This article examines how second language (L2) interactional competence is manifested in students' use of "and"-prefaced turns when doing meaning-focused oral tasks in pairs and small groups. Drawing on video recordings from English-as-a-foreign-language upper-secondary classes recorded in Czechia and Finland, 86 sequences involving…

Our study examines interpersonal functions enacted through a stance marker in spoken ELF academic discourse. We specifically focus on investigating the functions of "I don't know" in an academic speech event by embracing an interpersonal pragmatics and sociolinguistics perspective to figure out how it contributes to the act of…

Topics addressed in this review include ethnology and traditional dialect study, philology, linguistic conversion analysis, and interaction within the social sciences. Finland's size affects these research activities and research on spoken interaction is shifting to group projects with a common focus. (Contains 68 references.) (JP)

An analysis is presented of an electronic mail conversation that took place in a Finnish scholarly electronic mailing list. The data is analyzed within the framework of systemic-functional oriented discourse and the theory of register, which attempts to explain the ways language use varies according to the type of situation. The electronic media…

This paper examines points in oral test interviews where an interviewee explicitly seeks clarification from the interviewer on the content of a question posed, prior to attempting to answer a question. Some of the interviews are drawn from the Finnish Foreign Language Diploma for Professional Purposes examination (Tyoelaman kielidiplomi); others…

Research on spoken discourse that was conducted for three master's theses at the University of Oulu is summarized. The studies were as follows: (1) an examination of linguistic strategies realized in business negotiations, based on an analysis of six recordings of simulated negotiations between eight Finnish engineers and a native speaker of…

Experiences with the data, analysis, and results in the Finnish Contrastive Discourse Analysis Project (1985-1988) at the University of Oulu are reported. The purpose of the project was to describe the conversational skills of advanced Finnish speakers of English, and especially to determine the level of their social competence or their ability to…

Topics covered in papers presented at a Finnish workshop on discourse analysis include, in English: the situational code in conversation; persuasive strategies and face-work in impromptu speech; historical aspects of complex behavioral strategies in politeness; the implications of predictability and unpredictability for negotiation discourse; and…