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108 Chapter 4 Design for collaboration and communication

someone else taking part in the conversation may take up the opportunity and
offer a view on the matter. If this does not happen then the third rule is applied and
the current speaker continues talking. The rules are cycled through recursively
until someone speaks again.
To facilitate rule following, people use various ways of indicating how long
they are going to talk and on what topic. For example, a speaker might say right at
the beginning of their turn in the conversation that he has three things to say. A
speaker may also explicitly request a change in speaker by saying, "OK, that's all I
want to say on that matter. So, what do you think?" to a listener. More subtle cues
to let others know that their turn in the conversation is coming to an end include
the lowering or raising of the voice to indicate the end of a question or the use of
phrases like, "You know what I mean?" or simply, "OK?" Back channeling (uh-
huh, mmm), body orientation (e.g., moving away from or closer to someone), gaze
(staring straight at someone or glancing away), and gesture (e.g. raising of arms)
are also used in different combinations when talking, to signal to others when
someone wants to hand over or take up a turn in the conversation.
Another way in which conversations are coordinated and given coherence is
through the use of adjacency pairs (Shegloff and Sacks, 1973). Utterances are as-
sumed to come in pairs in which the first part sets up an expectation of what is to
come next and directs the way in which what does come next is heard. For exam-
ple, A may ask a question to which B responds appropriately:
A: So shall we meet at 8:00?
B: Um, can we make it a bit later, say 8:30?

Sometimes adjacency pairs get embedded in each other, so it may take some time
for a person to get a reply to their initial request or statement:
A: So shall we meet at 8:00?
B: Wow, look at him.
A: Yes, what a funny hairdo!
B: Um, can we make it a bit later, say 8:30?
For the most part people are not aware of following conversational mechanisms,
and would be hard pressed to articulate how they can carry on a conversation. Fur-
thermore, people don't necessarily abide by the rules all the time. They may inter-
rupt each other or talk over each other, even when the current speaker has clearly
indicated a desire to hold the floor for the next two minutes to finish an argument.
Alternatively, a listener may not take up a cue from a speaker to answer a question
or take over the conversation, but instead continue to say nothing even though the
speaker may be making it glaringly obvious it is the listener's turn to say some-
thing. Many a time a teacher will try to hand over the conversation to a student in a
seminar, by staring at her and asking a specific question, only to see the student
look at the floor, and say nothing. The outcome is an embarrassing silence, fol-
lowed by either the teacher or another student picking up the conversation again.
Other kinds of breakdowns in conversation arise when someone says something
that is ambiguous and the other person misinterprets it to mean something else. In