Turn taking

Conversation is a means of social interaction involving two or more participants who talk about certain topic. Therefore, conversation is determined to build a social relationship in society. Conversation is more than merely the exchange of talk. In conversation, two or more people participate in exchanging ideas. It means that there are at least two individuals who take part in the conversation as the speaker and the listener and the two participants have to take turn of speaking. Each participant has the power to control the floor in ongoing conversation. Each participant has their own way to get the floor which can be defined as the right to speak. However, there will be only one participant who speaks at a time. Since there will be two or more participants in a conversation, we could not estimate who will take the turn because each participant has the same right to speak. Therefore, each participant has the same opportunity to take the turn. The exchange of turn occurs orderly. The reason is that there are rules which govern our conversation. When someone talks, the others will listen to him and wait for their turns. Those rules are called turn taking system.

Participants could not take the control as they want. There is a set of rules that governs one's speech, when a speaker takes the turn, giving turn, or keeping it. Turn taking system is proposed to make sure that there is only one participant who speaks at a time with the minimal gaps and overlaps in each turn change. Turn-taking is considered to play an essential role in structuring people’s social interactions in terms of control and regulation of conversation. Therefore the system of turn-taking has become object of analysis for both linguists and sociologists. Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson are a group of sociologists who are considered to be the most influential in the area of Turn-Taking. They are the first linguists to introduce turn taking and discover how conversation works and what methods people use to participate in and make sense of interaction. They examine a variety of recorded conversations from everyday life and conclude that turn taking seems to be a basic form of organization for conversation and that organization must be controlled by some kind of mechanism which facilitates the orderly distribution of turns and govern the process of talk in their seminal review of the systemics of turn-taking in conversation. They also construct the rules that coordinate our spontaneous interaction. These rules organize who should take the floor and who should keep silent until his/her turn and at which point the speaker changes. Moreover, they wanted to know If the speaking turns are not pre-allocated, how do participants in the conversation select the next speaker?. After carefully studying very detailed transcripts of actual recorded conversations, they proposed what they called the turn-allocation component of the turn-taking system.

There are also cues through which people know when they have to take the turn or give it to the other participant. Those cues play an important role to minimize gaps and overlaps and to accomplish smooth conversation. They are cues given by the speaker in the conversation to indicate the beginning and the end of his turn. The study of conversational organization assumes that there are ways by which speaker communicates his desire to yield, take, or maintain the floor. Those cues can be verbal or non-verbal. Although the use of nonverbal cues is universal and innate, their meaning is culture-bound. Turn-taking cues are probably not generalized to all cultures. It has been found that cross-cultural differences in patterns of turn-taking cues like eye behavior are a potential problem in social interaction. The British do not nod their heads to let you know they understand; rather, they will blink their eyes to let you know they have heard you. Conversation will not always be accomplished smoothly. There will be some phenomena accompany the conversation such as gaps, overlaps, and interruption. On the other hand, there are phenomena which help the conversation to pass smoothly such as the phenomena of back-channels and adjacency pairs. Although turn taking rules govern who should take the turn and who keeps silent or leave the floor for other participant, there are other elements that contribute to the flow conversation such as Turn taking Cues, Adjacency pairs and turn taking Features.