Conversations

The database used in the present study consist of five audio-recorded conversations in which the language proficiency of the participants varies.

The participants can be divided in three groups according to their proficiency in Swedish: native speakers, non-native speakers with high command and non-native speakers with low command of Swedish. All the non-native speakers except one have Finnish as their mother tongue.

The recordings were made in 1983 and 1984. The conversations were recorded in natural situations (see below) in connection with the Swedish part of an extensive research project financed by the European Science Foundation. The goal of the project, known as EALA (Ecology of Adult Language Acquisition) was to investigate adult language acquisition in natural settings in five European countries. The informants were immigrants who had acquired the new language in the new country. The EALA project was a longitudinal study in which the data collection continued for two and a half years with each informant. For a more detailed description of the project, see Allwood et al. (1983) or Perdue (1982 & 1993).

The present study is cross-sectional: the data consist of conversations about a year and a half after the immigrant's arrival in Sweden. There are three speakers in each of the conversations: a non­

native speaker (NNS), a native speaker (NS) and a bilingual speaker (BS).

The NNS is a newly arrived immigrant with a relatively low command of Swedish. The BS is also an immigrant who has Finnish as her /his native tongue and is fluent but not native-like in Swedish. In the present study, s/he is referred to as the bilingual speaker on account of her/his familiarity with both languages and countries. In one of the conversations

the setting is different: an NNS with a low command of Swedish talks with a BS and an NNS who is rather fluent in Swedish but does not know Finnish. A Finnish speaking BS is also present in this conversation.

Because the conversations were recorded in connection with a longitudinal study that had been going on for more than a year at the time of the recording, the participants came to assume certain roles in accordance with the overall goals of the project. These roles are manifest also in the present data. One of the goals was to elicit spoken interaction between an NNS and an NS. Hence the third speaker, the BS, plays a subordinate role in the conversations analyzed. The conversations consist mostly of dyads between an NNS and an NS. The BS has the role of a mediator, but at times s/he either spontaneously joins the conversation or the other speakers ask him or her to help in communication breakdowns.

Four of the conversations take place in the informant's home during a visit by two researchers in order to record a conversation in familiar surroundings. The fifth conversation was recorded at a university department. The lengths of the conversations range between 15 and 67 minutes. The total duration of the five conversations is 3 h 14 min.

As suggested above, the conversational situations are natural, but they are natural only in the context of a research project. The speakers meet with each other only because they are all participants in that project.

On one hand, the situation resembles one of relationships between people working together occasionally or between members of a group on a package holiday. On the other hand, the conversations have features of ethnographic field work encounters where an anthropologist interviews a representative of another culture, although the goal is not to gain information through language but about the language of the informant.

This special nature, having a conversation for its own sake and knowing that the relationship between the interactants is limited both as to time and type of encounter, is noticeable in many sequences of the conversations. However, the less ordinary character of the conversations should not be overemphasized because "forced" conversations of this kind are not infrequent in real life outside research contexts either. Situations exist where people who would not otherwise communicate with each

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together for a third person, when driving together to meet friends in common or when sitting round a large dinner table. One of the conversa­

tions in the data is natural exactly in this regard: the speakers are sitting together after some work they have done and are waiting for the next scheduled recording activity to start. All the situations of the kind described have one feature in common: the goal is to speak in order to have a conversation for its own sake.

The conversations in the present data also have some of the features of an institutional conversation (see Ch. 3.4). There is an asym­

metry in the setting that is similar to that found in many institutional

situations. The researchers, both the native and the non-native speaker of Swedish, have power and status as experts. As they have planned the encounters, they mostly have control over the time limits. Furthermore, they know the Swedish language, which is the focus of the interaction, although this is seldom expressed explicitly. They are also highly edu­

cated, and they know Swedish society far better than the newly arrived immigrants. In certain other respects, however, the conversations differ markedly from the institutional type: the speakers are free to choose the topics and the organization of the talk is not restricted as it is in a court of law, etc.

One criterion for choosing this special type of conversation for the study is that asymmetry in access to knowledge is a fact that immigrants meet daily in communication situations. Most - if not all - of the encounters where they interact in the target language take place with Swedes or with other immigrants who may speak Swedish better than they. This happens frequently at work or in institutional situations, where the immigrants have a role similar to the one in the present data. This type of conversation is an essential part of an immigrant's naturally occurring everyday conversations.

Another reason for using the data in this study is that the con­

versations represent a special type of institutional interaction: they are conversations between researchers and informants. In the investigated encounters the speakers do not orientate to their institutional identities in a transparent way, as it is done in e.g. doctor-patient interaction, but the identities are made relevant from time to time during the conversations.

The topics in the three longer conversations vary, but each one includes at least one topic that is dealt with in detail and in longer sequences than the others. The following table presents the participants and the main topics.

TABLE 1 Participants and main topics of the conversations³

Cl C2 C3 C4 CS

Participants Leo Mari Tarja Rauni Rauni

Staffan Staffan Olle Clara Olle

Ville Ville Anna Ville Ville

Main topics sports religion Christmas baby baby

holidays language childbirth religion

cars learning

The atmosphere in the conversations is friendly. As indicated above the main topics represent the interests of the NNSs. The female NNSs show

3 See Appendix 2 for a more detailed list of the conversations.

a trusting relationship to the NS while very openly discussing religion, a recent childbirth with all its complications, and problem areas in language learning. The relationship between the three men in their conversation is also friendly and trusting, but their topics are less personal.

The use of audiotape recordings restricts the analysis to verbal behavior only. This is a serious shortcoming when considering the role non-verbal communication plays in interaction, but the use of video­

recordings is not without problems either. The cameras and other equip­

ment needed to capture all the visual information in the situation makes it difficult to obtain naturally occurring conversational data, and the methods of analyzing the simultaneous non-verbal behavior remain very selective and restricted.