conversational analysis

Conversation Analysis (CA), a research tradition that grew out of ethnomethodology, has some unique methodological features. It studies the social organization of 'conversation', or 'talk-in-interaction', by a detailed inspection of tape recordings and transcriptions made from such recordings. In this paper, I will describe some of those features in the interest of exploring their grounds. In doing so, I will discuss some of the problems and dilemma's conversation analysts deal with in their daily practice, using both the literature and my own experiences as resources. I will present CA's research strategy as a solution to ethnomethodology's problem of the 'invisibility' of common sense and describe it in an idealized form as a seven step procedure. I will discus some of the major criticisms leveled against it and touch on some current developments. Conversation Analysis is a disciplined way of studying the local organization of interactional episodes, its unique methodological practice has enabled its practitioners to produce a mass of insights into the detailed procedural foundations of everyday life. It has developed some very practical solutions to some rather thorny methodological problems. As such it is methodologically 'impure', but it works. Interests and practices of Conversation Analysis Most practitioners of CA tend to refrain, in their research reports, from extensive theoretical and methodological discussion. CA papers tend to be exclusively devoted to an empirically based discussion of specific analytic issues. This may contribute to the confusion of readers who are not familiar with this particular research style. They will use their habitual expectations, derived from established social-scientific practice, as a frames of reference in understanding this unusual species of scientific work. But a CA report will not generally have an a priori discussion of the literature to formulate hypotheses, hardly any details about research situations or subjects researched, no descriptions of sampling techniques or coding procedures, no testing and no statistics. Instead, the reader is confronted with a detailed discussion of transcriptions of recordings of (mostly verbal) interaction in terms of the 'devices' used by its participants. Some of the early articles reporting CA work, such as Schegloff & Sacks (1973), did include some explanations of the purposes of CA, however. And more recently, a growing number of introductory papers and chapters has been published that present an accessible overview of CA's theoretical and /or methodological position and/or substantive findings (2). An important addition to this literature is an edited collection of fragments from Harvey Sacks' unpublished Lectures that deal with methodological issues in CA (Sacks, 1984 a). The 'methodology' that is presented in these sources is, however, rather different in character from what one can read in the established methodological literature. There are hardly any prescriptions to be followed, if one wants to do 'good CA'. What one does find are summary descriptions of practices used in CA, together with some of the reasons for these practices. What is given may be called, in the terminology of Schenkein's (1978) introduction, a 'Sketch of an analytic mentality'. The basic reasoning in CA seems to be that methodological procedures should be adequate to the materials at hand and to the problems one is dealing with, rather than them being pre-specified on a priori grounds. While the essential characteristics of the materials, i.e. records of streams of interaction, and the

Bolden, Galina (in press). Conversation Analysis. In M. Allen (Ed.) The SAGE Encyclopedia of Communication Research Methods.

Language and Psychoanalysis, 2013

Discourse & Society, 2006

This book is a long-awaited collection of studies into the organization of talk in interaction. It presents several investigations in the field of conversation analysis (CA), an interdisciplinary area of research that explores practices that organize everyday talk in ordinary and institutional settings. The design of the book suggests that it is dedicated to the late Harvey Sacks, a scholar who was crucially involved in the founding of conversation analysis. The defining feature of the collection is that it contains contributions of 'first generation' conversation Book reviews 679 at UGR/

2020

Introduction: Conversation analysis is an approach to the study of social interaction which identifies and describes the stable practices of interaction and the encompassing organisations in which they are embedded. Its fundamental assumption is that naturally occurring talk is characterised by 'order at all points' (Sacks 1984), and this social order is to be found in the details of interac-tional events through detailed structural analysis of audio and video recordings of naturally occurring talk. Even though conversation analysis emerged within the field of sociology, it has predominantly focused on linguistic forms as a repertoire of practices for designing, organising, projecting and making sense of the trajectories and import of turns-at-talk. With its focus on linguistic objects as resources for constructing actions and sequences of actions in talk, the conversation analytic research enables us to understand some of the shaping factors of linguistic structures and patterns (grammar being the most researched). The rapid development of digital technologies in the last two decades has implicated conversation analytic research in three possible ways: the digitisation of conversation analytic methods, the application of conversation analysis to text-based online interactions and the automation of conversation analysis. The goal of this chapter is to contribute to a growing body of literature in the digital humanities by addressing all the above three implications. While many definitions of the digital humanities 'as smart and provocative as they are, often muddy the introductory waters more than clarify them', and most definitions reduce the digital humanities to the 'application of technologies to humanities work' Gibbs (2013: 289), this chapter is in accordance with definitions that emphasize 'studying the effects of the digital' on human cultures as much as 'using the digital' to study human cultures (Gibbs 2013: 290-294). The chapter is thus structured as follows: after a brief description of the foundational principles, basic methods and theoretical concepts of conversation analysis, we discuss the digitisation of conversation analytic research methods. We argue that while in adapting to the digital turn, conversation analysis retains its core methods for analysing interaction, digital technologies have enabled conversation analysts to better (and sometimes faster) answer long-standing questions and to pose innovative research questions that were difficult or even impossible to address without the use of digital means (e.g. searching for universal patterns in social interaction). Subsequently, we discuss conversation analytic studies of text-based online interactions, and we Conversation analysis 243 report on some of the concerns and questions that conversation analysts have raised about the suitability of applying conversation analysis-a method developed for analysing face-to-face or telephone interaction-to text-based forms of talk on social media. We conclude this chapter by pointing out possible future directions in the field of conversation analysis such as, the expansion of the analytical work on embodied language and the automation of conversation analysis.

Acta Sociologica, 1999

Language Learning, 2004

Transcripts are inevitably incomplete, selective renderings of the primary data which invariably involve a trade-off between readability and comprehensiveness.

Journal of Pragmatics, 2009

(paperback), £ 80 hardback, £ 19.99 paperback This book adds to an outstanding and continually growing range of books on talk-in-interaction as socially structured action. It is undertaken from a conversation analytic perspective. The immense array of publications on conversation analysis (henceforth CA) mainly consists of papers published in different journals, collections of papers in book format, and book-length monographs, while textbooks on CA, like the book under review, are limited in

The Modern Language Journal, 2009

The MLJ reviews books, monographs, computer software, and materials that (a) present results of research in-and methods of-foreign and second language teaching and learning; (b) are devoted to matters of general interest to members of the profession; (c) are intended primarily for use as textbooks or instructional aids in classrooms where foreign and second languages, literatures, and cultures are taught; and (d) convey information from other disciplines that relates directly to foreign and second language teaching and learning. Reviews not solicited by the MLJ can neither be accepted nor returned. Books and materials that are not reviewed in the MLJ cannot be returned to the publisher. Responses should be typed with double spacing and submitted electronically online at our Manuscript Central address: http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/mlj THEORY AND PRACTICE COOK, VIVIAN. Second Language Learning and Language Teaching . 4th ed. London: Hodder Arnold, 2008. Pp. xiii, 306. $33.95, paper. ISBN 0-340-95876-6.

Applying Conversation Analysis, 2005

The aims of this concluding chapter are to tie together a number of themes which have emerged from the chapters in the collection and to reflect on the processes of research manifested in the chapters, positioning these in relation to linguistic and social science research paradigms. A frequent complaint by researchers outside CA is that CA practitioners tend not to make their methodology and procedures comprehensible and accessible to researchers from other disciplines. It has sometimes been acknowledged by CA practitioners (Peräkylä 1997) that more could be done in this respect. A full explication of CA methodology and procedures would start with a discussion of the ethnomethodological principles underpinning CA. Considerations of space prohibit such a discussion here; however, see Bergmann (1981), Heritage (1984b) and Seedhouse (2004). Similarly, this chapter cannot provide an introduction to CA methodology; however, see Hutchby and Wooffitt 1998; Psathas 1995; Seedhouse 2004; ten Have 1999. In this first section I will focus on two areas relevant to this collection, namely the CA view of language and the emic perspective. 2 CA's origins in sociology and specifically ethnomethodology entail a different perspective on the status and interest of language itself from that typical of linguistics. CA's primary interest is in the social act and only marginally in language, whereas a linguist's primary interest is normally in language. In descriptivist linguistics, the interest is in examining how aspects of language are organized in relation to each other. CA, by contrast, studies how social acts are organized in interaction. As part of this, CA is interested in how social acts are packaged and delivered in linguistic terms. The fundamental CA question 'Why this, in this way, right now?' captures the interest in talk as social action, which is delivered in particular linguistic formatting, as part of an unfolding sequence. The CA perspective on the primacy of the social act is illustrated by chapters in this collection. For example, Gafaranga and Britten found that general practitioners systematically use different 'social' opening sequences to talk different professional relationships into being and hence to establish different professional contexts. This is an example of CA analysts' interest in linguistic forms; not so much for their own sake, but rather in the way in which they are used to embody and express subtle differences in social actions with social consequences. The distinction between emic and etic perspectives is vital to the argument in this chapter. The distinction originated in linguistics and specifically in phonology, namely in the difference between phonetics and phonemics. Pike's definition of etic and emic perspectives broadened interest in the distinction in the social sciences: The etic viewpoint studies behaviour as from outside of a particular system, and as an essential initial approach to an alien system. The emic

2012

We begin by outlining a range of ways in which Conversation Analysis (CA) can be relevant to Psychology, and vice versa. This is a complex topic, so the following list is neither definitive nor exhaustive. The rest of the chapter will elaborate, necessarily selectively, on those we see as most relevant for CA.(i) Much of psychology conceives of language in a noninteractive fashion, as the psychology of grammar and meaning, and as a matter of specifying the mental processes underlying comprehension and production.

2007

Conversation analysis initially drew its empirical materials from recordings of English conversation. However, over the past 20 years conversation analysts have begun to examine talk-in-interaction in an increasingly broad range of languages and communities. These studies allow for a new comparative perspective, which attends to the consequences of linguistic and social differences for the organization of social interaction.

1989

Conversation analysis2 has developed over the past fifteen years as a distinctive research stream of the wider intellectual programme of ethnomethodology -the study of the commonsense reasoning skills and abilities through which the ordinary members of a culture produce and recognise intelligible courses of action.3 Throughout the period of its public existence,4 the perspective has been distinctive both in its commitment to the study of naturally occurring interaction and in its avoidance of idealized theoretical and empirical treatments of its chosen research materials.

A few weeks ago, I sat in the audience of an atypical professional panel at an uplifting conference. The panel and audience members, all enthusiastic alumni and students of my alma mater's English Department, were discussing the career paths they had (or had not) chosen since college graduation. There were contributions from two lawyers, two English teachers, a global corporate chairman, and a few graduate students, as well as a smattering of undergraduates who were eager and anxious to learn more about possible job opportunities. Despite our diverse backgrounds and at times contentious conversation, we left that conference room having agreed on at least one thing: successful professionals are exceptional analysts. Someone who builds a principled argument in the courtroom, the boardroom, the classroom, or any other room, will go a long way. I had remarked that knowing how to analyze hinges on not only being able to build arguments, but also on being able to break them down. In order to critically engage with or respond to a piece of text, one must understand it in a deep sense, and mull over the connections within or between the lines. From intricate exploration comes enlightening analysis, no matter the context. As a student who entrenches herself in Conversation Analysis (CA), I find this conclusion heartening, for often in social encounters with fellow scholars, teachers, friends, or family members, I must publically wrestle with the following questions: Why do you analyze talk? What, exactly, do you do, anyway? And of course, the dreaded: Seriously, Catherine, who really cares about this stuff? Conversation Analysis (henceforth referred to as CA) demands that the researcher engage in a close relationship with texts. The first half of this term, in fact, might be a bit of a misnomer. Certainly, we students of CA have read seminal work that draws from the "mundane" conversations of everyday social encounters (see, for example, the famous telephone conversation transcripts between Ava and Bee in Schegloff, 2007). However, a burgeoning field of research within CA looks not at conversation per se, but in the interactions that occur within specific contexts such as the classroom (