The Devil's in the Details: A Response to Seedhouse

Abstract

ded by Editor Sally Magnan to continue this discussion on repair and correction with a short reply to Seedhouse (this issue). Given the increased interest in conversation analysis (CA) among applied linguists and, in particular, among scholars with interests in language learning, having a public forum to address such important topics is most welcome. I certainly appreciate Seedhouse's position on these issues. However, his comments display a misreading not just of my argument, but, more generally, of the literature on the nature of and on repair as a fundamental organization of interaction. Space and time constraints prohibit a complete redressing of his argument, so I will direct my comments to three issues whose particulars appear to have generated the most confusion. I hope that our collective work, taken together, will contribute to a better understanding of and the perspective it brings to the study of classroom interaction and language learning. The first issue is with the research purpose and methodological interests of CA. Seedhouse is right to point to the nature of CA, but his characterization of ethnomethodological CA and linguistic CA confuses, rather than clarifies, the kinds of work that ethnomethodology (EM) and do. As domains of sociology, EM and share theoretical perspectives on the nature and source of social order that are radically empirical, grounded in realworld activity. Their analytic and methodological interests, however, have followed different trajectories. EM's concern has principally been with uncovering the diverse common-sense reasoning paths taken by members of social worlds in making sense of these worlds, with particular interest paid to those paths found in various work settings.' Common research methods for collecting data to uncover these understandings include the breaching experiment, in which accepted social norms are intentionally broken so that people's reactions to the breaches can be examined to elucidate their