Turn-taking and Topic Management Strategies

The purpose of Community Based Organizations is to plan, implement, and monitor social and economic development programs and provide technical and financial help to the communities. CBOs positively affects the process of rural change i.e. increase in income, improvement in health, nutrition and literacy status of the populations. CBOs serve as a link between citizens and the government and are often thought to be more responsive to community concerns than government agencies or private businesses. They provide services to a specific community area. This study will seek to determine factors affecting performance of community based organizations projects in Kenya with a focus on MIGORI County. The private sector, NGOs and CBOs are now increasingly asserting their importance as alternative economic vehicles that will spur development in Africa as they contribute 24% to the gross national income of Africa’s economy (WB, 2008). In Kenya, a poor economic environment and rapidly increasing population has resulted in 50% of Kenyans currently living in absolute poverty (Mkutu, 2011). According to the Ministry of Health (2009), MIGORI County has a population of 1.27 million and the land size is 509 square miles. The land size is too small to meet the needs of the population considering the land is arable. The variables to be reviewed include financial management practices, governance, community participation, project management and CBO project performance. The study adopted descriptive research design as the researcher sought to gather information, summarize, present and interpret it for the purpose of clarification. The target population for the study was CBOs management teams. The researcher administered a questionnaire to 52 respondents. The study found financial management practices, governance, community participation and project management practices have a great positive influence on the performance of CBO projects.



Keywords;
CBO projects, CBO projects performance, CBO and financial management practices, CBO and project management, factors affecting CBO projects, CBOs in Kenya, CBO and community participation, CBO and governance and CBO in MIGORI County.

The article extends the application of the mechanisms of conversational humour from everyday conversations to written mass media texts. It argues that such an approach is made possible by the dialogic structure of some texts, despite the lack of spontaneity and authenticity that is found in casual conversations and that appears implicit in many definitions of conversational humour. Identifying instances of quasi-conversational verbal exchange in the novel journalistic genre of live text commentary, the article points out that humour in such written texts is achieved cooperatively between different voices present in the text, i.e. the journalist’s voice and the authentic voices of selected readers whose emails are cited in the text of the commentary. A close analysis reveals that within the commentary, quasi-conversational segments constitute a special narrative layer that is characterised by its orientation to gossip and which includes frequent elements of humour. After defining the concept of a quasi-conversation and distinguishing between two sets of mechanisms of conversational humour, the article focuses on the interactive mechanisms (retorts, teasing, and banter) that occur in second turns in conversations, i.e. as reactions to previous speakers’ turns.

This study exploits multimodal conversation analysis towards TV One's political interview between the interviewer, Ventin Oktavi, and Deputy Governor of Jakarta, Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, which is talking about the revocation of government subsidy on gasoline (BBM). This study determines particular issues on how does the interviewer differentiate and manage her conversational features in terms of aggression and insistence in order to pursue the theme, how the interviewer puts her words in the interviewee's mouth, how often they interrupt the interviewer and how often they themselves are interrupted. Aside from the analysis of their respective communicative functions in terms of feedback and turn management, this study will examine the type of facial, hand and body gestures as well. Data were taken from TV One's interview video on YouTube and then transcribed into textual evidence. Video annotation process and interview corpus are also conducted by using annotation software, ELAN. The analysis of data is based on the brief guide of Conversation Analysis (CA) that was conducted by Forrester . Analysis and interpretation of data determine the effect of the conversational interview setting on the interaction behavior of the participants. In conclusion, this study adds comments and exploitation of the resulting resource.

For the applied linguist seeking to establish the roles of teachers and students in a particular classroom context, the independent insights into the same data of two rival perspectives can be an advantage. However, leading exponents of both Conversational Analysis and Structural Discourse Analysis have often been dismissive of each others` approaches. This paper provides a detailed analysis to indicate how the two approaches may be used to complement each other.

Business meetings are superficially alike all over the world. Yet under the surface they show fundamental discursive differences that align with the specific cultures in which they occur (Aritz and Walker, 2014). A lack of awareness of these differences within the context of an intercultural meeting can potentially impact group rapport and meeting effectiveness. This paper compares the discursive behaviour of groups of Japanese English speakers and groups of native English speakers participating in decision-making meetings and concludes that there are notable and discordant differences across the two groups in terms how discourse is framed, how speaking turns are achieved and how conflict is resolved.

In TLT Volume 42 (3), Davey Young presents contrasting models of turn-taking in Japanese and English and argues that this cross-cultural difference is primarily due to linguistic differences across English and Japanese. While rightly noting that proficiency in turn-taking is crucial for overall interactional competence and should be a focus of pedagogical intervention, Young’s rationale for the difference in his models neglects the important factor of pragmatics, particularly the notion of politeness. In this response to Young’s original article, Japanese-English differences in turn-taking behaviours are considered from a pragmatic viewpoint and analysed as part of a larger discursive leadership (Fairhurst, 2007) framework. The implications for teaching turn-taking are also discussed.

In this paper we discuss a cross-cultural analysis of non-verbal expressions (gestures, facial expressions, body posture) that have a turn managing function in the flow of interaction. The study was carried out by analyzing and comparing the features of interest in two samples of institutional interaction, namely face-to-face political interviews, in Greek and Icelandic respectively. The non-verbal behavior of the participants in both interviews was annotated following the same annotation process. The attested turn management instances were compared in order to find similarities and differences in terms of frequency and modality preference.