Intersubjectivity or Preference: Interpreting Student Pauses in Supervisory Meetings

Abstract

This paper focuses on supervision in the context of higher education. It highlights the interactional complexities inherent in regular supervisory meetings between supervisor and student as they negotiate the institutional goal of achieving a successful PhD outcome. Close analysis of supervisory meetings shows that students sometimes pause following their supervisor's talk, when a response or an uptake is due. The question for supervisors, especially of international students, is how to treat student pauses, given that such pauses could either foreshadow a dispreferred response or a problem of intersubjectivity. Drawing on the methodology of conversation analysis and using data from supervision meetings of international engineering PhD students, this paper examines how supervisors are often able to appropriately identify the nature of a potentially ambiguous pause through an understanding of epistemics or knowledge of who knows what. Resources that supervisors use to correctly interpret a student pause also include a student's non-verbal actions, such as gaze direction, and changes in facial expression.