Zhaoyi Pan
English Language Coordinating Section, the School of Information Technology, King Mongkut’s University of Technology Thonburi, Thailand
Academic group discussions were studied as a ritual frame by adopting the interactional approach in this research. The first aim was to examine how students reached alignment with university lecturers via speech acts (SAs) in group discussions based on the integrative SA model in the interactional approach. The second aim was to examine how the students avoided conflicts with university lecturers in the process of reaching alignment. A total of 61 Thai university students and two American university lecturers were involved in this research. The data consisted of naturally occurring group discussions: English was used as a lingua franca (ELF). Qualitative and quantitative methods were used for the analyses in this research. Following the interactional approach, a bottom-up analysis was employed to identify the SAs. The results revealed seven Exchange patterns that consisted of different Moves realized via the SAs in the academic group discussions, including the frequent uses of the SAs Request, Opine, Tell, and Resolve. The Exchange patterns indicated that academic group discussions constituted a ritual frame in which the seemingly erratic utterances had regular patterns. Furthermore, the students did not engage in conflicts with the lecturers due to the SAs Request, Resolve, and Opine including a Grounder. This finding indicated that the disagreements in the academic group discussions were regarded as having positive discourse functions for resolving academic problems.
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