.

Ford, C. E. (2013). Conversation Analysis and turn taking. The encyclopedia of applied linguistics. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781405198431.wbeal0216

Grice, H. P. (1975). Logic and conversation. In P. Cole & J. L. Morgan (Eds.), Syntax and semantics (Vol. 3, pp. 41–58). Academic Press.

Kitzinger, C. (2013). Repair. In J. Sidnell & T. Stivers (Eds.), The handbook of conversation analysis (pp. 229–256). Wiley-Blackwell.

Mortensen, K., & Wagner, J. (2013). Conversation Analysis: An overview. The encyclopedia of applied linguistics. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781405198431.wbeal1339

Schegloff, E. A. (2007). Sequence organization in interaction: A primer in conversation analysis I (Vol. 1). Cambridge University Press.

Sidnell, J. (2010). Conversation analysis: An introduction. Wiley-Blackwell.

Sperber, D., & Wilson, D. (1996). Relevance: Communication and cognition (2nd ed.). Wiley-Blackwell.

Svennevig, J. (1999) Getting acquainted in conversation: A study of initial interactions. John Benjamins Publishing.

ten Have, P. (2010). Doing conversation analysis: A practical guide (2nd ed.). SAGE Publications.

Adjacency pair: A pair of utterances from two partners that are expected to go together.

Conversation: A joint activity consisting of participatory actions (verbal and nonverbal) between at least two participants that are sequentially organized, locally managed, and improvised.

Cooperative Principle: Grice’s principle that one should make their interactional contribution fitting for the point in time and for the purpose of the conversation at hand.

Grice’s Maxims: The set of four maxims that describe what cooperation looks like in the context of conversation: quantity, quality, relation, and manner.

Insert Sequences: Sequences that occur between the first-pair part and second-pair part of an adjacency pair.

Preference Organization: The conversational concept that certain actions are “preferred” and do not require explanation for their occurrence, whereas other actions are “dispreferred” and do require explanation for their occurrence.

Repair: A set of methods used to fix problems that arise with the process of conversing.

Turn-Taking: The jointly-created system by which two interlocutors manage the timing and manner of their talking to maintain a cooperative conversation.

1. Questions-Only Game

Watch a scene from “Whose Line Is it Anyway” where the players may only interact using questions. Why is this game so difficult and entertaining?

The link is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=89iZ8Dwim4E

2. Grice’s Maxims

Watch this clip of the Big Bang Theory and see how Grice’s Maxims are flouted. Which ones and when?

The link is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vEM8gZCWQ2w

3. The Science of Analyzing Conversation

Watch this Ted Talk by Elizabeth Stokoe (a notable conversation analyst) about how conversation analysis works. Did you come to the same conclusions in her analysis?

The link is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MtOG5PK8xDA