The current study will look into the turn-taking strategies used in American sports TV programs, taking daily basketball debate shows as an example and the possible reasons for using them. Stenstrom's (1994) categorization of turn taking strategies was used in this study, which involves three main strategies: taking the turn, holding the turn, and yielding the turn, each of which was further detailed into more specific strategies. Three YouTube videos served as the data: The first video (video N.1) is an episode of an Sports debate show named Inside the NBA in which the argument is between basketball former players and experts. About 13 minutes of this argument was chosen and analyzed. The second video (video N.2) is an episode of Get Up which is a morning sports talk TV show that airs on ESPN. The debate takes about six minutes. And finally the third video (video N.3) includes a face-to-face heated argument again on the TV show Get Up and takes about 6 minutes 40 seconds. The results of this study were obtained by quantitative and qualitative analyses of data and finally the following interesting points were discovered: first, Stenstrom's three turn taking strategies appeared in debates and as well as the mentioned reasons for using them, some new reasons were found and introduced; second, holding the turn strategy was the dominant strategy, followed closely by taking the turn strategy, and the least used strategy was yielding the turn; third, taking over, which was a specific type of taking the turn strategy, occurred most frequently.
