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Laboratory: DCTs (oral and written)

The discourse completion test (often also called discourse completion task) has a very long history in speech act research. It was used by Blum-Kulka, House and Kasper (1989a) in their Cross-Cultural Speech Act Realisation Project (CCSARP), in which the speech acts “request” and “apology” were contrasted in a range of languages. The method depends on invented little dialogues in which one utterance is missing, but the context makes it clear that in this particular position a particular type of speech act is required. It is easy to administer this test quickly to a large number of informants. According to Blum-Kulka, House and Kasper (1989b: 13) DCTs have several advantages over the field method. They concede that the data should come from “natural” conditions, but with the field method they would not be able to collect a large sample of data. With discourse completion tests, the researchers elicit more stereotyped responses, which will reveal the actual cross-cultural differences in a sharper contrast.

Blum-Kulka, House and Kasper (1989a: 274) use dialogues such as the following to elicit requests (1) and apologies (2).

1. In a crowded non non-smoking compartment
David S. is going by train from London to Manchester. In Watford another passenger enters the non-smoking compartment and takes the last available seat. After a while he lights a cigarette.
David S.: .................................................................................................
Passenger: Okay, I’ll put it out.

2. In the lobby of the university library
Jim and Charlie have agreed to meet at six o’clock to work on a joint project. Charlie arrives on time and Jim is half an hour late.
Charlie: I almost gave up on you!
Jim: ...........................................................................................................
Charlie: O.K. Let’s start working.
This method has been discussed and criticized widely. It has been noted that some dialogues put the informants into roles with which they are unfamiliar. This may create unnatural utterances. The space provided on the sheets constrains the length of the utterance, and the follow-up turn which is also provided is also unnatural because the informant knows ahead of time how the imaginary interlocutor will react to his or her utterance.

More recently DCTs have also been administered in oral form in order to avoid the problem that people don’t write how they talk.

One inherent drawback of the DCT technique, whether oral or written, is that it does not allow negotiation between the imaginary DCT character and the real-life interlocutor, so multiple turns become impossible unless a second-turn rejoinder is provided. As a result, respondents have to say everything in one turn, causing longer DCT responses than what is actually produced in natural speech, at least in the first Turn (Yuan 2001: 284)

See also:

For a discussion of this method in connection with a particular set of research questions see: