Between speaking and listening: The vocalisation of understandings

In the teaching of Listening in language pedagogy, there has been a tendency either to treat this skill as discrete from speaking, particularly as extended texts to be responded to after hearing them or to focus on speaking rather than listening in the teaching of conversational skills. This paper argues that there are some important aspects of listening as an interactive skill that have been largely neglected. Amongst these are what have been characterised in the literature as backchannels (Yngve 1970), minimal response (e.g. Coates 1986) or receipt tokens (e.g. Heritage 1984a), and include items such as Yeah, Oh, Right, and Great. Such vocalisations produced by those in primarily listening roles at any particular moment in spoken interaction provide information to a primary speaker about how their contributions have been understood, and can have a crucial influence on the trajectory of talk. This paper argues that such items might profitably be taught as part of the development of conversational skills, and provides a characterisation of three of them, Yeah, Mm hm and Mm, to illustrate some of their characteristics in terms of placement in sequences of talk, prosodic shape, pause environment and speakership incipiency. Some comments on pedagogical implications are made.