Discourse Patterns in First Language Use at Hcme and Second Language Learning at School: an Ethnographic Approach

Literature I 56

'enabling' adult secures and maintains attention, ensures mutual
comprehension (expanding, reformulating, extending the child's
utterances), and sustains the desire for conversation by enlarging
child-initiated topics (Veils and Gutfreund,1984; Veils,1986; see the
example of conversation on page 142);

in order to analyze adult-child conversation and Request/Response
patterns, a functional analysis of utterance is not enough: it is
necessary to elaborate a model that can capture the utterance's
potential for Interaction (Veils and Robinson,1982), in particular the
way adults acknowledge the response and return the floor to the child
(see 5.3).

2.4.2 QuestionZanswer patterns

The structure of conversation refers to 'the ways in which conversational
turns combine into larger units as well as the permissible orders of
occurrence of turns' (McTear,1985:29). The most used device to allocate
turns consists in asking a question, a move that returns the floor to the
interlocutor. As adult-child conversations tend to be asymmetrical, the
questions posed by adults and the ways in which the adults reply to
children's questions are important for the maintenance of the conversa-
tion.

This latter point has been taken into consideration by a number of stu-
dies focusing on adults' questions, and adults' turns moves conducive to
child's participation have been given many labels:
. turnabout sequences (Kaye and Charney, 198O)
. leading questions (Corsaro,1979)
. verbal and action-reflective questions (McDonald and Pien,1982)
. return questions (Cole et al.,1978)
. turn-transfer questions (Berninger and Garvey,1981).

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