An Introduction to Interaction: Understanding Talk in Formal and Informal Settings

Abstract

Reviewed by Raquel Lázaro GutiérrezUniversidad de Alcalá, Spain
 
 This textbook is a comprehensive guide for (mainly, but not only) linguistics, sociology, communication and even business students on the theories and research methodologies of conversation analysis. Based on ethnomethodology, a theoretical perspective of sociology which appeared in the 1960s and which explored how people create social order, social structure and situated action (Garfinkel 1967) through the direct observation of human behaviour, conversation analysis emerged in the 1980s as an approach to the study of talk in interaction. Sacks (1984), a graduate student who worked with Garfinkel, thought of talk as the ideal source of data to study human action, as it could be tape-recorded and carefully and repeatedly examined. The conversation analysis methodology was soon found useful for the study of a wide range of conversations (formal, informal, institutional, etc.) held for a great deal of different purposes and in diverse contexts (business, education, media, legal settings, etc.).