Turn-holding Strategies in the Conversation of High School Girls With Peers, Families, and Teachers in Birjand

This article studies the turn-holding strategies –as a part of turn-taking strategies– in the conversation of high school girls in Birjand and the effect of communicative situation on these strategies in communication with (1) peers, (2) families (older sisters) and (3) teachers. The findings of this study show that: (a) in all examined situations filled and unfilled pauses have the lowest and the highest rates among turn-holding strategies respectively; (b) in communication with peers and families, discourse markers and reiterations are almost used similarly; (c) comparing with the other two situations, in communication with teachers, reiterations are used more than discourse markers; (d) obtained standard derivations of frequency percentages of turn-holding strategies in the examined situations, the standard derivation of frequency percentages shows that dispersion of data is lowest in communication with peers and highest in communication with teachers. In other words, communication with peers and teachers are the most homogenous and the most heterogeneous data respectively.