Reflections on Conversation Analysis and Nonnative Speaker Talk: An Interview with Emanuel A. Schegloff

Abstract

Reflections on Conversation Analysis and Nonnative Speaker Talk: An Interview with Emanuel A. Schegloff Jean Wong The College of N e w Jersey D a v i d Olsher University of California, L o s Angeles Emanuel A . Schegloff is, along with G a i l Jefferson and the late Harvey Sacks, one of the founders o f conversation analysis, a mode of inquiry and research meth­ odology. W h i l e he is most widely known for the foundational articles on turn taking (Sacks, Schegloff, & Jefferson, 1974) and repair (Schegloff, Jefferson, & Sacks, 1977) published in the journal Language, and the first published paper in conversation analysis (1968), Dr. Schegloff has published over 70 articles on talk and interaction, and continues to publish his ongoing research widely, including recent articles in the American Journal of Sociology, Social Research, Language in Society, Discourse and Society, Discourse Processes, Research on Language and Social Interaction, Language and Speech, Discourse Studies, Aphasiology, and Applied Linguistics. H e co-edited the 1996 volume Interaction and Grammar with Elinor Ochs and Sandra Thompson and is currently writing a synthesis of work in conversation analysis that might also serve as a textbook for students. Dr. Schegloff is Professor o f Sociology at the University of California, L o s Angeles, where he has taught a course sequence on Conversational Structures on a regu­ lar basis for over twenty-five years. Through his teaching, data sessions he has organized, and his personal mentoring, Dr. Schegloff has been instrumental in training many of the practitioners of conversation analysis working today, includ­ ing researchers working on a growing variety of languages (such as German, Finn­ ish, Swedish, Japanese, Mandarin, and Korean). Wong: In its history of roughly thirty-five years, conversation analysis (hence­ forth CA) has moved from a focus on ordinary conversation to the inclusion of talk in institutional settings. But the CA tradition has been predominantly monolin­ gual, focusing on native speaker talk-in-interaction. What are your thoughts, Manny, on why CA has not included the talk of nonnative speakers in its research pro­ gram? Schegloff: Let me say something about the preface to the question. What you say is true and not true at the same time. When you look to see what sort of data Harvey Sacks and I first w o r k e d on, it was institutional data. I worked on Issues in Applied Linguistics © 2000, Regents of the University of California ISSN 1050-4273 Vol. 11 No. 1, 111-128