Japanese complaint responses in textbook dialogues and ordinary conversations: learning objects to expand interactional repertoires

Abstract

Abstract This study examines Japanese complaint responses appearing in naturally occurring interaction and textbook dialogues. The comparative analysis highlights that complaint responses in textbooks differ from those in mundane conversation. The inevitable difficulty for textbooks to reflect temporal and multimodal features of interaction results in the designs of affiliative responses being minimal and disaffiliative responses being more explicit. In contrast, conversation data indicates that complaint response turns are more intricately designed with multimodal semiotic resources and are precisely positioned according to the sequential development of complaints. By conducting empirical analyses, the study identifies interactional repertoires that are not observed in textbooks but employed in actual conversations. In doing so, it aims to expand the variety of the analysis of textbook dialogues to help calibrate the input for Japanese language pedagogy, while presenting a reference point for Japanese language learners to better understand the interactional organization of complaint sequences in mundane conversations.