The Characteristics And Importance Of Conversation In The English Language

Conversation is the chief way for people to interact despite the prevalence of social medium. Not only a dialogue can detect words spoken by the interlocutors, but also their mindset, relationship and intention. Transcript plays a very important role in this regard. It records utterance and movement of people. It serves to improve understanding and build relationship in different fields of the society. There are characteristics and conventions in analysing a transcript, which will be discussed in depth.

Most of the ‘speech acts’ in general has a topic and purpose, which aims to express something through dialogue to achieve a certain end. In this transcript between Simon and Hugh the main subject is a past football match and what derives from

Notwithstanding that there is no language barrier, the difference in cultural background still renders significant impact in the conversation. In this short video clip students from five countries are having a party with the lecturer. There are three native English speakers among them. The atmosphere is lack of warmth as each is in awe to search for an appropriate subject. They are obviously not familiar with each other. The lecturer Barbara seems to be in the role of bridging the gap with her linguistic expertise, when at 0.49 there is an embarrassed silence which she breaks by posing a question. Notably, most of the time the conversation is dominated by native English interlocutors. Others seem too shy to deliver a longer speech except the few short interspersing questions ‘‘Can you get to bed at the same time?’,’Is there a perfect time to have children?’’ or backchaneling with ‘really?’. Genevoix does spend one minute talking about his experience of fitting his time schedule to that of his children. As the party is not a lecture, spontaneous speech is spoken here. Genevoix seems to have short pause in his speech and occasionally repeats as in ‘again, again’ and use ‘filter’ (BBC, 2018)feature such as ‘uh’ and ‘so’ to ‘create thinking time and acts to fill a gap of silence’(BBC, 2018). The main subject is constantly about the experience of young parents. Due to cultural impediment or factors concerning interest, it seldom inspires others to offer a longer opinion. There are certainly laughter but it sounds forceful and seems to function as filling the empty space between pauses. There is no shortage of features in this extract, it would create a very rich transcript if it was to be