Kommunikative Muster in chinesischen universitären DaF-Unterrichtsgesprächen am Beispiel der Gesprächseröffnung

Conversation opening as one of the three most important phases of conversation is constructed interactively by participants. A lot of researches focus on it in various contexts, but there is no study of it in the setting of Chinese university GFL class. In this respect, this paper focuses on the analysis of conversation opening based on authentic recorded GFL classroom conversations from a Chinese university in order to approach the research desideratum described. Within the theoretical and methodological framework of the concept of communicative genres, this paper is dedicated to a detailed investigation of the conversation opening on the internal structure, situational realisation level and external structure in order to reconstruct the interactional processes between the teachers and learners in the opening sequences as well as to elaborate the structural features. On the basis of the data analysis, it can be stated that the interactants jointly negotiate and open the classroom conversations in a pattern-like form. Structurally, the communicative pattern of the conversation opening is essentially composed of the acoustic part, the greeting sequences and the transition to the middle of the conversation. In addition, the features of the conversation opening are still reflected at the three levels of analysis by the use of lexical means and the adjacency pairs as well as by the characteristics of the constellation of participants in the conversation. However, deviations from the sedimentations of the pattern (such as expanded or compressed conversation opening) are found in the data, as communicative patterns are not static and can always be updated in situ.