What value is there in children's talk? Investigating family therapists’ interruptions of parents and children during the therapeutic process

Abstract

In this paper, I explore the ways in which family therapists interrupt their clients during the process of therapy. Family therapy involves multi-party talk and allows for the possibility of overlapping speech, side conversations and interruptions. I focus here on speech acts that occur in the middle of another speaker's turn and can be treated as an interruption. The family therapist interrupts the clients in different ways. When interrupting an adult/parent client the interruption is accompanied by politeness or an apology. When interrupting the children in the family, though, the interruptions are different. The family therapist makes no apology and does not orient to the speech act as being interruptive. Here, I investigate, through a discursive analysis, how these interruptions are constructed and treated.