Sequential construction of disagreement in ELF academic discussion

Abstract

Group discussion is often used in academic settings as a way to collaboratively learn the diverse views on a given topic. Critical element, such as disagreeing to other’s opinions, are crucial to enhance the understanding of the topic in this academic genre (Brookfield & Preskill, 2005), however, ELF university students may confront difficulties when expressing oppositional ideas, as cultural differences in perspectives on disagreement are reported to be prominent (Angouri & Locher, 2012; Blum-Kulka, Blondheim, & Hacohen, 2002). While the past studies on disagreement have mostly examined the linguistic strategies and directness levels of the head act, the present study investigated sequential practices of disagreement in extended discourse, in order to illuminate the interactional dimension of this speech act. A total of 179 undergraduate students with mixed L1 background (approximately 55% Cantonese, 30% Mandarin, 15% others, including Hindu, Korean, Indonesian, Swedish, etc.) participated in this study, from an English medium university in Hong Kong. A corpus of 22 hours of academic group discussion have been recorded and fully transcribed. Conversation Analysis was used to identify adjacency pairs of disagreement (first pair part; FPP) and response to disagreement (second pair part; SPP), and coded for the progression of supportive moves in pre-, insert and post-expansions. Although there were some instances of thorough discussion on disagreed points consisting of multiple turns, some SPPs were either not directly relevant to the corresponding FPPs, or the corresponding SPPs were missing. This may indicate the transactional nature of the enacted disagreement, where the group members chose to disregard it or opted out the opportunity to deepen the discussion. Considering the purpose of academic group discussion, both the irrelevance and the absence of SPPs can be seen as lacking in collaborative interaction. In contrast to this feature, another pattern of supportive move was often observable, where disagreements to FPP were expressed by a third speaker through an agreement to SPPs in post-expansion, illustrating how agreement may be more preferred than disagreement when interacting with others.