Conversation Analytic Perspective Research Articles

Differentiated use of Japanese interjective items 'eeto', 'sonoo' and 'anoo' in self-initiated, same-turn repair

This study examines the intricacies of Japanese interjective tokens eeto, anoo, and sonoo from a conversation analytic perspective, particularly focusing on their role in self-initiated, same-turn self-repair. This study reveals that these tokens can serve as repair prefaces, projecting the quintessence of the impending repair operation. Depending on the specific interactional concerns at any given juncture, distinct variations in self-initiated, same-turn repair operations emerge, and Japanese speakers adeptly indicate how their orientation toward specific interactional aspects of the upcoming repair solution should be heard at that particular conversational juncture by prefacing their self-repair operations with these tokens, each signaling a different nature for the repair. Furthermore, this study argues that the differentiated use of eeto, anoo, and sonoo as repair prefaces correlates with and extends findings from our previous studies, thereby establishing congruence between their varied workings across multiple situations.

Self-repair in Korean conversation

This paper analyses the practice of self-initiated (same-turn) self-repair in Korean conversation, from a conversation-analytic perspective, with the focus on “post-positionally” conducted morphological repair. Korean is a predicate-final language with an agglutinative system, where a case marker or a sentence-ending suffix post-positionally marking the root (e.g., noun or verb stem) may become a repairable, being replaced by another, rearticulated, or even suppressed or blurred (in the case of turn-finally occurring repair). The analysis suggests that post-positional repair of the root or suffixes (e.g., sentence-ending suffixes or turn-final clausal connectives) embodies the repairer’s orientation towards rendering the action more “normatively appropriate” in a way that is more recipient-designed, face-sensitive, or solidary. Explicating the reflexive relationship between the repairable and the repair solution is shown to be a useful comparative-analytic practice, illuminating the way post-positional morphosyntactic elements in Korean are deployed as paradigmatically related interactional resources managing action, face and relationships

Discursive Interaction and Agency in Transitional Justice: A Conversation Analysis Perspective

ABSTRACT The article presents discursive interaction as an analytical framework for capturing agency in transitional justice (TJ). Embedded in the paradigm of Conversation Analysis, which foregrounds the interactive nature of communication, the framework sets out how the exercise of agency is facilitated or constrained at the micro level of talk in conversational sequences. The article shifts attention to the mechanics of interactions in TJ, which are demonstrated empirically with patterns of interactions in the Croatian Parliament. The reconceptualization of agency based on the systematic analysis of how speakers engage with each other advances emerging theories of interactive TJ both conceptually and methodologically.

Collaborative character searches in L2 Chinese peer writing: sequential design and object affordances

ABSTRACT In light of the growing field of research on writing-in-interaction within an ethnomethodological (EM) and conversation analytic (CA) perspective, which peer writing as a situated activity unfolded by participants, this study investigates how L2 Chinese learners accomplish collaborative character searches during a peer writing task. The analysis shows that learners’ collaborative character search follows a three-phase sequential design: problem-displaying, attention-drawing, and problem-resolving phases, during which they employ various multimodal resources to achieve interactional goals. By using different objects, participants demonstrate their agency in coordinating resources while collaboratively searching for the correct character(s). Furthermore, participants’ interactions with objects provide affordances for a particular point for noticing, transferring the writership, displaying epistemic stance, re-directing attention, and exploring the emergent learnable. This study unveils how L2 Chinese learners do collaborative character searches during peer writing and extends our understanding of the intricate coordination of multimodal resources in collaborative character search work. It contributes to ongoing discussions on (hand)writing-in-interaction within the EM/CA field by illustrating how participants navigate the intricacies of logographic writing while doing writing.

Schisming as an Interactional Resource for Learning at the Frontiers of Work and Vocational Training — A Secondary Publication

This paper examines the sorts of interactional competencies and institutional demands required from students as they engage in complex forms of participation combining work and training purposes. It focuses on a series of empirical cases, recorded through video data and analyzed from a conversation analytic perspective, in which mentors make the decision to intervene during work sessions moderated by students. Such interventions do not interrupt the student’s activity and lead to the emergence of two distinct but not impermeable interactional spaces. This complex participation framework, known as “schisming,” contributes to overcoming practical issues within multiparty settings. Our study shows how schisming constitutes a particular sequential phenomenon where participants reorganize the interaction and co-construct a social and cognitive interactional space, thus enabling a shared understanding of the specific training context. Empirical data from the practical training of medical radiographers are used to illustrate how schisming may contribute to learning in the conditions of guided practice.

How diabetes forum-users complain about others’ expectations: Troubles-telling and troubles-receiving

This article offers a qualitative analysis of two instances of troubles-telling threads on a diabetes forum, with a specific focus on how these instances contribute to constructing a way to manage others’ expectations concerning how persons diagnosed with diabetes control their condition. From the perspective of conversation analysis and discursive psychology, this article shows some recurrent features of both troubles-telling (namely announcement, stake inoculation and self-deprecation) and of troubles-receiving (namely appreciation, second stories, escalation). Our analysis furthermore shows how inadequate expectations from family members are judged differently from those of health professionals. The latter are judged more harshly for what seems a lack of professional competence, whereas the former are more easily pardoned but pose a particular challenge in that patients do not wish to remove these persons from their lives. Through this analysis, we contribute to showing a particularly important function of patient fora, namely allowing patients to tell troubles about others’ expectations and to receive support and advice for these circumstances that put a heavy emotional burden.

Noticing-based actions and the pragmatics of attention in expository live streams. Noticing ‘effervescence’ and noticing-based sequences

This paper focuses on live streams as interactional phenomena from an ethnomethodology and conversation analysis (EMCA) perspective. It discusses how streamers and viewers manage attention and engagement and how noticing-based actions constitute a powerful and crucial resource to produce and display these, finely tuned to the asymmetric communicative affordances of live streams, which, in the case of expository live streams, enact a streamer on display for the perceptual consumption of remote viewers. It discusses how streamers and viewers may produce noticing sequences and noticing-based sequences. It also discusses how the orientation towards noticing in expository live streams may become contagious and lead to a ‘noticing effervescence.’

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.

A Conversation Analytic Study on Clicks in Mandarin Chinese

From the perspective of Conversation Analysis, this paper analyzes clicks in daily Chinese communication. Data analysis shows that clicks generally appear in negative contexts and play an important role in conveying the speaker’s negative attitudes or feelings. This article first discusses the main ways that the linguistic resource of clicks helps the speaker convey his/her negative attitudes: presupposing the click-producer’s disdain, presupposing the speaker’s dissatisfaction, presupposing the speaker’s impatience, and strengthening the speaker’s negative attitude. On this basis, the author explores the main two functions of clicks in Chinese conversation, that is serving as a signal of topic transition and maintaining harmonious social relations.

Review of Wong & Waring (2021): Review of Storytelling in multilingual interaction: A conversation analysis perspective

Review of Wong & Waring (2021): Review of Storytelling in multilingual interaction: A conversation analysis perspective

Classroom interaction in an online context: A translanguaging informed conversation analysis perspective

This study aims to investigate the mode-divergent practices of pre-service teachers in an online context. Firstly, 16 h of classroom interaction is analyzed via Conversation Analysis utilizing the Classroom Interactional Competence framework. Then, the translanguaging pedagogy perspective complements this analysis by focusing on linguistic, social, and psychological aspects. The conversation-analytical findings demonstrate the failures in constructive alignment, and an inordinate amount of wasted time with no satisfying results has been observed. It is shown that translanguaging pedagogy may support the creative, critical, and strategic utilization of bilingual students' entire repertoires in classroom practices. Overall, the analysis demonstrates how translanguaging pedagogies can inform mode-divergent practices in classrooms by which teachers’ interactional competence may be improved.

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.

A CONVERSATION ANALYTIC INVESTIGATION ON EXPERTISE DEMONSTRATION IN COMMUNITY PHARMACY INTERACTION

Objective: In recent years, there have been incresing numbers of the studies based on pharmacist communication skills in community pharmacy. However, different expertise knowledge provision within community pharmacy interaction is an under-researched area. This article aims to investigate how the expertise demonstration is deployed in a community pharmacy interaction. Material and Method: 30-hour audio and video recordings were collected in a community pharmacy in Türkiye, and analysed through data-driven and bottom-up research perspective of Conversation Analysis. Result and Discussion: The findings of the study show that the pharmacist displayed his expertise knowledge within three different sequential organizations initiated by the patient, pharmacy staff and pharmacist through a wide range of interactional practices such as providing extended explanations and advices, referring to external authority, and using both professional and trade knowledge. This micro-analytic study in pharmacy interaction makes an important contribution to pharmacy services and education.

„weil es halt schwieriger ist zu reden als es einfach selber zu machen“ – Lernenden-Engagement und Escape Games im Spanischunterricht

Educational Escape Games (EEG) are learning scenarios in which participants must solve a series of puzzles with a clear educational purpose in order to escape from a (fictional) locked room under time pressure. This paper examines two EEGs designed by teacher education students and play-tested with two Spanish classes (10th and 13th grade). The study focuses on the construct of learner engagement from the perspective of conversation analysis and investigates the extent to which learners engage cognitively, affectively, and socially. The results demonstrate that the participants jointly accomplished the task of solving the puzzles as a shared activity, underscoring the high potential of EEGs in promoting engagement with the target language. However, the interaction in the target language still presents a significant challenge.

Child-initiated informings and conversational participation in a bilingual preschool

This paper explores children's interactional competence in the context of bilingual early childhood education, looking specifically at how very young children initiate conversations with teachers by informing them about something interesting and new. Video recordings collected from ethnographic fieldwork in a Swedish–English preschool are investigated from the conversation analytic perspective, paying particular attention to multimodal aspects of naturally-occurring interactions. The analysis reveals that in initiating informings aimed at teachers in a multiparty institutional setting, children practice their bilingual skills in turn-taking and recipient design, and present their topic as relevant and coherent within the local material and conversational context. In so doing, children navigate institutional constraints on participation, secure teachers' recipiency, and establish themselves as knowledgeable speakers. Child-initiated participation in multiparty institutional settings provides a co-operative, transformative social process that constitutes an essential affordance for children's development of interactional competence in a bilingual educational context.

Developing Cosmopolitanism Through Intercultural Mediation Activities: An After-School Digital Storytelling Project in Catalonia

This article analyzes interaction taking place in an after-school digital storytelling project, involving a group of teenagers in Catalonia, Spain, with different lingua-cultural backgrounds. It focuses on intercultural mediation activities carried out in one of the early project sessions in which a young girl of Ghanaian origin mobilizes her previous life experience to mediate, for her local peers in Catalonia, understanding of a video produced by Ugandan youth. The data is transcribed and analyzed using a multimodal conversation analytic perspective. Drawing on the theoretical concepts of intercultural mediation, cosmopolitanism, and funds of knowledge, this article investigates the following: (a) how the girl mobilizes her funds of knowledge to mediate the content of the video and the other audience members and, (b) how cosmopolitanism is developed in intercultural mediation. The article also touches on how intercultural mediation is collaboratively constructed across modes, languages, and material objects. The findings indicate that the young participants’ cosmopolitan stances are enacted and enabled in intercultural mediation, as the youngsters can make sense of cultural concepts that they can not tackle as well on their own. The findings further help to reconceptualize the competences, knowledge, and resources of youth in the superdiverse and interconnected world.

Interactional Contingencies in Rehearsing a Theater Scene: The Consequentiality of Body Arrangements as Action Unfolds

Based on video-recordings of several weeks of rehearsals of a Japanese theater piece played by French actors, and adopting an ethnomethodological and conversation analytic perspective, this paper focuses on how the same few lines of a scene are subsequently enacted. In particular, it explores how the scene is played, not only in relation to the script but also to the situated moment-by-moment unfolding of embodied movements constituting the actions and achieving their detailed formatting and meaning. Whereas the dialogue refers to the scripted text, we argue that the multimodal details of each scene constitute a unique situated course of action achieved for ‘another first time,’ whose multimodal configuration depends on the temporality and the shape of each step, gesture, and body posture, as they are embodied and responded to in the vivid present and its contingencies. We demonstrate this by revealing how variations of the scene are performed, explored, and serendipitously found by the actors. We focus in particular on embodied details like walking, sitting, hugging and kissing, and the sequential and temporal positions at which they co-occur with the lines of the script. The analysis demonstrates both the indexicality of the script interpretations and the creative contingencies of the embodied work of the actors. In this way, it aims at contributing to current growing literature revisiting theater rehearsal as a situated activity and an interactional multimodal achievement.

“Zhen de” (真的) at the Response Position in Mandarin Chinese: A Conversation Analytic Perspective

In natural conversation, “zhen de” can appear as a turn construction component before, in or after a turn, or as a single turn construction unit at the response position of a sequence. Using the research method of conversation analysis, this paper takes the video and audio data of daily conversations as the corpus to conduct an in-depth study on “zhen de”, the practice that appears in the response position of the sequence. Combining with the existing corpus, we found that in the sequence environment of story telling, “zhen de” independent as turn construction unit usually performs other initiated open repair, this case “zhen de” can appear in second pair part, seeking a response and explanation. It can also appear as first pair part in non-minimal post-expansion of second pair part to challenge the authenticity of the responses of it.

The use of invitations to bid in classroom interaction

Abstract This study explores the interactional meaning of an invitation to bid in Korean elementary school EFL classroom interaction by adopting a conversation analytic perspective. The study argues that participants use invitations to bid to indicate that a question elicits knowledge worthy of public demonstration. The analysis of thirteen video-recorded EFL lessons revealed that teachers use invitations to bid, fulfilling instructional agenda or demands whether they are set up at the beginning of an activity or arise midway. Students similarly invite themselves to bid, showing their understanding of the meaning that the practice carries. While teachers overwhelmingly accept students’ self-invitations, they may reject them in light of the details of instructional here and now. It is argued that deciding which student population should reply is a matter of negotiation although teachers have the final say, oriented to consequences of turn allocation on the work of teaching in progress.

Negatively-Formatted Requests for Confirmation in Korean Conversation: Three Types of Verbal Negation as Interactional Resources

Abstract From a conversation-analytic perspective, this article analyzes three types of verbal negation in Korean, which shape requests for confirmation (RfCs) into distinctive interactional resources. The pre-verbal negation (an) RfC emerges in the context where the recipient is prompted to see the “fittedness” of its confirmable as referencing an “allusive” aspect of his/her situated domain, inferentially formulated by the questioner as a “negative event.” The post-verbal negation (ci anh) renders the RfC a vehicle for making mitigated assertions, seeking the recipient’s agreement in acquiescence to the questioner’s “problematizing” stance. The use of post-nominalization negation (nun-ke ani) RfC exhibits the questioner’s “conjecturing” stance, displaying norm-based deontic orientations treating the noted event at hand as deviant or counter-expectational. The target of the confirmable is formulated an “entity” assessable by the recipient as an externally-positioned co-member/evaluator. Cross-linguistic implications of the findings are discussed, in relation to English tag questions and negative interrogatives.