One humorist who was envious of the correspondents talking over the satellite connections worked up a very witty pause to demonstrate how important people are who make pauses in such a way, similar but not the same for my internet telephony conversation. I suppose that with a large screen in front of me here to talk with videocam I would recognise the body language of my correspondent similarly equipped, but I doubt it. EFL and language learning is about learning a tongue, not a body language.

Gar

ICQ Chat <http://icq.com/> does this Gar. You can indeed see the text as it is being typed - you can see the other chat participant even correcting their spelling errors! It's quite amusing. Someone I communicate with regularly on ICQ does so after a few drinks and I can see them struggling with the process of typing an accurate message!

Microsoft Instant Messenger shows that the other party is "typing a message' but you don't actually see the message being typed. Maybe Yahoo Messenger also does this? I can't remember......But the point is, it does have the effect of making you wait because you can see that other parties in the chat are composing a message.

- Michael C.

To respond to Gar,

>>EFL and language learning is about learning a tongue, not a body language.

I'm afraid the tongue cannot be so simply disconnected from the body -- or even necessarily claim prominence. Again and again work in conversation analysis has demonstrated the intricate ways the talk and body behaviors are mutually embedded in one another. One section of my dissertation
(which will be published as a paper in an upcoming volume on Second Language Talk) reveals that many of the restarts that are regularly counted as "speech disfluencies" in quantitative studies of nonnative speaker talk, are in fact, strategically deployed and precisely timed practices designed to solicit the gaze of a non-gazing talk recipient (and still other restarts are the result of overlapping talk at points of turn
transition). At least for face-to-face talk attempting to extract talk from its physical matrix (or vice versa) is as hopeless as Shylock's task of taking is pound of flesh without taking a drop of blood.

Of course, this all basically boils down to one's view of language. Perhaps the majority of language teachers see language as a more or less autonomous, abstract linguistic system resident in the mind of a single speaker. The teacher's job then consists of reproducing in the mind of the learner the "machinery" of this system. A starkly contrasting view is that interaction (and thereby the construction and reinforcement of our societies) is accomplished through a host of practices shared across a community some of which draw on vocal resources (including such non-"verbal" aspects as in-breaths, coughs, laughter, in addition to "linguistic resources") and others physical resources. This might be summarized as the "Language as Social Action" metaphor vs. the "Language as Machine" metaphor.

--Don

PS. I hope this "bleeding" of practices and knowledge of one CoP (that of conversation analysts and ethnomethodologists) into another CoP is not annoying to other members of this forum.

Don's good explanations inspire me to reply to Gar's comment about language being speaking and not being about body talk. One quick test of language=speech is that so many people over the centuries have learned to read an FL, but not speak it at all. The spoken word is but one channel, and certainly the socio-cultural is another, and a very important one. Or, to know how to say something does not always mean knowing when to say it.

The point is well taken that CALL too often has treated language as if it were "machine"--often been forced to by the limitations of the technology. And no, Don, the cross-over with ethno-cultural questions is not annoying, and in fact very valuable, esp. as we examine several different channels of communication--text, voice, video.

--Elizabeth H-S

... especially as I spend much of my time teaching body language, the structure of conversations, non-verbal communication and pragmatics in general! As always, learners' needs are paramount -- in an ESL situation, being able to use and recognize the non-verbal aspect of the target language is highly valuable. Teachers on this list are working in every possible area of our field, which is worth bearing in mind.

This relates to CALL, and to chat in particular, in very interesting ways. As various community members have pointed out, the pragmatics of synchronous CMC (Chat) are very different from those of face-to-face (f2f) conversations. My own (rather less formal) research confirms that turn-taking, questioning and adjacency do not operate in ways that would be acceptable in f2f sitautions. For me, this reduces the usefulness of chat *in my teaching situation*. There is no evidence to my knowledge that competence in chat transfers to competence in f2f interactions. (The question of the value of chat for second language acquisition is a separate, but equally vexed one.)

I have the "luxury" of being able to dispense with chat because my students (theoretically at least) have ample opportunity to interact with real Americans and with each other in English. And for most of them, f2f communication is a much higher priority than a form of computer literacy which has relatively little application outside personal contact (business don't chat, do they?). As I said at the start, it's all about context -- horses for courses (or as my American friends say: different strokes for different folks).

All best,
Nigel

I have been pondering all morning GMT 1600 now what it was that I did not like about the idea of Ethnomethodology and how I might be able to explain more clearly the rationale of the post which Nigel objected to; I accept his restrictions but I would say that I am concerned not with ethnomethodology but with language ethology, not in the first place with ethnic methodology, but with language as it relates to the behaviour of ALL animals. That is why I refer to other species than man. I was merely trying to highlight the importance f all language not in what was deemed militaristic references but also in the references to the languages of other animals. With regard to the organisation of language, and to the organisation of Webheads during these few weeks, the word <taxonomy> is relevant, and I am not just looking for big words for the sake of it. Language taxonomy is concerned very much with search engines, for which Joann is handing out such excellent assignments in EFL basic activities, but, and I refer back to Nigel again,we should not forget that the exclusively written language of the worldwide web, is the language of ALL languages. Let me call those written languages for the sake of explanation (and they may have a hierarchical name) primary languages, and all spoken languages secondary languages. Let me explain now that I do not believe that any secondary language has any superiority whatsoever over any other spoken language. If I make any remarks about EFL it applies equally to any language under the sun and its teaching to those who are alien to it, whether it be Xhosa, Chinese or Finlandic. If I make any remarks about a low or high level language, programming code, it is because I am aware that it is a universal language.

It is a remark that you may choose to ingore as off topic, that I find it unfortunate, especially for the english English, that the language of the programmer has hitherto been English, which has debilitating effects on cultural diversity worldwide. That is probably a reference back to <ethnomethodology>.

Regards, Gareth

Week 2