EEJ 2 (2) (2012) English Education Journal http://journal.unnes.ac.id/sju/index.php/eej THE NEGOTIATION IN STUDENTS’ CASUAL CONVERSATION Suci Purwaningjati  Prodi Pendidikan Bahasa Inggris, Program Pascasarjana, Universitas Negeri Semarang, Indonesia Abstrak Studi ini bertujuan untuk (a) menggambarkan cara tentang bagaimana untuk menopang percakapan siswa, (b) menggambarkan pattern dari negotiation, (c) menggambarkan implikasi pedagogis temuan. Penelitian ini merupakan qualitative research dengan pendekatan Systemic Functional Linguistics dalam menganalisa casual conversation. Instrumen yang digunakan ialah Eggins dan Slade’s Move Network System, bahan diambil dari 10 chat dalam I ntensive course group Universitas Sunan Muria Kudus. Hasil temuan menunjukan bahwa respon peserta ditemukan 37,1% dikategorikan sustain, 45,7% merespon move dan 17,1% rejoinder. Tiga paten dari negosiasi yaitu (1) paten dari splitting Moves relevancy (2) collaborative support (3) dan particular choice of moves closed conversation exchange. Implikasi pedagogis adalah emosi yang muncul dalam teks dengan rincian 64% fungsional dan 36% non-fungsional. Mayoritas peserta setuju untuk meningkatkan pengembangan paten dengan memberikan peserta treatment menggunakan materi dengan konjungsi dan statemen yang dapat diterima dan menggunakan question tag. Abstract The Negotiation in Students’ Casual Conversation: The Case of Muria Kudus University’s Intensive Course Group Chat in Facebook aims at a) describing the way how participants sustain their conversation, b) describing the negotiation pattern, c) describing the pedagogical implication of the findings. It is a qualitative research with Systemic Functional Linguistics approach on analyzing Casual Conversation. The instrument was the Eggins and Slade’s Move Network system. The corpus was 10 transcribed chats of Intensive Course Group Chat Muria Kudus University. The findings showed that 37.1% of the participants’ response was Sustain:Continuing Move, 45.7% was Responding Move, and 17.1% was Rejoinder Move. Participants therefore negotiated around what had been proposed by the initiator. Three Ne- gotiation patterning were: (1) a pattern of splitting Moves relevancy (2) a pattern of col- laborative support, (3) a pattern of particular choice of moves closed conversation exchange; particular others opened the channel of a conversation. The pedagogical implication was that Emoticons appeared in the text 64% functioned conventionally, while 36% functioned un-conventionally. The domination of Responding:Agree Move should be encouraged to the production of Developing and Rejoinder Move by treating the participants with some materi- als like expanding message using acceptable conjunction and Statement with question tagging. © 2012 Universitas Negeri Semarang Info Artikel Sejarah Artikel: Diterima Agustus 2012 Disetujui September 2012 Dipublikasikan November 2012 Keywords: Negotiation in student’s group chat Sustaining move Confrontation and sup- port in casual conversation  Alamat korespondensi: Kampus Unnes Bendan Ngisor, Semarang 50233 E-mail: jurnalpps@unnes.ac.id ISSN 2087-0108 Suci Purwaningjati / English Education Journal 2 (2) (2012) 134 INTRODUCTION It has become a general consensus for te- achers who approach their students with Commu- nicative Language Teaching that the instructional goal of foreign or second language learning is to facilitate students achieving their communicative competence. Murcia (2001:16) defined Communicative Competence as a compilation of grammatical competence, discourse competence, socio cultu- ral competence and strategic competence. Lear- ners having good communicative competence are those who can apply their grammatical compe- tence to communicate with their environment based on the socio-cultural context to create spo- ken or written discourse, and if anything happens during their effort of creating a discourse they should use strategies to maintain the continuing flow of the discourse. Fluency, an indicator to measure commu- nicative competence, was explained by Lazaraton in (Murcia 2001:104) to have two meanings. The first meaning refers to the ability to link units of speech together with facility without strain or inappropriate showiness. The second meaning refers to “natural language use,” which is likely to take place when speaking activities focus on mea- ning and its negotiation, when speaking strategies are used and when overt correction is minimized. In the case of Intensive Course Class at Muria Kudus University, where English was a fo- reign language and all students taking this subject were freshmen, there were still a lot of students who found constraints in speaking English. In short, it was considered that students’ performan- ces in the class during the conversation session probably did not provide enough room for practi- ces; students needed more room providing them with good supporting atmosphere which was less anxious than classroom atmosphere was. As one indicator to measure one’s commu- nicative competence is through testing the lear- ners’ fluency in the natural use of language when the interaction is focused on negotiation and its meaning, I am interested to do a research on the interaction the students made through a group chat in facebook to tap their true communicati- ve competence with negotiation as the measure- ment. Therefore this article research aims at (1) describing the way how Intensive Course Group chat sustains their conversation by analyzing the Sustaining Move in Intensive Course Group Chat; (2) describing the Negotiation pattern in Intensive Course Group Chat; (3) describing the pedagogical implications on the interpretation of Sustaining Move and the interpretation of Nego- tiation Pattern in Muria Kudus University’s In- tensive Course Group Chat. Study dealing with analysis of students’ chat had been conducted by Stahl (2005). The pa- per identified a pattern of exchange of postings that it termed math proposal adjacency pair, and described its characteristics. The paper adapted the approach of conversation analysis in inves- tigating mathematical problem-solving commu- nication and to the computer-mediated circums- tances of online chat. The result of the study was Math proposals and other interaction methods constituted the collaborative group as a working group, gave direction to its problem solving and helped to sustain its shared meaning making or group cognition. The second study was a comparison of ne- gotiated interaction in text and voice chat rooms which was conducted by Jepson (2005). This study explored the patterns of repair moves in synchronous non-native speaker (NNS) text chat rooms in comparison to voice chat rooms on the Internet. To define the patterns of repair moves, Jepson has focused his research questions on two areas. The first was the types of repair mo- ves occurring in text and voice chat rooms when the time was held constant. The second was the differences of repair moves in text and voice chat rooms when the time was held constant. Repair moves made by anonymous NNSs in 10, 5-minu- te, synchronous chat room sessions (5 text-chat sessions, 5 voice-chat sessions) were counted and analyzed using chi-square with alpha set at .05. The result was that there had been some signifi- cant differences found between the higher num- ber of total repair moves made in voice chats and the smaller number in text chats. Qualitative data analysis showed that repair work in voice chats was often pronunciation-related. The negotiation referred by this article re- fers to the negotiation proposed by Eggins and Slade (1997). The Negotiation aimed in this ar- ticle is the Discourse Structure patterns. Eggins and Slade (1997:54) stated that Discourse struc- ture patterns are patterns which operate across turns and are thus overtly interactional and se- quential. They show participants choose to act on each other through their choice of speech function (i.e speech act), such as “demanding”, “challenging”, “contradicting”, or “supporting”, and how participants’ choices function to sustain or terminate conversational exchanges. Choice of speech function is a key resource for negotiating degrees of familiarity. If interactants wish to exp- 135 Suci Purwaningjati / English Education Journal 2 (2) (2012) lore their interpersonal relations, they must choo- se speech functions which keep the conversation going, and this frequently means that intimate re- lations involve interactants reacting to each other in confronting, rather than supporting moves. The Negotiation pattern discussed in this article refers to the regularities shown by the dis- course structure performed in each chat segment. Hence, the discourse structure is the combination of a synoptic and a dynamic perspective on the speech function analysis. In visualizing the negotiation pattern, I draw an arrow to connect the first Move (initia- ting Move) to the next Move chosen by the next respondent or by the current speaker if her/his choice of Move is Continuing Move. In the me- antime the Turn in chat segment is set in Arabic number.The underlying theory of this interpre- tation is that the discourse structure in systemic provide a way of relating patterns in move cho- ices to the interpersonal context of interaction (Eggins and Slade, 1997:179) The micro pattern that characterizes the pattern within exchange per chat segment will make up a macro pattern of Negotiation in Student’s Group Chat in Facebook: This macro pattern is the characteristic of Negotation pattern in Intensive Course in Muria Kudus University According to Eggins and Slade (1997:8), casual conversation is the kind of talk we engage in when we are talking just for the sake of talking. In case of Intensive Course Group Chat in Facebook, even though group chatting was con- sidered to be an asynchronous CMC, the parti- cipants were doing chatting continually that the existing time-delay did not provide any necessary impact on the negotiation the participants had because the notion of negotiation used in this study is based on the process of exchanging mea- ning occurred in the conversation. In addition to this, the purpose of conversation and the features of language performed in this conversation di- rected to spoken language and the use of some expressions like emoticons, extra punctuations and lexical choices directed it to close with casual conversation than pragmatic conversation. The- refore, the negotiation notion used to approach this conversation was the negotiation in casual conversation which emphasized on the process of exchanging meaning. Eggins (1997:48) stated that one of the most powerful aspects of the systemic approach is that language is viewed as a resource for ma- king not just one meaning at a time but several strands of meaning simultaneously. This means that a casual conversation, itself an extended se- mantic unit or text, is modeled as the simultaneo- us exchange of three types of meaning.. In terms of ideational meanings, Derewi- anka (2011:13) stated that one important fun- ction of language is to enable us to represent what is going on in the world: to talk about our experiences, to reflect on our observations, to share knowledge and ideas. In terms of textual meaning, Droga and Humphrey (2003:85) refer it as a way a language is used to organize the in- formation in a text to make connections across a text. In terms of interpersonal function, Derewi- anka (2011:109) stated that language functions to foster social interaction, to create and maintain relationships, to develop and project a personal identity, to express opinions and engage with the views of others. The participants’ social roles and relative The following is the example of the negotiation pattern retrieved from given analyzed chat segment. Conversational Structure Turn/ move Speaker Talk O:I:Statement:Opinion 1/a Risqie (i)Huuft! Tomorrow I will go to school (ii)cause attend pengajian in audito- rium. R:c:contradict C:enhance 2/a 2/b Fathur (i)That’s good,, (ii) make your heart pure R:R:d:extend 3/a Ulil (i)Yeah, God together with you ② ② Suci Purwaningjati / English Education Journal 2 (2) (2012) 136 social status is the area where this study is wor- king, therefore he data analysis in this study oc- cupies some techniques—mood and Speech Fun- ction-- to obtain the negotiation pattern from the conversation. Halliday (1994) suggests that “dialogue is a process of exchange involving two variables; a commodity to be exchange; either information or goods and services, role associated with exchan- ge relations; either giving or demanding” (Eggins and Slade, 1997:180). In terms of Casual Conversation, Eggins and Slade (1997: 191) stated that the distinc- tion to capture is more subtle: it is the types of initiations, and types of responses that they see differently created and maintained. Since the re- lationships may appear to be based on equality and sameness, a more delicate analysis is needed to reveal underlying patterns of inequality and differences. Thus, Eggins and Slade (1997:192) elaborate the speech functions classes into open- ing, sustaining, responding, and rejoinder speech functions. Eggins and Slade (1997: 192) describe the speech functions and their sub classes in a speech function network. The speech functions are open- ing speech function and sustaining speech functi- on. There are two kinds of opening speech func- tions; attending and initiating. Sustaining speech functions can be elaborated in to Continuing speech function and Reacting speech function. There are two kinds of Reacting speech func- tions; they are Reacting speech function; Respon- ding and Reacting speech function; Rejoinder. METHODS This article works with the method of a qualitative research. The approach of this article was based on Eggins and Slade’s (1997) Casual Conversation Analysis, within the approach of Systemic Functional Linguistics. The subjects were the Intensive Course of F Class Muria Kudus University of academic year 2011/2012. The data were a one-year se- lected transcript of conversation-like texts in In- tensive Course Group Chat in Facebook. To collect the data, a group chat through Facebook was established in November 2011 and then all students were invited to join the group. In the first week, an initiation of topics was done with some encouragement and then after eve- ryone was getting used to this group, the group was administered and their conversations were observed until late of June 2012 in order to find minimum 5 Turns per chat segment and finally the transcript was copied and noted based on the notation stated in Eggins (1997:5). The unit analyses of this research were ‘turn’, ‘moves’, ‘exchange’ and ‘clause’. Eggin &Slade’s steps of analyzing a casual conversation (Eggin&Slade:1997:217-226) were adopted while combining them with researcher’s interpretation on drawing the Negotiation Pattern. The steps of analyzing the data are as follows: (1) Observing transcripts, (2) Chungking the data into clauses, (3) Identifying the Moves per clause, (4) Classi- fying the categories of Moves based on the Eg- gins and Slade Speech Function Network, (5) Tabulating the type of Move in each Chat Seg- ment,(6) Integrating the Tabulation of Speech Function in all chat segments into one Table, (7) Interpreting the overall Sustaining Moves in all chat segments (8) Interpreting (Synoptic analysis of Speech Function) (9) Analyzing the dynamic of conversational exchange in each chat segment (10) Interpreting the overall dynamic of conver- sational exchange, (11)Drawing the Negotiation Pattern of each chat segment based on the dyna- mic of conversational exchange, (12) Interpreting the commonalities or regularities shown in ove- rall chat segments , (13) Inferring the Pedagogi- cal Implication of the findings, (14) Drawing the Conclusion. FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION This section is divided into four sections: The Interpretation of Sustaining Moves in Inten- sive Course Group Chat Altogether there were 5 Sustaining Moves performed by participants of Intensi- ve Course Group Chat. Those 5 Moves were Sustaining:Continuing, Responding:Support, Responding:Confront, Rejoinder:Support, and Rejoinder :Confront. The detail presentation of the Moves is in Table 4.52. From the above table, the most Sustaining Moves being chosen by participants of Intensive Course Group Chat was Responding: Support which in percentage it was 39%. In compare with Sustaining: continue, it had an aggregate Move of 2% as the Sustaining:Continuing contributed 37.1% of the totaling Sustaining Move. The third most Move used by participants was Rejoinder: confront which in percentage it was 9.4% whe- reas the Respond: confront and Rejoinder: Sup- port were 6.7% and 7.6% respectively. This imp- lies that participants of Intensive Course Group Chat when they interact they tended to support the proposition delivered by the initiator and they also prefer to continue their proposition. 137 Suci Purwaningjati / English Education Journal 2 (2) (2012) Reflecting from the Choice of Moves by participants of Intensive Course Group Chat in Muria Kudus University, the Rejoinder Move which was expected to be the most dominant Move chosen by participants was not able to be presented here based on the analysis of Move proposed by Eggins and Slade. Meanwhile, the achievement of Rejoinder Move was only 18% of the totaling Sustaining Move. The combination of a synoptic and a dy- namic perspective on the Speech Function ana- lysis allows us to capture both who takes on which roles in the interaction, and the dynamic negotiation of the relationships of inclusion and exclusion, support and confrontation, alignment and distance. The following description covers the summary of Synoptic Interpretation and the dynamic Interpretation of Negotiation Intensive Course Group Chat . In number of Turns, St6 had been the do- minant participant. He almost always enrolled in every chat initiated by his friends. This suggested that St6 interacted more than the other partici- pants in Intensive Course Group Chat. In terms of the number of Move, St1 had been the dominant participant with St6 sits on the second place. This indicated that St1’s had more Speech Function choices or had more purposes than the other participants do in the interaction with Intensive Course Group Chat. For the number of clauses, St1 also was the dominant participant with St6 again sat on the second place. She had made altogether around 43 clauses whereas St6 was 36 clauses. The number of clauses usually resembled that St1 had more air to speak in compare with her other friends sin- ce she produced more clauses. As it was informed above, St1 had been the dominant opening from all chat segments. As an opener, she favored to command her friends. It was for sure indicated certain egocentricity. St1 continued more often, although there was proportionally little difference. When St1 continued she liked to qualify the topic by pro- viding the spatial, causal and conditional detail. This indicated that St1 took a role as instructor giver with detail explanation on a matter. In Responding Move, we see St6 produced the most Moves, and St15 never responded. In fact when St6 responded, half of his responses were replies then registers and the last was deve- loping. This indicated that most of his responses were supporting which constitute a minimal ne- gotiation. In Rejoinding Moves, we see St6 had been the dominant participant. He had produced the most Move in compare with the others producing Rejoinder Move like St8, St1, St11, St10, St15, St16. As the most participant with Rejoinding Moves, it suggested that St6 had been the most assertive participant in Intensive Course Group Chat to negotiate interpersonal relationship. It can be summed up that St6 had been the one who led the negotiation in Muria Kudus Intensive Course Group Chat because he had been dominating the number of Turn, Respon- ding Move and Rejoinding Move. Even though St1 was also the one who was in compete with St6s. St1’s Move were mostly continuing which does not open to another exchange whereas St6’s Table 1.4. The Summary of Sustaining Move in Muria Kudus University Intensive Course Group Chat. Chat Segment Sust: continue Resp: support Resp: confront Rej: support Rej: confront Chat 1 10 6 2 Chat III 3 2 2 2 Chat III 3 3 1 Chat IV 5 5 1 Chat V 1 1 2 2 2 Chat VI 4 5 Chat VII 1 2 2 Chat VIII 4 9 2 2 Chat IX 7 6 1 Chat X 1 2 1 3 Number of Move 39 41 7 8 10 Number of Move in % 37.1% 39.0% 6.7% 7.6% 9.5% Suci Purwaningjati / English Education Journal 2 (2) (2012) 138 Move was mostly responding which sustain the conversation to another exchange. From the Dynamic Interpretation of con- versational Exchange in Intensive Course Group Chat, the pattern of alignment was obviously seen from chat V where St6 was dependent to St1. whenever there was St1 responding in the chat, in the end he would confirm with St1’s proposition. Meanwhile, St1 had always aligned to St7 by al- ways supporting her proposition by developing. St7 could be the central negotiator if she would; only her rare contact with the group gives her a little distance. St11 on the other hand, always in- clines to St6’s proposition in vice versa with St8. St6 was seen to have always argue with St8. The Negotiation Pattern in Intensive Cour- se Group Chat of Muria Kudus University was interpreted based on the commonalities found in the dynamic of confrontation and support in the 10 analyzed chat segments. From the result of analysis of commonali- ties shown by the patterns, they were three major points able to be revealed. First, generally in a con- versation, the Reacting Move given by the addres- see was connected with the previous speaker’s Move in a linear patterning (in this pattern it was in a vertical angle). Bringing the phenomena of Move patterning into the content of the informa- tion in chat where the parallel pattern occurred, it may be assumed that from the content point of view there seemed to be a symptom of splitting relevancies in all of the chat segments. Second, Observing the Reacting Moves chosen by the addressees in Chat segment I up to Chat Segment X there was a tendency in most of chat segments that the most chosen Reacting Moves were Rresponding: Replies Move. This Finding was quite a confirmation to the finding in the analysis of Speech Function in the former section of this study regarding the most domi- nant choice of Speech Function. Since the most Reacting Moves found in the most of the chat segments was Responding:Replies, and the domi- nant replies was Supporting Replying Move, the type of Intensive Course Group Chat Negotiati- on constituted a pattern of collaborative support amongst friends. Third, there was a tendency of termina- ted exchange or sustained exchange in relation with certain choice of Reacting Moves. Some Supporting Moves were proven to terminate the exchange even though few others still sustained the exchange. Usually when it happened, the Supporting Move was Replying Move unless the Supporting Replying Move producer continued his/her Move or the Supporting Move was a De- veloping Move. Meanwhile there was a tenden- cy that Rejoinder Move almost always made the channel opened for exchange. Theoretically the finding deals with the language as a resource of making meaning and pedagogically it deals with the process of learning and communication competence tapped from the students based on the analysis of their products. During the analysis of Move, it was found that the use of emoticons had been very common to accompany expression in the participants’ clause. perhaps this finding may be a reference for Emoticons as a new resource to modulate the meaning of our act. In terms of Negotiation, some typicality like 22 initiating Moves produced by participants, 7 Moves were continued by the initiator before the Turn was given to the floor. In percentage, the continued initiation shares around 32% of totaling Initiating Move. This finding might cont- ributed to the typicality of how negotiation takes place in Computer Mediated Communication which in the future it calls another research on the related field. The next typical finding was that the oc- currence of a split Move relevancy (borrowing the term from Tudini it was called splitting adja- cency). Perhaps this characterizes how Compu- ter Mediated Communication differs from Face to Face communication in some way. The most important finding which recalled pedagogical implication was the way how partici- pants of Intensive Course Group Chat sustained the conversation which was quite different from how the expected sustaining conversation in Ca- sual Conversation should be. This indicated that participants might need some more concentration on the way how to deliver message logically and therefore the students might need to be trained more on how to expand clause by elaborating, extending or enhancing or generally how to use conjunction to be more specific. CONCLUSION Of the whole choice of Moves, the most type of Move chosen by participants for sustai- ning the chat was Responding:Support which shared around 39% of occupied sustaining Mo- ves. Relating the result of Sustaining Move with Communicative Competence, the communica- tive competence is measured by the natural use of language which is likely to take place when speaking activities focus on meaning and its ne- gotiation (Murcia 2001:104). Therefore the result of Sustaining Move as a reflection of Negotiati- 139 Suci Purwaningjati / English Education Journal 2 (2) (2012) on may reflect the communicative competence of the students joining Intensive Course Group Chat. 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