@The WhatsApp DCT: An exploration into a discourse completion task based on WhatsApp

Abstract

The classical discourse completion task (DCT) popularised by the CCSARP is the most maligned research method of any that has been deployed in pragmatics research. One important criticism that has led to more specific criticisms is that the method is unnatural or inauthentic (Blum-Kulka, House, & Kasper, 1989; Jucker, 2009; Leech, 2014). This inauthenticity arises because researchers who have deployed DCTs are generally interested in making claims about spoken speech act usage using a written medium. Thus, researchers have innovated the traditional DCT in a number of ways such as oral DCTs (Yuan, 2001), the multimedia elicitation task (Schauer, 2009), the free discourse completion task (Barron, 2003), and the use of cartoons (Rose, 2000; Flores Salgado, 2011) to better approximate the spoken medium. Of course, this would be much less of a problem for studies which are interested in how speech acts are produced in a medium that matches the medium of the DCT. For example, researching how speech acts are realized in emails using the traditional DCT (Woodfield & Economidou-Kogetsidis, 2010; Liu & Ren, 2016) would seem more appropriate since both are in the written medium. The main takeaway from these more innovative forms is that DCTs should not be viewed as a method placed in a static position along a continuum from elicitation methods to authentic/observational methods (see Kasper & Dahl, 1991). Rather, they should be seen as an instrument that can be modified to move towards the observational/authentic end. This talk introduces a new form of a DCT based on WhatsApp, a CMC medium that has attracted “more than 1 billion people in over 180 countries” (About WhatsApp, 2018). This WhatsApp DCT is one instrument in a research methodology that I have deployed to investigate politeness in English WhatsApp text messaging during university group projects in Hong Kong. I will draw on several examples in the data collected from the WhatsApp DCT and critically discuss them in relation to what is known about authentic communication in CMC contexts. I will show how, despite the more authentic match in medium between the DCT and research goal, common DCT issues such as interaction management and utterance length remain. Additionally, while DCTs are easy and convenient to administer, they require quite a bit of thought in its construction (Bardovi-Harlig, 1999). I will outline the major procedural pitfalls of this WhatsApp DCT and potential modifications that may enhance the DCT to elicit more authentic production of speech acts in WhatsApp.