Methodology Of Conversation Analysis Research Articles

Weaving Smartphones Into Mother–Infant Interaction: Digital Disruptions or Participatory Possibilities?

ABSTRACTIntense public scrutiny of mothering practices continues to perpetuate unhelpful narratives of maternal smartphone use as ‘risky’ and ‘harmful’, positioning mothers to experience guilt and judgement around their smartphone use. Yet despite this, the ubiquity of digital device ownership means mothers are increasingly using smartphones around their infants (birth–12 months). This article presents a single case analysis of a video‐recorded interactional episode between a mother at home with her 3‐month old infant and her smartphone. Fine‐grained analysis shows how mother and infant co‐construct and manage active participation in ‘doing phone use’ while attending to and responding to one another. Attentional and maternal responsivity during smartphone use predominantly has been studied using larger scale, quantitative research designs using social experiments, surveys, self‐reports and interviews. These methods preclude capacity for detailed contextual understandings of what is occurring when mothers use smartphones around their infants in their everyday lives. This study uses visual ethnographic methods of video‐recorded observations of mother‐infant interactions at home during their everyday routines and activities. Using the methodologies of Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis (EMCA), we illustrate how a mother and her 3‐month old infant accomplish moments of mutual attention in the presence of a smartphone. We also illustrate how attention and responsivity is interactionally organised and how the mother displays responsivity even when digital devices are present. Using a qualitative methodological approach offers a reframing that considers the participatory possibilities of maternal smartphone use around infants.

Interactional practices accomplished by index-finger pointing directed at the addressee in Hebrew face-to-face interaction.

This study uses Hebrew data to examine the practices accomplished by index-finger pointing toward the addressee, with a focus on interactional purposes beyond merely indexing the reference. The data were taken from the Haifa Multimodal Corpus of Spoken Hebrew, which consists of video recordings of naturally occurring casual conversations collected between 2016 and 2023. By employing the methodologies of interactional linguistics and multimodal conversation analysis, the study elaborates on the social actions that are accomplished via this gesture, showing that pointing at the addressee in Hebrew talk-in-interaction can be explained from different perspectives. The study suggests that non-referential pointing primarily serves as an attention-drawing device. However, similar to other gestural or verbal attention-drawing devices, in some contexts, the gesture can also be considered to be a cue whereby conveying a negative stance or displaying epistemic authority is recognized. Additionally, it can be employed as an abrupt way of interrupting or as an attempt to elicit a response from the addressee.

An interactional linguistics study of Shi ba in Mandarin conversation

From the perspective of interactional linguistics and adopting the methodology of conversation analysis, this study explores some fine-grained interactional uses of shi ba in Mandarin conversation. It first classifies shi ba into unmarked and marked forms generally in terms of their prosodic manifestations with the assistance of Praat, the speech analysis tool. Then it demonstrates that the unmarked shi ba fulfills three interactional functions: requesting confirmation, seeking affiliation and maintaining floor; the marked shi ba registers dissatisfaction and displays affiliation. However, shi ba is basically a tag question, and serves to invite the recipient to proffer certain interactional response. The specific function that shi ba performs in conversation is tied to three decisive factors – its prosodic manifestations, position in specific turns and sequences as well as the relative epistemic status of interlocutors. The study also suggests that there lies a common motivation for the emergence of various interactional functions of shi ba, that is – the demand for an on-line alignment, which reflects the cross-fertilization between language and interaction.

The Chinese change-of-state token o in responsive units

Adopting the methodology of Conversation Analysis and Interactional Linguistics, this study investigates the uses of the response token o in Mandarin Chinese face-to-face conversation. The analysis of naturally occurring interactions shows that o features centrally in the practices by which speakers display a change in cognitive states, either from previously being uninformed to now being informed, or from non-understanding to understanding regarding relevant information that was just mentioned by a co-participant. It is also revealed that there is an interrelatedness between the sequential environment/turn shape of o and the epistemic claim that it conveys. That is, the o marking now-knowing typically occurs in response to informings (especially extended tellings) and it primarily plays a continuative forward-looking sequential role in freestanding form, which makes it distinct from the English oh. Furthermore, other turn-initial uses of o are routinely followed by components of repetition or assessment which are sequence-curtailing in character. Different from the o marking now-knowing, the o marking revised understanding is exclusively found in third position following the speaker’s first-position claim or question, and where that claim or question contains an incorrect assumption which has either been corrected or disconfirmed in second position.

Modification of the intensity of evaluation as an interactional resource

Using the methodology of conversation analysis, this study considers excerpts from Japanese spontaneous conversation in which the intensity of evaluation is modified through self-repair operations. It demonstrates that the modification is utilised as an interactional resource. The analysis reveals that the intensity of evaluation is modified to achieve two interactional outcomes: to disambiguate or amplify the speaker’s evaluative stance toward the referent and to display the speaker’s orientation to the lack of direct epistemic access or strong commitment to the position. The findings are discussed to explore the possibility that the public process of modifying the intensity of evaluation may itself be an interactional resource with which to display the speaker’s dual orientations. The paper further considers the possible crosslinguistic relevance of the findings.

Urology HEIRS: A Feasibility and Acceptability Study for Video-Based Research on Physician-Family Communication in Pediatric Urology Visits.

Patient- and family-centered communication is essential to health care equity. However, less is known about how urologists implement evidence-based communication and dynamics involved in caring for diverse pediatric patients and caregivers. We sought to evaluate the feasibility and acceptability using video-based research to characterize physician-family communication in pediatric urology. We assembled a multidisciplinary team to conduct a multiphase learning health systems project and establish the Urology HEIRS (Health Experiences and Interactions in Real-Time Studies) corpus for research and interventions. This paper reports the first phase, evaluating feasibility and acceptability based on consent rate, patient diversity, and qualitative identification of verbal and paraverbal features of physician-family communication. We used applied conversation analysis methodology to identify salient practices across 8 pediatric urologists. We recruited 111 families at 2 clinic sites; of these 82 families (N = 85 patients, ages 0-20 years) participated in the study with a consent rate of 73.9%. The racial/ethnic composition of the sample was 45.9% non-Hispanic White, 30.6% any race of Hispanic origin, 16.5% non-Hispanic Black/African American, 4.7% any ethnicity of Asian/Asian American, and 2.3% some other race/ethnicity; 24.7% of families used interpreters. We identified 11 verbal and paraverbal communication practices that impacted physician-family dynamics, including unique challenges with technology-mediated interpreters. Video-based research is feasible and acceptable with diverse families in pediatric urology settings. The Urology HEIRS corpus will enable future systematic studies of physician-family communication in pediatric urology and provides an empirical basis for specialty-specific training in patient- and family-centered communication.

Translanguaging as Interactional Resources Employed by Students in EFL Student-Led Group Task Interaction

This study aimed to investigate the strategies used by students during group tasks in the EFL classroom. The study focused on translanguaging as one of the strategies to facilitate communication and interaction among students. The data was collected by recording the classroom discussions of a focused group in an EFL class at a Chinese university over three hours. The analysis was carried out using conversation analytic methodology. The study revealed various interactional features in turn constructions. Students often used single learner turns to agree and extended learner turns with clarification or explanation to support their ideas for turn-taking. Concerning turn passing, students prefer to use open-ended questions to ask for opinions, they also used open-ended questions to ask for opinions, confirmation checks for meaningful understanding, and extended wait times for other speakers to take turns. Regarding self-repairs and peer repairs, they often made content-focused repairs rather than form-focused ones, and students with a higher English proficiency usually provided support. Translanguaging was an effective strategy to facilitate peer interaction and avoid errors in meaning-making. The study has important implications for language teaching and learning policy, highlighting the need to encourage prospective teachers to practice translanguaging to facilitate classroom interaction and second language acquisition.

Framing offer-related actions as assistance at jewelry stores in Japan

While most of the studies on assistance in talk-in-interaction from the conversation analytic perspective presuppose that the actor who receives assistance already has or is expected to have problems, issues, needs, or demands, assistance can be offered without the expression or existence of plausible expectations of problems, issues, needs, or demands. Using the methodology of conversation analysis, this study explores how service providers frame their offer-related actions as assistance without the customer’s expression of concrete needs or demands or their expected emergence by analyzing the sequences in which salespersons offered customers to try the jewelry. The results of the analysis show that salespersons were motivated to execute pull-based offer-related actions in which assistance is provided in response to the expression or anticipation of customer needs, as they could lead to successful sales outcomes. Salespersons employed various techniques to frame their offer-related actions as assistance.

Evasiveness in Greek Political Interviews: A Case Study in Conversation Analysis

This paper identifies the conversational practices of evasiveness in Greek political interviews and debates through Conversation Analysis (CA) methodology. The present study is accomplished according to Clayman and Heritage's proposed model of questioning and answering dimensions in American and British news interviews. The analysis focuses on the sequential organisation of the pre-allocation type of interviews exploring how interviewers structure their questions while focusing on the practices that interviewees deploy to display resistance towards the addressed questions. By presenting transcripts from three interviews and two political debates, it is argued that Greek IEs show resistance in answering by providing partial or incomplete responses or by performing a different action than the addressed through specific turn prefaces, i.e., look-, listen-, first of all- turn beginning components and the practices of rhetorical questions and the incorporation of IR’s wording. According to findings, similar practices of resistance can be found in both cross-cultural contexts with some differentiations and novel elements in the Greek corpus as well as Greek IRs’ multi-unit style of questioning which seems to favour politicians’ evasiveness.

Analyzing L2 Classroom Dynamics: A Conversation Analysis Perspective

This paper explores the reflexive relationship between pedagogy and interaction in second language (L2) classrooms, employing Seedhouse’s (2004) model and Conversation Analysis (CA) methodology. The analysis covers three contextual dimensions: form-and-accuracy, meaning-and-fluency, and task-oriented contexts. The study reveals the dynamic interplay between pedagogical focus and interactional organization, showcasing how participants negotiate linguistic forms, repair sequences, and engage in turn-taking to accomplish pedagogical goals. Despite critiques emphasizing the emic perspective’s limitations, the paper underscores CA’s contribution to understanding language use in teaching, offering pedagogical insights for language educators.

From lack of understanding to heightened engagement: A multimodal study of Hebrew ′ATA LO MEVIN ‘You don’t understand’

Abstract This study explores the Hebrew ′ATA LO MEVIN (‘you don’t understand’) construction in a corpus of casual conversation. Employing the methodology of Interactional Linguistics and Multimodal Conversation Analysis, we show that deployment of this construction is fixed and formulaic and only rarely denotes the recipient’s lack of understanding. Based on a mostly synchronic analysis, we suggest a grammaticization path followed by this construction from a negative epistemic subject-predicate construction denoting literal lack of understanding to a discourse marker signaling the opening of a new narrative, while seeking recipient alignment with the speaker’s intensified affective stance. The path described reveals that embodied conduct, as well as prosodic, morphophonological, and syntactic features of the construction correlate with the weakening of its literal meaning. This sheds light on the uses speakers make of the construction, on how heightened engagement may be achieved in discourse, and on the dialogic nature of interaction and grammar.

“You are fake news”

Abstract Using the methodology of conversation analysis and a modified analytical framework, this article attempts to characterize and investigate Trump’s practices to resist the agendas of the interviewers’ questions during the press briefings held by the Trump Administration in 2020. Statistical data show that Trump mainly used four types of overt resistant response practices in order of decreasing frequency: (1) Justifying the resistance; (2) Providing a partial answer; (3) Flatly refusing to answer without any explanation; and (4) Resorting to a personal attack, which is a new type of overt resistant practices. However, only one type of covert resistant response practice is identified, i.e. Repeating words subversively. The potential reasons for Trump’s use of such practices are discussed. In essence, Trump’s deliberate use of resistant response practices is a typical reflection of the right-wing populist politicians’ claim of “authenticity” rather than “truth” in the Post-Truth era.

Recipient design and collaboration in language socialization

When people participate in a special event such as a religious ritual, they may need support to perform the appropriate actions specific to the ritual. This study adopts the methodology of multimodal conversation analysis to investigate how language socialization is achieved differently depending on the recipient and the agent and how adults of different social roles collaboratively socialize a child participant. The analysis of the linguistic and embodied behaviours directed towards child and adult participants during a Japanese household Shinto ritual reveals that the priest’s style of speech becomes informal, less formulaic, more involved, and more personal when directed towards child participants compared with those towards adults. Shifts in the membership category are also observed, which suggest that the priest assumes the role of a caregiver in addition to being a religious authority. The parent also contributes to the socialization of a child participant, but not in the same way as the priest. While the priest has the rights to give verbal instructions, the parent makes physical corrections to the child before the priest. Through analyses of multiple recipients and agents, this study contributes to the understanding of the intricacies of language socialization.

„do you really beLIEVE that.“ – Positionierungen von Lehrkräften zu Verschwörungstheorien im Spannungsfeld von Epistemik, Vertextungsform und Institution

Abstract We analyse how teachers position themselves towards conspiracy theories in teaching contexts following the methodology of conversation analysis and positioning theory. For the analysis we selected sequences in which three teachers narrate and comment retrospectively on incidents from their everyday school life in which their students confronted them with conspiracy theories. Since conspiracy theories are seen as a complex and potentially explosive phenomenon in both public and academic discourse, many see it as mandatory to take or at least express a critical stance towards them. In general, however, conspiracy theories make it difficult to take a clear position, as they are often vague and incoherent on evaluative, textual, functional and epistemic levels. These ambiguities are also reflected in the teachers’ positions as evidenced in our data: On the one hand, they emphasise the need to raising students’ awareness of how to identify conspiracy theories and how to adopt a critical stance towards them. On the other hand, the micro-analytical reconstruction of the narrative sequences of concrete classroom situations shows that the teachers do not always act in line with these beliefs. This can be interpreted as a tension between socially conforming positioning acts towards conspiracy theories on the one and the teachers‘ professional self-perception on the other hand.

"I See What You Mean"-A Case Study of the Interactional Foundation of Building a Working Alliance in Care Decisions Involving an Older Couple Living with Cognitive Decline.

Social workers have a key role in needs assessment meetings with families dealing with dementia, providing information, support, and advocacy, while also assessing needs and making decisions about care services for several parties. These contacts are especially important during the introduction of home care services, where often the person has previously relied on informal support from relatives. The needs assessment process entails the involvement of all present parties, with the aim to reach a mutual agreement, a working alliance, regarding which services to apply for. The aim of this case study is to explore how the participants, by means of different conversational practices, jointly create a working alliance between the different parties in one family. The study provides insights into the process of co-constructing a working alliance in the needs assessment process for elder care services. This article addresses the process by which social workers build a working alliance in a multi-party conversation with a family living with cognitive decline; a meeting that lasted 50 min. In this case study, we benefit from an inductive and detailed conversation analytic methodology. The theoretical framework of working alliances in institutional interaction has informed the analysis. The findings illustrate how the social worker in this case study involves all parties in the decision regarding care services and explores the use of the conversational practices of mitigations, positive framing, adding information, and positioning, as a "we" achieve mutual agreement toward the end of several sequences. Drawing on the results of this case study, we argue that multi-party interaction involving relatives enables diversity in role-taking, where the professional, for instance, can pursue a more empathic role. Also, our results indicate that minimal agreement to a proposal is sufficient in a multi-party interaction involving clients with cognitive decline.

Temporality and the cooperative infrastructure of human communication: Noticings to delay and to accelerate onward movement in mobile interaction

This article examines how mobile participants, at interactionally delicate moments, deploy noticings to invite joint attention on objects in the speaker's vicinity. Complementing recent accounts of environmentally occasioned noticings, the focus of this study is on noticings as a practice to delay and, by contrast, to accelerate joint onward movement through museum spaces. It is argued that the interactional function of these noticings is, first, to draw the co-participant's attention to objects that they treat as noteworthy, and second, to request movement towards the speaker in order to jointly orient to the noticeable. The analysis shows that participants may launch noticings at opportune moments to serve their own spatiotemporal trajectory, either by detaining or by prompting co-participants on. The analysis draws on the methodology of Multimodal Conversation Analysis and a corpus of naturally occurring mobile interactions recorded with external cameras and eye-tracking glasses. Our observations on the double function of noticings in the local context may shed light on different ways in which we enact and draw on the cooperative infrastructure of human communication in social interaction.

Sequential positions and interactional functions of negative epistemic constructions in Japanese conversation

Abstract In this study, we adopted the methodology of conversation analysis and interactional linguistics to investigate the use of shiranai and wakannai ‘I don’t know’ in data from (the Corpus of Everyday Japanese Conversation), a corpus of naturally occurring conversations. The quantitative and qualitative analyses of the sequential positions and the interactional functions of these two expressions revealed that shiranai is often used as a response to a question that explicitly requests knowledge status. Shiranai is also used in response to informing, soliciting more talk from the interlocutor. On the other hand, wakannai is more often used as a response to a question that requests information. Used with prosodic features such as elongation and laughter, both shiranai and wakannai sometimes convey the speaker’s affective stance towards the lack of knowledge. Furthermore, wakannai can be used as a discourse marker to mark the speaker’s low degree of commitment, sometimes working as a sequence-closing device.

From Inanimate Object to Agent: Impact of Pre-beginnings on the Emergence of Greetings with a Robot

The very first moments of co-presence, during which a robot appears to a participant for the first time, are often “off-the-record” in the data collected from human-robot experiments (video recordings, motion tracking, methodology sections, etc.). Yet, this “pre-beginning” phase, well documented in the case of human-human interactions, is not an interactional vacuum: It is where interactional work from participants can take place so the production of a first speaking turn (like greeting the robot) becomes relevant and expected. We base our analysis on an experiment that replicated the interaction opening delays sometimes observed in laboratory or “in-the-wild” human-robot interaction studies—where robots can require time before springing to life after they are in co-presence with a human. Using an ethnomethodological and multimodal conversation analytic methodology (EMCA), we identify which properties of the robot's behavior were oriented to by participants as creating the adequate conditions to produce a first greeting. Our findings highlight the importance of the state in which the robot originally appears to participants: as an immobile object or, instead, as an entity already involved in preexisting activity. Participants’ orientations to the very first behaviors manifested by the robot during this “pre-beginning” phase produced a priori unpredictable sequential trajectories, which configured the timing and the manner in which the robot emerged as a social agent. We suggest that these first instants of co-presence are not peripheral issues with respect to human-robot experiments but should be thought about and designed as an integral part of those.

The distinctive uses of right in British and American English interaction

This paper explores distinct usages of the response particle right in American versus British English conversation. The analysis shows that, in American English, right conveys the speaker's knowing stance and, in certain environments, the speaker's claim of primary knowledge. In contrast, in British English, right registers provided information as previously unknown, informative, and relevant to the current speaker's ongoing project. The analysis draws on large corpora of audio- and video-recorded ordinary and institutional interactions in British and American English. We use the methodology of Conversation Analysis to examine sequential environments in which right is used, its interactional import, and prosodic realizations.

Studying humour from a Conversation Analytic perspective

Humour is a complex and dynamic phenomenon prevalent in social interaction in various settings, such as mundane talk and institutional contexts. It has been a focus of interest in social interaction research for decades. To date, scholars have sought to gain insights regarding what counts as humorous and why we find certain utterances funny (e.g., Carroll, 2014; Bell & Pomerantz, 2016). As such, scholars from various fields ranging from philosophy, sociology, psychology, pragmatics, and linguistics, to name a few, have adopted different approaches in the examination of humour. One of the new perspectives that offers unique insights into humour scholarship is Conversation Analysis (CA) methodology. CA is a method and a research field in itself deriving from ethnomethodology, and it provides valuable opportunities for researchers to investigate humour in interaction. Thus, the main aim of this study is to present Conversation Analysis as a candidate methodology to be used for analysing humour in interaction. It also provides a critical discussion of how CA approaches ‘humour’.