I was just reading the log from our TI session and I I found a question you asked while I was away from the computer: "BTW, is there any way that chatlogs record "conversational silences"?"

Well, if you set Yahoo Messenger to automatically save your chats, you will get a log where each interaction shows the time when it took place, so you can "measure" the "conversational silences". That's another advantage of YM over MSN messenger. Long silent periods in FL students may mean they are taking time to compose their messages, or that their typing skills are not very good.

Nice to see you and and all other webheads who were at TI today.

bfn,
Dafne Chavez

I've been thinking again about silences and CHAT and one thing that is very VERY different from spoken interaction is that the recipient of the talk doesn't see anything until the entire "turn" has been produced, that is, until after the person hits the enter key AFTER typing a message. Thus, an inter-turn "silence" in text chat lasts from the time the message is displayed (and presumably comprehended) until a response turn is displayed on the chat screen. In contrast, in spoken interaction, the response begins the moment the very first bit of talk is produced -- in some cases the moment an audible in-breath is produced. And from that moment on the talk-recipient is actively engaged in the moment by moment unfolding and analysis of the turn-a-talk -- constantly looking for that moment in the flux that the turn-in-progress is possibly complete. It has even been demonstrated that the stance taken up by a talk-recipient during the construction of a turn-at-talk can affect the syntax of the turn being produced.

It would be interesting to see how text chat might be affected if it were possible to design the software such that talk-recipients would see the message being typed out letter by letter.

Don Carroll

Vance

>>another advantage of YM over MSN messenger. Long silent periods in FL
>students may mean they are taking time to compose their messages, or
>that their typing skills are not very good.

This is the standard assumption made about silences in nonnative speaker talk in general, i.e. that silences just reflect "processing problems". However, there is mounting evidence that this is no more true
in novice L2 talk than in talk by fully proficient speakers. In other words silences are not neutral phenomena but rather pursue specific interactional tasks. A couple of years ago I wrote a paper that touched on this issue. Of course, in text chat typing skills would add in another variable to the mix. This is one reason that I would find analyzing voice chat than text chat.

Don Carroll

This is something I tried to point out in my dissertation, the problem of not knowing when a person was replying, going to reply, going to add something to a reply he/she had already sent, etc. But you say it so much more succinctly. Although I was talking about one-on-one virtual interviews, it is also something that happens in group chat sessions.

One thing I like (the only thing, really) about MSMessenger is that it tells if the other person is typing a message or not.

Dr. Cat
Prof. John H. Steele, Ph.D.

I think the issue of timing in CMC is not quite relative to traditional way of communication. Silence can also be an ignorance in CMC. Or, multitasking makes it impossible to be prompt to reply... However, it is a strange feeling that we all tend to reflect is that if person is online, s/he could be waiting for what I am going to write and respond.

>One thing I like (the only thing, really) about MSMessenger is that it
>tells if the other person is typing a message or not.

It really is a good indication of maintenance of conversation in synchronous communication. How about typing speed? Experienced typists could send several messages in seconds, whereas the other party can delay in responding simply because s/he is slow in typing. How would we interpret the silence here? Any ideas?

Arif Altun

First, in a hypothetical chat software that revealed messages letter by letter, general typing speed would be relatively unimportant just as speech rate is of relatively little importance in spoken interaction. What WOULD matter were be perceived tempo changes, i.e. a sudden quick flurry of keystrokes or a noticeable slowing down.

The second thing that occurred to me is that while we talk about synchronous vs asychronous CMC (e.g. chat vs. email), in reality both are asychronous, the only real difference being the time lag between "posts." In chat, the lag has been reduced to seconds mimicking some of the qualities of synchronous communication.

Don Carroll

It's been another of my contentions that one advantage to CMC is that students using translation tools can participate in live conversations in a target language in a way that would be impossible using other means and that might lower their affective filter by giving them the impression that they can hold their own in a conversation with native speakers.

I've tried this in Spanish, a language I don't know all that well. You open altavista's translation tool and try to get the gyst of the conversation as it unfurls, maybe copy a posting into the tool and get its English approximation as a comprehension check.

You then type your response in English (in Altavista) and get the Spanish translation. You cut this from the Altavista window and paste it (maybe with minor edit) into the chat field.

People in the chat who don't know what you're doing might be fooled into thinking you know more about their language than you do and take your postings more seriously than they might otherwise (giving you a foot in a door that would otherwise be closed to you). If you can't follow the replies you can always pour over the transcripts later (an excellent, meaningful learning technique).

So, to get to the point, this is yet another reason why there could be a lag ... students using such tools, consulting with peers, decoding, dealing with scrolling offscreen, composing in a text editor to get it right and copy/posting only when satisfied ... and as John pointed out in his dissertation and Rif above, maybe going to get a cup of coffee, use the bathroom, or as I often do, working on another computer glancing at the chat one from time to time, sometimes to see I've just missed a flurry of interaction.

Vance

Such software does exist. ICQ chat does exactly this. You can see each other's messages being typed in letter by letter in real time. And of course you can see where the slow typist is headed and anticipate if you're a touch typist (and speed up the pace when the other doesn't have to complete what s/he is writing).

Vance

At 12:26 PM 28/01/2003 -0800, Don wrote:

>BTW, I was wondering if other people also find themselves composing "next
>turns" in chat even before a response turn is received. That is, you have
>made some sort of projection about how someone might respond and have
>already typed out a response to this response in order to have it
>immediately available for display (all you have to do it hit enter). This
>would be one way of "doing" an immediate response (one with almost no lag).

I've tried this Don but my typing is not fast or accurate enough. What usually happens is by the time I have my 'advance message' ready for posting the conversation has moved on. I then either:

1) post it anyway because someone might still pick it up and respond 2) ditch it because I feel that the moment was lost 3) cut and paste it into Word in case I can use it later in the chat (a bit like having an idea in a spoken conversation that you save for a lull in the conversation I guess.)

Michael C.

Composing turns?
I have heard that some teachers ask their students to follow a pre-set order of turns, and to compose their answers to a question that is previously formulated, and if a student does not want to participate, just passes the floor to the next. Of course this would give time to the students to compose their messages in advance. I do not like this style of chatting even for academic purposes because chats are spaces for conversations to flow. I prefer to let the students follow their own rhythm, try to organize their turns naturally as it would happen in a f-2-f group work. I have had 15 group chat sessions with university students and they have been able to organize their group task, with very little if not none intervention on my part. The turn taking process has gone smoothly, they have been engaged in their tasks from 1 to 2 and a half hours. There has been negotiation of meaning at different levels: language, technology, content, logistics, and social, and at the end the collaborative task has been completed. Going through the logs of these chat sessions, i found that some of the longest silences in between interactions were due to the fact that the while one student was describing a building, the others were looking at a photo of that building, and I noticed it because they negotiated meaning with expressions like the ones below that I took from a log, W: "my building has 3 rows of balconies on each wing, but one balcony is different from the others." after a 2, 5 minute pause: X : "oh you are referring to the balcony on the second floor to the right, now I see" the answer to this, only took 30 secs.
Y: "yes, different from the others, in same floor"

Wow, there are so many things to consider when analyzing chats. If we had not been discussing the issue of silences I wouldn't have paid attention to this, because I have been paying attention to turn taking, negotiation of meaning,
etc.
Daf

Dr. Cat
Dr. John H. Steele

> I was wondering if other people also find themselves composing "next
> turns" in chat even before a response turn is received. That is, you have
> made some sort of projection about how someone might respond and have
> already typed out a response to this response in order to have it
> immediately available for display (all you have to do it hit enter). This
> would be one way of "doing" an immediate response (one with almost no lag).

Yes, sometimes. This also happens in live F2F conversation. Try this on someone for a laugh some time ...
You: Go on, ask me what's the secret of good comedy. Other: Ok, what's the secret of ..
You: TIMING!!

I also sometimes type out a response, see the conversation thread has drifted slightly, ctrl-x out my response (cut and save to buffer), respond to the new direction of the conversation, then paste in my previous rejoinder when the sidetrack has settled down and I feel it's proper to resume the previous thread.

Vance