Objectives of study Method of The Study

10 CHAPTER II THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK A. Previous Research In this section, the writer found some previous researches from articles, journals and thesis which are correlated to Backchannel. The first research comes from Kathrin Lambertz 2011, entitled Backchannelling: The use of yeah and mm to portray engaged listenership. This research aims to investigate the use of yeah and mm as backchannels utterances to show engaged listenership and focused on the different back-channel functions that can be identified the location at which they occur. The data was analyzed from the Griffith Corpus of Spoken Australian English. The conclusion is the analysis of the interactional data yielded three different functions of backchannels through the use of yeah and mm: as continuers, as an alignment tokens and agreement tokens. However the findings of this research have contributed to the importance of the listener in a conversation. Backchannel utterances are important, as they are one of the few indicators that shed some light on one of the central features in a conversation: the listener. 8 Different from this research, the writer does not focus only about the uses yeah and mm, the writer will observe about the other backchannels such as yes, okay and etc. 8 Kathrin Lambertz. 2011. Back ‐channelling: The use of yeah and mm to portray engaged listenership. Griffith Working Papers in Pragmatics and Intercultural Communication 4 p.11 ‐18 The second research is from Ying He 2009 entitled An Analysis of Gender Differences in Minimal Responses in the conversations in the two TV- series Growing Pains and Boy Meets World. This research‟s investigation is to find out how male speakers and female speakers use minimal responses in mixed-gender conversations from a particular family perspective in two American TV-series. The focus will be on the type and function of male and female usage of minimal responses. This analysis is based on randomly selected conversations in six episodes from two TV- series Growing Pains and Boy Meets World. His analysis focuses on the data so as to demonstrate the type and function of male and female usage of minimal responses. This research proves that there is indeed a difference between male and female in the conversations where minimal responses are concerned. Previous work shows that women speak more and use more minimal responses than men. However, based on this research, it is men who use comparatively more minimal responses. What is more, it is men who speak more in daily conversations according to data collected from the primary material. Women use more minimal responses to show their active listenership and agreement to the addressee in mixed-gender conversations. By contrast, men use more minimal responses to interrupt the current speaker in order to be dominant in conversation. The most important is that both male and female speakers prefer their use of minimal responses according to the gender of addressee. 9 The writer doesn‟t focus in the 9 Ying He.2009.An Analysis of Gender Differences in Minimal Responses in the Conversation