Discourse Approach to Turn-taking

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Movie as a Medium for Teaching Turn-Taking Rules and Tone Functions

Movie films require the audience to interpret the meaning beyond the sentence-level

of an utterance. They not only allow constant reference to the context but also are rich

in conversation and encourage a focus on natural sounds and intonation. Although it

cannot be denied that they differ in certain ways from ordinary conversation, films

which are carefully chosen for specific aims can still serve as excellent material for

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language study (Forster 1998). For this research, a film from a particular genre and a

particular series is chosen: a film from the series of Columbo™. There are several

reasons: (a) detective stories generally stimulate people’s interest and even beginning-

level students may be able to make inferences in spite of their limited linguistic

resources; (b) they have logical relations between segments; (c) unlike most detective

stories, the murderer is already known to the audience at the beginning of the film, so

that students can relate every segment, utterance, interaction in the following scenes to

establish pragmatic coherence; and (d) regarding authenticity, the series are not

created for the purpose of illustrating or teaching features of the language, but made

for entertainment. The series is one of the most popular TV series in the USA, and it is

imported to Japan and has gained popularity here, too. Additionally, the way the story

develops is familiar to quite a few people in Japan, because the Furuhata Ninzaburou

series which imitated the plot of the Columbo™ series was on TV recently (Furuhata

Ninzaburou Tomono-kai    1999: 152). Particularly because of the unique way of story

development that certain understandings develop cumulatively during the course of

conversation, it should be a suitable material for looking at tone functions in context,

as a cue of turn-taking. It will also raise awareness of how tone reflects the speaker’s

mental activity toward the other participants.

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