Applied Linguistics 19/2 204-224 © Oxford University Press 1998 Between Speaking and Listening: The Vocalisation of Understandings 1 ROD GARDNER University of Sydney In the teaching of listening in language pedagogy, there has been a tendency either to treat this skill as discrete from speaking, particularly as extended texts to be responded to after hearing them, or to focus on speaking rather than listening in the teaching of conversational skills This paper argues that there are some important aspects of listening as an interactive skill that have been largely neglected Amongst these are what have been characterised in the literature as backchannels (Yngve 1970), minimal response (e g Coates 1986) or receipt tokens (eg Hentage 1984a), and include items such as Yeah, Oh, Right, and Great Such vocalisations produced by those in primarily listening roles at any particular moment in spoken interaction provide information to a primary speaker about how their contributions have been understood, and can have a crucial influence on the trajectory of talk This paper argues that such items might profitably be taught as part of the development of conversational skills, and provides a characterisation of three of them. Yeah, Mm hm and Mm, to illustrate some of their characteristics in terms of placement in sequences of talk, prosodic shape, pause environment and speakership incipiency Some comments on pedagogical implications are made INTRODUCTION Although interaction has been one of the major foci of language teaching since communicative language teaching began in the seventies (e g Widdowson 1978, Breen and Candlm 1980, Breen 1987a, 1987b, Long and Robinson forthcoming), and a large body of interactive teaching materials and tasks have been developed, both published and unpublished, there are aspects of interaction that the teaching profession has largely neglected In this paper I wish to draw attention to one such aspect, namely the influence that a listener in conversation (and other kinds of talk) can have on the talk as listener, I e not through contributions to the development of topic, but through minimal feedback <cf Coates 1986) or backchannelhng (cf Yngve 1970) These responses include such items as the acknowledgements, brief agreements and continuers Yeah, Mm hm, Uh huh and Mm, newsmarking items such as Oh, Really, and Right, evaluative or assessment items such as Wow, How terrible, and questions directed at clarification If language teaching is to prepare learners to talk in the real world, then pan of that preparation would need to take into account partiapation in interactive talk that involves these very common vocalisations, even though they are not part of a