Taking turns to speak in a classroom with bilingual students (Spanish-Wixárika)

Abstract

The majority of students, mestizos and indigenous people of the university campus studied, show deficiencies in the knowledge of standard Spanish both at the syntactic level (grammar) and at the pragmatic level (rules of use). Standard Spanish is the one used in books, the media, official writings, and university classes. Such ignorance often makes the transmission and acquisition of knowledge difficult, so it is advisable to better understand these difficulties. The objective of this work is to support the proposal of the study of taking turns to speak within class, as a relevant research project to optimize the verbal interaction that occurs in the classroom. The exploration presented here was carried out from the perspective of speech ethnography and conversational analysis of North American linguistic pragmatics, where the analysis of turn-taking plays a central role. As results, it was found that interruptions in the rhythm of verbal exchanges within the class frequently occurred due to anomalies when speaking, and came from both mestizo and indigenous students. Based on the observations collected, it was possible to outline a strategy to begin to remedy these communication difficulties. In conclusion, it is advisable that teachers and students keep in mind that there are different ways of using the same language, and that a bachelor's degree graduate increases his or her chances of performing successfully in the workplace if, in addition to grammar, he or she masters the rules of use of Spanish. standard; among which are those concerning taking turns when participating in a formal conversation.