Emic Approach to Research on Conversational Gap in the Foreign Language Classroom

An emic perspective, or insiders’ perspective, has been widely employed in social interactionism-inspired qualitative studies. This view claims that any interactional behavior can be examined from within the system. Applied to research in which talk is central, this view requires data to come from the participants who are involved in the talk because they document their social actions to each other within the details of their interaction. Researchers can access the perspective by adopting the same perspective as the participants. As a result, the findings yield high internal and ecological validity. Following this perspective, this study, which explores silence, or, to be more specific, gap, in institutionalized talk, demonstrates how interactional data is produced and analyzed by the participants as the talk emerges. This study shows that an emic view allows researchers to indirectly involve participants in the analysis and can be an alternative potential tool in descriptive communication research.