Interactionist Approach Research Articles

Review of Chepinchikj (2022): Interactional approach to cinematic discourse: How do Woody Allen’s characters talk?

Review of Chepinchikj (2022): Interactional approach to cinematic discourse: How do Woody Allen’s characters talk?

Navigating power and impoliteness in criminal court discourse

Abstract This study uses an interactional pragmatic approach to examine impoliteness in Turkish High Criminal Court proceedings, offering an alternative perspective compared to the Anglo-American contexts typically explored in legal discourse research. Grounded in (Culpeper, Jonathan. 1996. Towards an anatomy of impoliteness. Journal of Pragmatics 25. 349–367.) impoliteness super strategies, the analysis draws from 45-min audio recordings of seven criminal trials, focusing on impoliteness during the examination-in-chief. The findings reveal a significant register clash, especially from a defendant who deviates from formal legal norms through misalignment, mock impoliteness, threats, and profanity. This disruption challenges courtroom decorum, affects power dynamics, and influences trial progression and interaction, underscoring the complex interplay between institutional authority and individual behavior, which shapes overall (im)politeness in the courtroom.

Eye closures in spoken Hebrew

Abstract The present study focuses on eye closure (EC) as a communicative facial gesture in Israeli Hebrew media talk and pays particular attention to its coordination with co-expressive verbal, prosodic, and embodied resources. Drawing on the interactional approach to language and embodied action, the study demonstrates that EC can convey four contextual meanings — concentration, hedging, negation, and totality — depending on the context in which it occurs and the verbal material with which it is co-produced. The paper proposes that these contextual meanings are derived from the more general meaning of disengagement conveyed by EC. Moreover, the present paper suggests several potential semiotic connections between the basic physiological use of EC as a reflex of self-protection and evasion and its observed contextual meanings. This provides evidence for the co-optation of the basic functions of facial gestures for communicative purposes via metaphorical-metonymical extensions.

The effects of implicit corrective feedback on production of lexical stress in L2 English

The interactionist approach to second language acquisition has yielded a plethora of studies confirming the positive impact of interaction and corrective feedback on second language (L2) development. Nevertheless, only a few studies have attempted to investigate the development of L2 prosody using the interactionist approach. The current study contributes to this line of research by investigating the relationship between recasts and the production of primary stress in L2 English. Following a pretest-posttest design, 68 L1 Arabic speakers were randomly assigned to control and intervention groups. The pre- and posttest comprised sentence-completion and information-exchange tasks, whereas the intervention was a role-play task that dyads carried out with the researcher. The intervention group received a recast upon producing target words with misplaced primary stress, whereas the control group did not receive any corrective feedback. The results of acoustic analyses, which focused on syllable duration, intensity, and pitch, indicated a positive relationship between recasts and development of primary stress placement. The results were also supported by expert listener judgments. The findings suggest that interaction and implicit corrective feedback play a positive role in the development of lexical stress.

L2 discourse marker use in interaction: The case of pues in Spanish

AbstractWhile discourse markers (DMs) are crucial for coherence and interactional competence, previous research suggests that learners' usage of DMs differs from L1 speakers. Prior research has taken either a discourse‐functional or interactional approach, yet combining these two methods may provide greater understanding of the unique learner communicative needs that drive the acquisition and use of DMs. This investigation contributes to research on interlanguage DM use by quantitatively investigating the frequency and functional distribution of the Spanish DM pues by L2 and L1 speakers of Spanish from a discourse‐functional perspective and qualitatively examining pues as an interactional resource. Oral interviews with 58 L2 and 14 L1 speakers of Spanish were analyzed, revealing distinct frequency and distributional patterns across groups and unique L2 interactional needs that are supported with the DM pues. Results inform L2 learners and teachers of the importance of DMs for interactions and provide classroom implications.

Discussion of Emotions Among Newly Diagnosed Non-Hispanic White and Chinese American Patients With Breast Cancer and Their Oncologists.

This qualitative study analyzed how Chinese American (CA) and non-Hispanic White (NHW) breast cancer patients and their oncologists communicated about patients' emotional concerns. Data included twenty-four recordings of clinical encounters between oncologists and four CA and eight NHW women with a new breast cancer diagnosis between 2013 and 2015. Using an interactional sociolinguistics approach to discourse analysis, we examined how CA and NHW patients and their oncologists initiated conversations about patients' emotions. We also categorized oncologists' responses by whether oncologists turned toward, turned away, or remained neutral to patients' emotions. When bringing up emotions with oncologists, NHW patients brought up social and personal life topics, whereas CA patients only brought up biomedical topics. We also observed that oncologists initiated discussions about emotions with only English-speaking patients of both racial groups. There were no observed differences in how oncologists remained neutral to or turned away from both CA and NHW patients' emotional expressions. When oncologists turned away from patients' emotions, they did so to solve administrative or biomedical problems. In conclusion, the findings suggest that CA patients' racial backgrounds and the language spoken during the encounters may influence how patients and oncologists initiate discussion about patients' emotions. Furthermore, the findings suggest that oncologists remain neutral and turn away from CA and NHW patients' emotions in similar ways. This study provides preliminary data for more comprehensive investigations of Asian American cancer patients' actual communication with their providers regarding emotions and treatment decisions to facilitate patient-provider communication quality.

Where Trouble Starts: Communication Breakdown in a Complex Emergency Call

ABSTRACT Emergency calls require efficient communication between caller and call taker to establish a need for assistance and dispatch help quickly. Analyzing communication processes at this first link in the emergency medical care chain has important implications for improving the quality of emergency care across the health system. This paper examines an interaction between a call taker and a caller requesting assistance at the scene of a family murder, using a hybrid interactional sociolinguistic approach to analysis. We also draw from court testimony. We demonstrate how several factors contribute to communication breakdown, prolong the call, and lead to the call taker doubting the credibility of the emergency. These include the caller’s inability to frame a believable request for help nor clarify his stance concerning the emergency, an absence of urgency and emotion in his description of the incident, an extended focus on and repair of the incident location, and his dysfluent speech behaviors. We demonstrate how communication breakdown is co-constructed and compounded by system-related trouble. This call has useful implications for call-taker training and highlights that when an interaction goes wrong, it has a cascading effect on health care not only for those patients who need the help urgently but also for the efficient running of the health system as a whole.

‘Someone has taken all my tiaras' pre-teen girls’ emotional engagements with controversial online behaviors

ABSTRACT Based on ethnographic fieldwork including video recordings, this study examines how pre-teen girls, in everyday peer interaction, deal with controversial issues on a social media network. Drawing on a multimodal interactional approach, we analyze the situated affective and collaborative embodied work through which a peer group unravels and remedies problematic online behaviors (cheating, scamming, stealing). The results show how the girls affectively align themselves to deal with online risks in ways that demand different social media skills as well as networks of supportive peers. The girls agentively draw upon the affordances (texting, images, social norms) of the social media network as well as their expertise and collective knowledge of similar online events. The creative power of the peer group plays an important role, in terms of how the girls nourish their peer culture while building mutual trust and collaborative competencies for interpreting and anticipating risky practices in their lives with peers.

Empowering pandemic pivots: the inclusive power of remote work and school

ABSTRACT We examine the transitions to remote work and education as unplanned large-scale social experiments in critical institutions that were rapidly digitized in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. As the long tail of the pandemic continues, going remote continues to impact marginalized populations in unexpectedly positive ways and meet needs that are invisible to dominant populations. Therefore, we make the case for remote work and school as new frontiers in digital inclusion with particular benefit to traditionally underrepresented groups. We use Symbolic Interactionist approaches drawing on Hochschild’s emotion work and Goffman’s impression management and stigma to reveal interactional mechanisms through which digital communication modalities offer a way to circumvent some of the deleterious aspects of face-to-face social interaction that occur in these institutional spheres. Digital interaction tools facilitate flexibility and greater control of impression management to avoid stigma among workers and students who are most at risk of being marginalized or harmed in face-to-face institutionally embedded interactions. Thus, both remote work and school can supply new avenues for institutional inclusion of particular value for those who suffer the most from bias, stigma, and/or discrimination in face-to-face institutional settings governed by norms that were built by those with privilege to serve and replicate their privilege. Finally, we call attention to the ways that going remote is being resisted as older forms of social control reemerge, as well as to how remote workers and students are increasingly subjected to digital surveillance tools that extend Foucault’s concept of the panopticon into the digital realm.

Negative health classifications: understanding avoidance and social exclusion during a pandemic

During a pandemic, there is a fine line between distancing and avoiding other people, with stigmatizing classifications sometimes transforming social distance into social exclusion. Drawing on Bourdieu's under-utilised theory of classification struggles, this paper conceptualises schemes of pandemic Othering in terms of Negative Health Classifications. Complementing the interactionist approach in pandemic stigma research, classification struggles are a social practice that denote a conceptual link between the individual and social structures of inequality. When social structures are unstable, as was the case during the pandemic, an established common sense can become questionable. Based on the analysis of survey data from 2606 respondents collected during one of the peaks of COVID-19 in Austria and Germany, the paper explores two struggles over health classifications, (1) social cleavages created and exacerbated by individuals who strive to tackle medical crises by avoiding the 'disease carriers', and (2) conflict over illegitimate pandemic practices resulting in the loss of social capital and a polarization of social groups. The findings offer evidence of widespread negative health classifications emerging during the COVID-19 pandemic that future research should explore in their implications for inequalities in other health policy contexts.

Unraveling substance abuse among Malawian street children: A qualitative exploration.

This qualitative study adopts a phenomenological and symbolic interactionist approach to comprehensively explore substance abuse among street children in Lilongwe, Malawi. The research aims to uncover the complex sociocultural, economic, and environmental determinants influencing substance abuse within this marginalized cohort. Through in-depth semi-structured interviews, the study engages with street children to understand their subjective experiences, perceptions, and interpretations of substance abuse within their community context. Employing convenience, purposive, and snowball sampling strategies, the research collected data from street children, acknowledging their transient nature and societal challenges. Thematic analysis was conducted on interview transcripts to derive comprehensive insights. Results revealed five key thematic areas: familial absence and emotional void, societal normalization and peer pressure, economic hardships, coping mechanisms, environmental accessibility, and peer influence and belongingness. These themes highlighted the intricate interplay between personal experiences, socio-environmental factors, and peer dynamics, shaping the prevalence and persistence of substance abuse among street children. This study's implications for practice underscore the need for tailored interventions and support mechanisms addressing substance abuse within this demographic. It emphasizes the urgency for context-specific strategies and policy formulations aimed at ameliorating the challenges faced by street children dealing with substance abuse in Malawi. Ultimately, this research contributes to a deeper understanding of substance abuse among marginalized street children, advocating for compassionate and contextually sensitive interventions within this overlooked drug abusers' population subset.

Light At The End Of The Tunnel? The Staging of Expertise During the COVID-19 Vaccination Campaign

In this paper, we compare the governmental and public framings of expertise in the Dutch Covid-19 vaccination campaign in the period between January 1st and April 30th, 2021. Specifically, we collected all statements regarding vaccination on three interrelated stages: (1) the official press conferences; (2) Twitter, for responses to government policies; and (3) political motions that were put forward by Members of Parliament in the days following the press conferences. We combine an interactional framing approach with a discursive psychological perspective to get insights into how framings between stages modify, contest, or build upon each other. We argue that the press conferences show a persistent technocratic framing, in the sense that a direct line between science and policy is assumed and promoted. Unlike the first period of the COVID-19 crisis in 2020, experts are not often quoted initially, but key political actors themselves act as responsible for the message that there is light at the end of the tunnel, if only citizens will get vaccinated. Once the AstraZeneca vaccine comes under fire, however, experts are again held accountable for the policy message. Throughout, governmental policies are disputed on Twitter and in Parliament, albeit in different ways, by making hidden moralities relevant, such as the government’s assumed complacency, rigidity, and inability to explain policies with the available evidence.

Revisiting Evolutionary Naturalism: Challenging Misconceptions and Embracing Interactionism

The study aims to illuminate the fallacious misconceptions regarding evolutionary naturalism, which often reduce it to strict fatalist naturalism, while also defending an interactionist perspective between nature and nurture in explaining social and individual traits. To achieve this goal, the study is divided into two sections. The first section offers a brief overview of evolutionary naturalism and nurturism, illustrating their biased interpretations as well as the erroneous philosophical, ethical, and political implications they allegedly entail. By clarifying the fundamental tenets of evolutionary naturalism and distinguishing it from sociobiology, the second section argues that evolutionary naturalism, as an interactionist approach, offers incomplete yet superior explanations for highly complex traits such as cultural, legislative, and ethical ones. To support this argument, the second section exposes several fallacies and misconceptions surrounding evolutionary naturalism, which often lead to overlooking its interactionist dimension. These fallacies include the fallacy of genetic causation, the fallacy of genetic sufficiency, and the fallacy of genetic necessity. It is concluded that, rather than adhering to creationist naturalism, sociobiology, strict naturalism, or nurturism, embracing evolutionary and interactionist naturalism provides better insights into investigating the origins of such complex traits.

A tale of two English teachers: Examining narrative in multilingual writing and teaching

This paper examines how multilingual English language teachers use narrative for learning and teaching writing given their own writing practices and beliefs. The data was collected and analyzed using different narrative approaches to explore the advantages and disadvantages of each of these three models: Labov, Ochs and Capps, and De Fina & Georgakopoulou's Social Interactional Approach (SIA). Each model highlights different aspects of narrative. However, due to the contextual nature of multilingual writing, the SIA model proved to be the most comprehensive for knitting together teacher writing practices, beliefs about language-learning, and their pedagogies. Nevertheless, applying all three models proved useful for highlighting the dynamics of language use in different contexts along with multidimensional aspects of storytelling.

Revealing the Motives Behind Executive and Legislative “Interests” in the Discussion Process and Determination of the Budget Regional Revenue and Expenditures (APBD)

Purpose: This interpretive case study delves into the dynamics of executive and legislative interactions in the determination of Regional Revenue and Expenditures (APBD), aiming to understand the underlying motives driving their actions. Theoretical Reference: Drawing on Siegel and Marconi's theory, which emphasizes the influence of individual perspectives on budget figures, this study employs symbolic interactionism to explore the behavior and motivations of the Executive and Legislative branches in the APBD process. Method: Qualitative research is conducted, employing a symbolic interactionism approach to analyze the behavior and discourse of the Executive and Legislative branches during APBD discussions. Results and Conclusion: The study reveals that despite public rhetoric emphasizing performance-oriented budgeting, traditional practices still largely dictate APBD discussions, hindered by a prevailing paternalistic culture and elite commitments. Conflicts between the branches often arise, delaying APBD approval. The findings suggest a phenomenon of Budgetary Mutualism, where both branches engage in strategic maneuvers to secure mutually beneficial gains while maintaining a facade of harmony. However, underlying this facade is a reality of hypocrisy, where public rhetoric masks conflicting interests and power dynamics. Implications of Research: This research sheds light on the complexities of APBD determination, highlighting the need to address underlying power dynamics and conflicting interests between the Executive and Legislative branches. Understanding these dynamics is crucial for reform efforts aiming to improve budgetary processes and governance. Originality/Value: By applying symbolic interactionism to analyze APBD dynamics, this study offers a novel perspective on the behavior and motivations of government actors in budgetary processes. The identification of Budgetary Mutualism and the revelation of underlying hypocrisy contribute to a deeper understanding of governance dynamics.

Kinship Health Relationships: Reconfiguring the “Good Death” in Mixed Species Families

Through an innovative interspecies analysis, this article explores narratives surrounding the medical treatment of humans and pet animals at the end of life among U.K. veterinary surgeons, medical practitioners, and members of the public. Contrasting the care options open to pet owners with those available to human patients, and through a thematic focus on treatments and medicines, euthanasia, and palliation, this article pays close attention to the ways that practitioners and members of the public make sense of—and express ideas about—interspecies family kinship at the end of life. We highlight the utility of interactionist approaches for understanding microsocial human‐animal kinship ties and argue that health policy and practice during end‐of‐life care should better reflect the lived reality of the multispecies family. In so doing, we highlight the significance and complexities of interspecies conversations for the development of contemporary end‐of‐life care debates.

Variation in the mu-opioid receptor gene (OPRM1) moderates the influence of maternal sensitivity on child attachment

The endogenous opioid system is thought to play an important role in mother-infant attachment. In infant rhesus macaques, variation in the μ-opioid receptor gene (OPRM1) is related to differences in attachment behavior that emerges following repeated separation from the mother; specifically, infants carrying at least one copy of the minor G allele of the OPRM1 C77G polymorphism show heightened and more persistent separation distress, as well as a pattern of increased contact-seeking behavior directed towards the mother during reunions (at the expense of affiliation with other group members). Research in adult humans has also linked the minor G allele of the analogous OPRM1 A118G polymorphism with greater interpersonal sensitivity. Adopting an interactionist approach, we examined whether OPRM1 A118G genotype and maternal (in)sensitivity are associated with child attachment style, predicting that children carrying the G allele may be more likely to develop an ambivalent attachment pattern in response to less sensitive maternal care. The sample consisted of 191 mothers participating with their children (n = 223) in the Maternal Adversity, Vulnerability and Neurodevelopment (MAVAN) project, a community-based, birth cohort study of Canadian mothers and their children assessed longitudinally across the child’s development. Maternal sensitivity was coded from at-home mother-child interactions videotaped when the child was 18 months of age. Child attachment was assessed at 36 months using the Strange Situation paradigm. As predicted, G allele carriers, but not AA homozygotes, showed increasing odds of being classified as ambivalently attached with decreasing levels of maternal sensitivity. Paralleling earlier non-human animal research, this work provides support for the theory that endogenous opioids contribute to the expression of attachment behaviors in humans.

Summarising in medical emergencies: The role of the discourse marker so

This article is concerned with the in situ negotiation of epistemic authority through the mobilisation of summaries in the context of medical emergencies. It focuses on the use of the discourse marker so in prefacing summaries as a strategy for claiming epistemic primacy, with particular attention being paid to so's multimodal accomplishment. Taking an interactional sociolinguistic approach, we bring together simulated and real-life trauma emergencies and zoom in on the role of the institutionally defined team leader.Our findings illustrate that summarising in this context is almost exclusively reserved for team leaders, with so being an integral part in this process, consistently prefacing team leaders’ summaries. These summary acts, in turn, contribute to the summarisation process, which is part and parcel of role performance and doing leadership. We unpack the spatiotemporal dimensions of so, highlighting the systematicity of its use in the material space of the emergency room, and make a case for the need to capture discourse markers in the situated spatiolinguistic context.

Writing Woes of ESL Learners: Can Dynamic Assessment Be the Solution?

AbstractThis study explores the effectiveness of dynamic assessment (DA) in addressing grammatical writing difficulties in Pakistani English as a Second Language (ESL) learners' writing. Adopting an interactionist approach to DA, the research observes mediational moves by a teacher during the writing assessment process. The study employs a qualitative case study design, examining the interactional patterns and outcomes of DA for three higher secondary-level Pakistani ESL learners over an eight-week period. The findings indicate that the interactionist approach to DA is a promising method for improving the grammatical accuracy of Pakistani ESL learners, particularly in areas such as tenses, pronouns, and subject-verb agreement. The results of this study have significant implications for writing instruction in ESL contexts. Dynamic assessment can support the development of writing skills by providing ESL writers with opportunities to engage in distributive practice and receive feedback on their writing, resulting in a tailored and effective approach to writing instruction.

Religio-temporal framing and religio-social synchronization in family discourse in Saudi Arabia

Studies on time and timing in language often adopt psychological or cognitive perspectives. This work aims to study the relationship between time, religion, and family discourse. An interactional sociolinguistic approach was used to collect data from spontaneous family interactions to study how religious activities govern how family members in Saudi Arabia organize their day and simultaneously how different times of day are organized though religious activities. This study draws on Gordon’s study of family discourse, Van Leeuwen’s concepts of timing and Goffman’s concept of framing to investigate how family members organize their time in what can be referred to as religio-temporal framing and religio-social synchronization, and how this plays a role in the co-construction of Muslim identity.