CONVERSATIONAL BEHAVIORS OF MONOLINGUAL AND BILINGUAL CHILDREN: A STUDY ON EPISODES AND INITIATIONS

Year 2017, Volume: 26 Issue: 2, 291 - 307, 31.10.2017

Fatma Hülya Özcan

Abstract

Conversations
shape social interactions and conversational rules shape understanding among
the participants. Among these conversational rules, initiations, verbal or
non-verbal, are one of the basic rules. Initiations are important in the sense
that they signal where a certain stretch of discourse, in other words,
episodes, starts and ends in long stretches of discourse. Each episode in a
conversation continues the same topic and contributes to topical coherence.
Therefore, applying conversational rules are important at all stages of
language development since it will prevent communication breakdowns. In this
study, the focus is on the type of episodes that take place in conversations
and how episodes are initiated by both monolingual Turkish-speaking and
bilingual Turkish-Danish-speaking children. For this purpose, group
conversations of monolingual and bilingual children were analyzed in terms of
episodes and how these episodes are initiated. The results show that
conversational skills continues to develop at school age. Being a monolingual
or bilingual also makes a difference in conversational skills.

Keywords

Conversational Skills, Episodes, Initiations, Monolingual, Bilingual

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