Conversation Analytic Perspective Research Articles

Creating space for learning through ‘Mm hm’ in a L2 classroom: Implications for L2 classroom interactional competence

ABSTRACTStudies on Second Language (L2) classroom interaction have placed a great deal of emphasis on the value of teacher third-turn feedback practices. However, the roles that seemingly minor aspects of interaction like minimal response tokens (e.g. ‘Mm’, ‘Mm hm’, ‘Uh huh’, ‘Okay’, ‘Yeah’) play as a feature of these practices have not been investigated in great detail. Studies which have sought to examine what such tokens do in language teaching and learning processes have mostly adopted a discourse analytic perspective, thereby treating them more or less as a homogeneous group (namely, ‘backchannel signals’). However, through ethnomethodological research, each token has been found to be doing distinctive work. This study adopts a multimodal conversation analytic perspective to investigate the uses of ‘Mm hm’ by an English as a Foreign Language teacher in a teacher education context. Analysis demonstrates how the teacher uses the token as a ‘continuer’ to withhold a third-turn evaluation, thereby keeping the channel open for further participation and hence creating space for learning. As such, the study furthers our understanding of L2 teachers’ third-turn feedback practices and has direct implications for L2 teacher classroom interactional competence.

Reconsidering self-deprecation as a communication practice.

‘Self‐deprecation’ (SD) is widely understood within social psychology and popular culture as a form of self‐talk that reflects a cognitive state, such as low self‐esteem or negative self‐regard. However, most research on SD suffers theoretical and methodological problems that fail to account for how its cognitive and linguistic aspects can be reconciled. We know little about SD as it occurs in interactional settings. Utilizing a conversation analytic (CA) perspective that brackets cognitive explanations for linguistic phenomena, this paper draws on more than 100 hours of transcribed recordings of interactions from diverse settings to systematically examine the form and function of a common class of SD: critical comments by a speaker on their current talk or actions (self‐deprecatory meta‐comments; SDMCs). Analyses demonstrate that SDMCs are used in environments of possible or actual interactional trouble, and manage this trouble in different sequential positions. The paper shows that SDs can be treated as a communication practice. Rigorous analysis of SDMCs can enrich understanding of the construction of ‘identities’ in talk. It advances a CA understanding of the ascription of social actions, and the preference for self‐criticism over criticism by others. Findings suggest that widespread advice to self‐deprecate less may be invalid.

Evaluaciones Formativas en el Aula: Análisis Discursivo de la Actividad de Retroalimentación en la Práctica Supervisada de Psicólogos Educativos en Formación

This is a discursive study of the formative assessments as feedback activities that take place as part of the Supervised Practice of undergraduate educational psychologists at a Mexican public university (UNAM). The formative practice of undergraduate psychologists has been recognized as very important, however there are few studies that show how are they evaluated as a formative practice at the classroom. Analyze the processes of interactional work involved in a feedback activity, when students become evaluators of competence or psycho-educational skills, in modalities of formative assessment such as (a) co-evaluation, (b) peer evaluation and (c) self-evaluation, is this work purpose. After the first psycho-educative session at the Gesell camera several classroom interactional extracts were analysed, where the participants (the teacher, an intern and undergraduates) evaluate the professional competence of an undergraduate student that work as the psychologist of a particular case. A discursive approach informed by the ethnometodology and the conversation analysis perspective orients the study in order to exam, turn by turn, the formative assessments of the undergraduate psychologists work and the public positions about her performance. The analysis results show the collective construction of the formative assessments of the supervised practice realised by a psychologist student. This psychologist together with a passant are in charge of the case and the rest of the students observe and participate in the assessment of the supervised practice. Through these collective discursive processes, all the participants have the opportunity to improve their professional performance. This results show the important contribution of this kind of analysis in order to describe and recognize the formative contribution of the supervised practices evaluated in real settings.

Evaluaciones Formativas en el Aula: Análisis Discursivo de la Actividad de Retroalimentación en la Práctica Supervisada de Psicólogos Educativos en Formación

This is a discursive study of the formative assessments as feedback activities that take place as part of the Supervised Practice of undergraduate educational psychologists at a Mexican public university (UNAM). The formative practice of undergraduate psychologists has been recognized as very important, however there are few studies that show how are they evaluated as a formative practice at the classroom. Analyze the processes of interactional work involved in a feedback activity, when students become evaluators of competence or psycho-educational skills, in modalities of formative assessment such as (a) co-evaluation, (b) peer evaluation and (c) self-evaluation, is this work purpose. After the first psycho-educative session at the Gesell camera several classroom interactional extracts were analysed, where the participants (the teacher, an intern and undergraduates) evaluate the professional competence of an undergraduate student that work as the psychologist of a particular case. A discursive approach informed by the ethnometodology and the conversation analysis perspective orients the study in order to exam, turn by turn, the formative assessments of the undergraduate psychologists work and the public positions about her performance. The analysis results show the collective construction of the formative assessments of the supervised practice realised by a psychologist student. This psychologist together with a passant are in charge of the case and the rest of the students observe and participate in the assessment of the supervised practice. Through these collective discursive processes, all the participants have the opportunity to improve their professional performance. This results show the important contribution of this kind of analysis in order to describe and recognize the formative contribution of the supervised practices evaluated in real settings.

第42回研究大会ワークショップ 相互行為における指さしの多様性―会話分析の視点から―

第42回研究大会ワークショップ 相互行為における指さしの多様性―会話分析の視点から―

Leiten oder leiten lassen? Gesprächsanalytische Beobachtungen zur interaktiven Aushandlung der Leitungsfunktion im Klassenrat

Abstract The class council is a teaching format which takes place regularly, aiming at the teacher stepping back from his/her conventional role as the organizing authority in order to allow the students to participate directly in decision-making processes concerning their everyday school life. This format results in a unique interactional constellation among the participants. In this article, we explore this interactional constellation from the perspective of conversation and interaction analysis. On the basis of videographies of class council sessions in which students and teachers occupy different participation roles, we ask how those roles are negotiated interactively. With a specific focus on the teacher and the moderator (student), we ask to what extent the teacher is able to delegate leadership responsibility among the group. It is shown that teachers are only partly able to do so. Often, teachers influence the interaction on a multimodal level. The challenge of organizing the class council lies in the need for the participants to accomplish different (and in part incompatible) interactional orders: on the one hand, teachers as well as students have to consider their specific participation roles; on the other hand, their participation roles are framed institutionally and cannot easily be changed.

How prosody constitutes the actions of formulations in courtrooms

Com base nas perspectivas teóricas e metodológicas da Linguística Interacional e da Análise da Conversa, este estudo investiga como o traço prosódico tom contribui para a formação e a atribuição de sentido às ações em audiências de instrução, em particular, na prática de formulação. A análise revela que variações de tom na prática de perguntar estão intrinsecamente relacionadas às diferentes ações realizadas local e situadamente: checar entendimento e desafiar o interlocutor.

‘Oiling the social wheels’ in an undergraduate chemistry lab: an ITA’s participation in small talk

ABSTRACT Even though small talk has been investigated in a variety of business contexts and service encounters, it is understudied in instructional settings. This paper explores the occurrence of small talk in a university chemistry lab between a Chinese international teaching assistant (ITA) and American students. Drawing on naturally occurring interaction data from a conversation analysis perspective, triangulated by interview data and researcher field notes, the study describes the particular functions of small talk, such as identity affiliation and rapport management through humorous small talk. The findings are discussed in relation to ITA identity and professional development and the role of small talk in instructional discourse.

Navigating assigned roles for asynchronous online discussions: Examining participants’ orientation using conversation analysis

Asynchronous computer-mediated communication (CMC) tools, such as asynchronous online discussions (AODs), are widely used in higher education. Particularly for online-only classes the organization of AOD forums is of pedagogical importance, as these discussions are one of the major opportunities for participants to develop understanding of course content. This study examines participant orientations to a common AOD practice, assigning roles. The data were gathered from a graduate-level teacher education course that used forum discussion module included in Sakai. Using a conversation analytic perspective, data were examined to understand patterns in participants’ uptake of Discussion Starter and Devil’s Advocate roles in the forum. The findings demonstrate how assigning roles established a frame for participants’ understanding of course content and delimited possibilities for participation. Further, patterns of engagement related to these roles encouraged participants to distance themselves epistemically from the content of their posts. Specifically, students took up the Devil’s Advocate role in both expected and unexpected ways. While students did use this role as an opportunity to disagree with others in the forum, they also took up the role of Devil’s Advocate to pose non-critical questions as well. Pedagogical insights and the usefulness of conversation analysis as an analytical approach are discussed.

«По-русски говорите»: сообщение информации и обратная связь во взаимодействии врача-генетика и пациента

The article is devoted to the analysis of interactions between geneticists and patients through the perspectives of ethnomethodology and conversation analysis. The focus of the research is on how geneticists deliver medical information to their patients and how patients are involved in this process. The primary data are audio recordings and ethnographic observations of genetic counseling sessions conducted in July–December 2018. The study also uses materials from interviews with geneticists and from genetics textbooks that deal with issues of patient-provider communication. The author criticizes some features characteristic of the research on “information delivery” in a medical context. First, such studies are often one-sided: although they analyze how the patient understands information and what it means to him/her, the patient is represented as a passive recipient of information. This article, conversely, argues that the patient is also an active participant in the process of formulating information through various kinds of promptings, clarifications, and responses. Thus, communication of information is a joint achievement of doctor and patient. Secondly, when analyzing information delivery, various expressions, for example, “yes,” “aha,” “ooh,” and such, are considered signals of epistemic status change in conversation analysis. That is, it is assumed that these are signals that the recipient has received the information and understood the message. The question of which part of the message the recipient understood is hardly addressed. This article highlights a specific feature of the interaction between geneticist and patients: the difficulty of achieving mutual understanding. For the doctor, a description of the patient’s condition and his/her diagnosis is “packed” into abstract medical concepts, the explanation of which is problematic during the consultation process. Hence the difficulty of reaching an understanding, which happens either when the doctor himself/ herself begins to use everyday language or when the patient begins to ask for clarification in everyday language (although this can lead to tension). Using medical terms, the doctor gives a report, but it does not explain everything to the patient, and because of the problematic nature of the demonstration of misunderstanding, the patient has almost no way to tell the doctor about it. Article in Russian DOI: 10.25285/2078-1938-2019-11-2-125-148

Oral English Skills of Chinese University Students in Describing Their Native Culture

AbstractThis paper addresses the issue of Chinese students’ oral English skills in talking about Chinese culture from the perspective of conversation analysis. To examine their performance in this regard, group discussion data in the classroom were collected for analysis. Their oral skills in talking about Chinese New Year and Christmas, a Western festival, were analyzed and compared to determine their oral performance in describing their native culture. Comments by two native English speakers on the students’ performance are used to complement the conversation analysis. The results indicate that, compared with their performance regarding Christmas, the students were able to express a wider range of cultural connotations about Chinese New Year in English, but they used significantly fewer correct culturally-loaded words and phrases, and switched to Chinese much more frequently, suggesting unsatisfactory oral skills in describing Chinese culture.

The multimodal interactional organization of tasting: Practices of tasting cheese in gourmet shops

Taste is a central sense for humans and animals, and it has been largely studied either from physiological and neurological approaches or from socio-cultural ones. This paper adopts another view, focused on the activity of tasting rather than on the sense of taste, approached within the perspective of ethnomethodology and multimodal conversation analysis. This view addresses the activity of tasting as it is interactionally organized in specific social settings, observed in a naturalistic way, on the basis of video recordings. Focusing on video recorded improvised tastings of cheese in gourmet shop encounters, the paper offers a systematic analysis of the way in which tasting is orderly achieved in an intersubjective way. It follows the various steps characterizing tasting, from the invitation to taste, to the grasping of a bit to taste, which is put in the mouth, chewed, and swallowed; it details how an interactional moment offering the taster a priviledged, individual, focused space in which to devote exclusive attention to the object tasted is actively tailored by all parties. By contrast, the completion of tasting is marked by a return to mutual gaze, the animation of facial expressions and nods, and the final production of a judgment of taste. By offering a systematic reconstruction of how these tasting moments are organized, the paper invites to a multimodal approach of sensoriality in social interaction.

Analyzing the Impact of Teacher Talk on English Grammar Learning: With Correlation to the Procedures in Classroom Interaction

The main purpose of this research paper is to explore the impact of Teacher Talk in English Grammar Acquisition through interaction procedures in the classroom. Through a Conversation Analysis perspective, three extracts from audio- recording were analyzed and transcribed. These extracts focused on the Teacher Talk in Grammar Teaching through interaction with the students. The findings show that Teacher Talk improves the learning of English Grammar. When teachers engage in small talk with students, the students acquire the rules of grammar easily through ‘Turn Management’ and the ‘Next Speaker Selection’ Procedures. Thus, these procedures do not only improve teaching process, but also accredit students who learn English as the second language correctly and accurately. The findings of the study underline opportunities for further research.

Data collection considerations for classroom interaction research: a conversation analytic perspective

ABSTRACTWith the growing centrality of digital recording technologies to conversation analysis (CA) research, an emerging array of publications has begun to provide useful methodological insights on how to capture multimodal and temporal complexities of social interaction in video footages. By and large, however, they have been written as general guidelines, without much regard to specificities of institutional settings. To address this gap, this article discusses specific considerations for the production of audio-visual data for CA research on classroom interaction. We argue that a set of heuristic considerations is needed to prevent researchers from overlooking details that participants orient to as constitutive of their institutional activities. To this end, we offer a brief overview of common characteristics of classroom interaction. These include its multiple spatial arrangements within and across lessons and pedagogical projects which are accomplished through local actions and action sequences. Building on these characteristics, we provide a set of guiding questions to facilitate pre- and online decision-making processes that are undertaken by individual researchers in the data collection phase. Yielding unprecedented opportunities for research, careful and disciplined attention to the production of video data is indispensable as we continue to study and theorise classroom interaction in diverse contexts.

Encounters in Public Space: How Acquainted Versus Unacquainted Persons Establish Social and Spatial Arrangements

ABSTRACTThis article studies how people enter into interactions in public space by examining casual encounters initiated either by strangers or acquainted persons. It contributes to the study of openings of interactions in public space from a conversation analytic perspective. The analysis reveals systematic similarities and differences between these two kinds of encounters, with regard to the prospective participants’ recognition, identification, and categorization, their spatial approach, the absence vs. presence of greetings, the delivery of a reason for the encounter vs. the manifestation of the social relation, and the shaping of the embodied participation framework. Data are in French and Italian with English translations.

Introduction

We are pleased to have this opportunity of presenting a collection of studies of the use of East Asian languages (principally Chinese/Mandarin, Japanese, and Korean) in naturally occurring interactions in ordinary conversation and institutional settings. This is the second of two volumes of East Asian Pragmatics (2.2 and 3.1) which, we hope will bring to a wider linguistics/pragmatics audience an appreciation of the breadth and vitality of research being conducted from a conversation analytic (CA) perspective – and through these studies, readers who are unfamiliar with CA will obtain a taste of what CA has to offer. As in the previous issue, we solicited these contributions from scholars we knew who are doing important and novel work on interactions in their respective languages, using CA to address significant topics and issues in pragmatics. We would welcome the opportunity to showcase more of the research being done in this area, but we hope these two issues together will give a glimpse of the wealth of CA research being done in the field of East Asian languages.

A Conversation-Analytic Perspective on the Organization of Teacher-Led Clarification and Its Implications for L2 Teacher Training

A Conversation-Analytic Perspective on the Organization of Teacher-Led Clarification and Its Implications for L2 Teacher Training

EFL Classroom Discourse; From the Perspective of Discourse Analysis and Conversation Analysis

This research aims to analyze the EFL classroom discourse by investigating the terms of IRF (Initiation, Response, and Feedback) structures, turn taking, conversational repair and repetition. The subjects were two English teachers and their students from different schools SMKN 10 and SMA Adabiah Padang. The data was collected from classroom recording. The recordings were taken in one meeting for each teacher. There are four findings in this research. First, the discourse structure in EFL classroom is more complex than single IRF model which also includes the IRFR structure, the IR [I 1 R 1 … (I n R n )] F structure and the IR 1 F 1 R 2 F 2 …R n F n structure. Second, students in EFL classroom rarely initiate the conversation, and usually take the turn by nomination. Third, it is found that repairs are frequently adopted by the teacher and students to cope with problems in speaking, hearing and understanding. Fourth, repetition frequently occurs in EFL classroom, and teachers usually use repetition to emphasize or guide students to complete utterance, and students usually repeat part or all teachers’ utterance to show their confirmation or doubts. In conclusion most of the interaction in the EFL classroom is from the teacher to the students, there is little student initiative and little student-student interaction.

Driving instruction at high speed on a race circuit: Issues in action formation and sequence organization

The paper deals with instructions in a specific instructional setting, in which a driver learns to drive on a race circuit, assisted by a coach helping him to improve his performance and speed. This setting opens up both original issues for the study of learning to drive a car and general issues concerning the praxeological, multimodal, and sequential analysis of instructions in an ethnomethodological and conversation analytic (EMCA) perspective. On the basis of a systematic analysis of the coach's instructions and the driver's responses, the paper reveals the situated methodic production and understanding of these instructions and their organization in sequences and series of sequences. Training to drive at high speed appears as a perspicuous setting for investigating the ecology and the indexicality of instructed action, its temporal features, and the way these feature affect sequentiality—in particular action formation and sequence organization.

A conversation analytic perspective on Quranic verses and chapters

Applying a conversation-analytic framework to Quranic verses and chapters, the current qualitative study sought to shed new lights on the opening and closing verses in The Holy Quran. In effect, the study analyzed the opening and closing verses of 14 surahs to find out the central themes upon which they begin and come to a close. The analysis was conducted using the Persian translations of the verses as well as seeking help from the available Quran commentary or exegesis written in English. The analysis of the opening verses of the selected surahs revealed three central themes: (1) some surahs begin with words that praise and eulogize Allah, (2) some with imperative sentences or commandments addressed to the Holy Prophet, and (3) some related to specific events and times. Regarding the closing verses, the findings were not uniform across the selected surahs; while in some surahs the closing verses together with the opening verses deal with a similar topic or theme, in some other surahs the closing verses are concerned with different topics.