Radio Phone-in Research Articles

“Grab a pen and paper”

In this paper we analyse the discursive frameworks for interaction in a UK political radio phone-in between 2001 and 2010, and the implications of those frameworks for public engagement with politicians. The BBC Radio 4 phone-in program Election Call, broadcast in the run-up to a general election, has experimented with ‘new’ interactive technology (TV simulcast, web broadcasting and e-mail) in its attempt to provide listeners with the opportunity to engage with politicians and political parties live on air. By 2010 however, the program had returned to the original ‘old’ media format of telephone interaction only. Building on previous research in the discourse of radio phone-in broadcasts (Hutchby 1996; Thornborrow 2001a, 2001b, 2002; Hester & Fitzgerald 1999; Fitzgerald & Housley 2002; Thornborrow & Fitzgerald 2002), our analysis focuses on the empirical implementation of the 2010 shift in editorial policy which explicitly invited callers to engage with issues rather than just giving opinions. We will argue that while interactivity may broaden access to democratic debate, it is through live interaction that callers are best able to challenge politicians and hold them to account.

Challenging Pedagogy: Emotional Disruptions, Young Girls, Parents and Schools

This paper follows on from a research project which explored the inclusionary and exclusionary dynamics of young girls’ friendship groups. This initial study received considerable media attention in the UK, Europe and Australia and consequently came to the attention of a wider audience beyond the academy who were thus given an opportunity to engage with the research findings. Having previously explored and analysed the emotionally disabling everyday practices experienced by the girls in the initial research project, the voices of these other adults offered a possibility to explore, examine and analyse the experiences of their daughters and themselves and as a result offered insights that challenge the day to day practices in the classroom. The focus of this paper therefore, is to explore the emotionally raw moments as articulated through the stories told by these adults and to examine what meaning and sense is conveyed about the prevailing norms and values of the school underpinning their pedagogy and practice. We contextualise emotions within a theoretical framework of Sara Ahmed and bell hooks that views emotions in terms of power and culture. The data analysed include contributions from the public to a radio phone-in as well as email responses. The analysis makes explicit the dynamics of power in girls’ friendship groups revealing action/inaction by parents and their accounts about teachers which either disrupt or reinforce dominant practices that pertain. We advocate hooks’ concept of engaged pedagogy to challenge current practices underpinned by neo-liberal assumptions.

Gatekeeping public participation: An ethnographic account of the production process of a radio phone-in programme

This article describes and discusses the production process of the leading Israeli radio phone-in programme. Phone-ins are considered an arena for public participation as part of the public sphere. The researcher used ethnography and interviews to study the production process. The production team screens the participants – thus gatekeeping processes are in effect. The different agents in the production process use two main considerations to inform gatekeeping: medium-related considerations and public sphere considerations. These considerations are evident throughout the production process and in the broadcast itself. The gatekeeping process leads to limited access to public participation. The two considerations which inform the gatekeeping practices on radio are also useful when examining public participation in other media.

Public Complaints and Complaint Responses in Calls to a Jordanian Radio Phone-in Program

This study investigates complaints and complaint responses in interactions between local citizens and the hosts of a live two-hour radio phone-in in Jordan devoted to receiving and handling complaints of a public nature. Using Brown and Levinson’s (1987) politeness model, the study examines the functions and patterns of complaints and the types of responses elicited from the hosts. Findings indicate that callers attempt to promote solidarity with the hosts in order to strengthen the validity of their complaints and increase their chances of receiving remedial action. Given the inherently face-threatening nature of complaints, the data show that there is often a considerable area of rapport building between callers and the hosts, achieved through such devices as praising remarks and use of informal address forms. In responding to the complaints, the hosts attempt to negotiate solidarity with callers by encouraging them to speak freely, using empathic remarks, and promising to transfer callers’ problems to the authorities. These phone-in complaints are thus heavily constrained and shaped by the public institutional setting in which they are performed. This study investigates the conversational behavior of local citizens and the hosts of a radio phone-in program in Jordan devoted to handling complaints of a public nature in which different government departments are involved. In particular, the study examines the complaint patterns used by callers and the ways in which the program hosts respond to these public complaints and provide redress. The program is broadcast on weekdays and receives calls from local citizens about problems they encounter in terms of public services, or problems caused by bureaucratic inefficiency. Therefore, the program’s role involves calling the relevant government department in order to provide possible solutions for the problem in question. In light of the apparent unresponsiveness of governments to grievances about public services and corruption, one issue fueling current popular protests in the Middle East, such ‘open’

Types of Interaction on Israeli Political Radio Phone-In Programmes and Their Relations to the Public Sphere

This paper typifies the different interactions on Israeli public stations political radio phone-in programmes. Based on general features of the interaction and of the host perceptions, six different types of interaction were found. The different types can be distinguished by two aspects, whether the interaction is based on agreement or disagreement and whether the participants engage each other in the interaction. The most prominent type of interaction is a two-sided disagreement interaction, in which hosts and callers argue about issues and problems. A similar type is that of the neutral interaction, in which hosts try to avoid expressing their opinions. Other types of interactions also occur in the programmes, yet hosts often remark on their occurrence. These remarks serve to explain the interaction to the audience, to justify the hosts’ behaviour, and to reprimand or compliment the caller. These remarks also suggest that hosts see these types as non-normative interactions, when compared to the two-sided disagreement and neutral interactions. The normative categories go hand in hand with the demands of a public sphere, showing that political radio phone-in programmes in Israel contribute to the public sphere and to its democratic life.

“I have a question for you”

Schegloff described utterances such as “lemme ask you a question” as pre-questions, pre-pre’s or pre-delicates (Schegloff 1980). This paper provides a discussion of similar utterances in a specific institutional setting - political radio phone-in programs in Israel. The participants use these utterances in ways that are similar to Schegloff’s description. Yet, the pre-construction has additional institutional functions for the differing roles of the host and the caller. Hosts use these utterances to manage the interaction during overlaps as a means to secure an exclusive turn of talk following them. Callers use them infrequently at the beginning of their talk as story-prompts. Hosts may challenge this usage and the interactional role reversal. Regular callers can use the pre-constructions similarly to hosts. In this way, the pre-constructions in the Israeli radio phone-in programs are employed as interactional practices that relate and construct the roles in this institutional setting.

Establishing solidarity in radio phone-in medical consultation in China

Sex and sex-related topics are rather sensitive in the Chinese culture, thus conversations about those topics prove to be a delicate issue. The present study uses Conversation Analysis as the research methodology to analyze the use of communicative strategies in doctor–patient communication about venereal disease. The data excerpt analyzed is from a radio phone-in program that offers medical advice for males’ sex-related diseases, solves problems that the listeners have about certain sexual behavior, and provides general sexual knowledge. In the telephone call selected for the present research, the caller is the mother of the young man who is infected with venereal disease and needs help from the medical expert who is on the program. The mother employs indirect compliment, direct compliment, insider claim, and sympathy seeking as communicative strategies to build solidarity with the doctor. The various communicative strategies used lead to a smooth sequential development of the communication, and illustrate how solidarity-building serves an important function in this specific healthcare context.

Das Adverb jetzt zwischen Zeit- und Gesprächsdeixis

Abstract The adverb jetzt is used extremely frequently in everyday spoken language. Usually, jetzt is described as a deictic adverb which activates a concept of temporal proximity (“now”), which is contrasted to some past or future temporal distance (“not now”). Indeed, one can find many instances of such a basic temporal use of jetzt in data of spoken German. Often, however, the functions of jetzt are somewhat more complicated: Sometimes, jetzt is used to refer back in time, in other cases it refers forward, in yet other instances, it refers to some virtual temporal and discourse-structural space within narratives, sometimes, it is a semantically empty discourse marker which is used to structure and partition talk, and finally, there are cases where jetzt can only be described in terms of a conglomerate of several of these meanings and functions. On the basis of a corpus of spoken German (including audio material from the second series of the TV show Big Brother, radio phone-in shows and informal interaction between friends or families) this article aims to give a qualitative and detailed description of the syntactic, prosodic, semantic, functional and sequential features of the different uses of jetzt within this corpus. In a next step, the question is asked which of these features are necessary and sufficient for a full description and finally, an attempt is made to integrate these findings into the descriptive framework of Construction Grammar.

Prosodic orientation: A practice for sequence organization in broadcast telephone openings

Telephone opening sequences from a corpus of English speaking radio phone-in programs are investigated, following a first noticing of the potential for a pause between the presenter’s introductory turn and the caller’s first turn on air. The openings are found to display one of two structures: callers’ first turns may be designed as replies, or ‘seconds’, to the host’s introductory turn; or they may be designed as sequence-initiating, or ‘firsts’. Participants are shown to negotiate the sequential positions of turns primarily – sometimes exclusively – through displayed orientation to other participants’ prosody. Turns that are designed and treated as seconds orient prosodically to prior turns. Turns that are designed as firsts contain little or no prosodic link with previous talk. Turns that could be interpreted as seconds on lexical or action-related grounds may not be treated as such if they do not contain prosodic orientation to prior turns. The study shows that callers’ first turns on the air are not defined by their position as chronologically placed after the host’s introduction, but by their being positioned in the local sequential context as firsts or seconds. Prosody is shown to be a signaling system for participants’ negotiation over the sequential status of turns.

Topical and sequential backlinking in a French radio phone-in program

Drawing on a corpus of French radio phone-in confidential chats, this paper deals with the resources that participants recurrently employ to get back to a prior course of action following age-inquiry sequences. It might be expected that the age sequence occurs predominantly during the initial, opening part of the phone-call, as part of the caller’s identification sequence. Although such occurrences can be found, the age sequence is produced overwhelmingly after the introduction of the reason for call or after a pre- announcement of it. The way in which participants link back to the activity preceding the age sequence is related to the sequential placement of the age sequence as well as to the ‘authorship’ of its initiation and termination. Backlinking turns may therefore be analyzed with respect to their pragmatic effects (as doing restart, continuation, disjunction etc.) and with regard to the syntax and the linguistic units that speakers employ to achieve these effects.

Exercising politeness

The paper seeks to demonstrate that, first, over the course of interaction in the radio phone-in events, participants display orientation to various aspects of their co-participants´ identities, second, since membership categories emerge and are developed at various sequentially relevant times, membership categorisation processes are closely tied with the event´s sequential organisation, and, third, categorisation bears on politeness aspects of interaction as the participation in the public ´arena´ causes participants´ faces to be constantly at stake. The methodological underpinnings of the paper represent the approaches of Membership Categorisation Analysis and the model of politeness based on the conceptualisation of face. The data are drawn from the corpus of Nočné dialógy (´Night Dialogues´) radio phone-ins broadcast on the Slovak public radio over the period of 1995-2004. The paper further attempts to demonstrate that participants are engaged in category work which sequentially unfolds in the course of the production of phone-in calls. Participants´ progressive involvement in talk is closely linked with the construction of ´layers´ of their categorial identities. The membership category of ´location´ represents the minimum agreed-upon canon of callers´ call-relevant identities. As the category is universally applicable, it bears the least face-threatening potential, for which reason it is used explicitely. In contrast, strategies of non-explicit categorisation, i.e. invoking categories through category-relevant predicates, apply to those topic-relevant categories which carry a significant face-threating ´load´ (e.g. ´family status´, ´political affiliation´, etc.). In summary, sequential organisation and category work are seen as being closely intertwined, with the latter also being employed as a positive and negative politeness strategy.

Categorization, Interaction, Policy, and Debate

During the course of this article the themes of public accountability, government policy, and interaction in media settings are examined. In particular, we examine empirical instances of media discourse as a means of exploring the use of identity categories, predicates, and configurations as a means of accomplishing policy debate in participatory frameworks such as radio phone-ins and the accountable frames of political interviews. This paper respecifies and explores the situated character of media settings as a means of documenting, describing, and illustrating the interactional methods associated with policy debate, public participation/representation, and democracy-in-action.

Matters of opinion: talking about public issues

Acknowledgements Transcription conventions Focus-group data 1. Paradoxes of opinion 2. A tool kit for analysing group discussions 3. Forums for opinion: 'what is it that's going on here?' 4. Institutions of opinion: voice of the people? 5. Topics in interaction: 'why that now?' 6. Agreeing and disagreeing: maintaining sociable argument 7. Representing speech: other voices, other places 8. Questioning expertise: who says? 9. Radio phone-ins: mediated sociable arguments 10. Vox pop television interviews: constructing the public 11. Opinions as talk References Index.

Applied Linguists and Institutions of Opinion

Public opinion research is not an area that has received much attention from applied linguists. But language lies at the heart of the procedures used to define, elicit, and report opinions, whether through such methods as polling, interviews, and focus groups, or through the less obvious channels of vox pop interviews, letters to the editor, radio phone-ins, or public hearings. In this paper I consider ways in which work in language studies—by linguists, conversation analysts, and social psychologists—might help us understand, improve, or question these procedures, and also give a new perspective on what opinions are. The relation of this new perspective to existing knowledge of academic and professional practitioners in the field may have parallels in other applications where applied linguists encounter experienced professionals and large organizations. Institutions of opinion feed back into political processes, so it is important that we consider them, not only as researchers and professionals, but also as citizens.

Code-choice in bidialectal interaction: the choice between Putonghua and Cantonese in a radio phone-in program in Shenzhen

Abstract In this paper we examine the relationship between macrolevel sociolinguistic structures and microlevel conversational structures by studying code-choice between Putonghua (the standard dialect) and Cantonese (a regional dialect) in calls made to a radio phone-in program in a bidialectal city, Shenzhen, in southern China. Our aims are (1) to uncover participants’ methods of establishing the code for host–caller interaction episodes, and (2) to find out what reality macrolevel sociolinguistic structures might have for the speakers as manifested in the microlevel procedures in their talk. For these purposes we have analyzed data obtained from naturally occurring bilingual speech interaction using the conversation-analytic method and have collected information on sociolinguistic characteristics of Shenzhen from library materials. We will show that individual acts of speech and interaction at the microlevel allow participants to ‘play out’ the social structures relevant to the macro-sociolinguistic setting in which particular speech events are situated. The findings from the microanalysis also serve to validate the macrolevel social reality regarding the factors affecting the choice of linguistic code in a bidialectal community such as the one in Shenzhen.

‘We all have bad bad days’: Attending to face in broadcast troubles-talk

The authors of this article investigate electronically mediated communication on a radio phone-in programme, critically applying ideas about face and politeness to instances of broadcast troubles-talk. They focus on the host’s performance of identity, which is bound up with her strategies for attending to face. Analysing the mediated interaction and quasi-interaction that she has with callers and audiences, the authors show how ordinariness, trust and sincerity can be constructed in relationships between physically distant others - and they argue that, in order to take account of the significance of straight talking in these moments of intimacy at a distance, it is necessary to modify politeness theory. Bringing together concepts drawn from language studies and media studies, they develop an interdisciplinary perspective on broadcast discourse that extends the existing range of work in this area.

Radio Phone-in Talk Shows as Politically Significant Infotainment in Hong Kong

Radio Phone-in Talk Shows as Politically Significant Infotainment in Hong Kong

Radio Phone-in Talk Shows as Politically Significant Infotainment in Hong Kong

Past research has generated two main characterizations of the radio phone-in talk show phenomenon. Some argue that talk shows can provide forums for public deliberation, while others regard talk shows as a form of infotainment that displaces serious political journalism. This study argues that public forum and infotainment are not necessarily incompatible with each other, and it tests this possibility by a case study of talk radio in Hong Kong. Analysis of a survey data set points to the infotainment characteristics of talk radio listening in the city. However, results also suggest that talk radio provides political information to listeners and serves as a forum for the public to criticize the government. The author thus argues that talk radio constitutes a form of politically significant infotainment in Hong Kong. Implications on the study of infotainment and talk radio in general and in the specific case of Hong Kong are discussed.

Identity, categorization and sequential organization: the sequential and categorial flow of identity in a radio phone-in

Radio phone-in programmes have been the subject of a number of studies using the methodology of conversation analysis. Although this has been successful in making apparent the sequential organization of this type of interaction, little has been said about its categorial organization. Adopting an ethnomethodological approach, it is demonstrated in this article that interaction on public access radio can be seen to rely upon categorial and sequential identities built up and developed upon over the course of interaction. By paying attention to the categorial features within media interaction, together with the sequential organization, it is possible to examine the way identities are reflexively developed in conjunction with the sequential flow of interaction. This in turn allows an analysis able to address the multilayered organizational methods used by members as part of the on-going flow of interaction.

From problematic object to routine `add-on': dealing with e-mails in radio phone-ins

This article investigates the new phenomenon of e-mailed questions to a radio phone-in programme, BBC Radio 4's `Election Call'. Our interest in this phenomenon arose for several reasons. First, as a new form, e-mails were singled out at the beginning of each broadcast for special instructions to listeners, although there was evidence that as the series progressed, dealing with e-mail became more of a routine event in each subsequent programme. Second, on listening to the Election Call broadcasts, the sequential introduction of an e-mail question appeared to be problematic for the host (Peter Sissons). First mentions of e-mailed questions were often subject to a noticeable amount of disfluency and repair work, in contrast to the well-rehearsed and highly routine introduction of callers' questions. Third, we are interested in the function of e-mail questions in terms of how they are handled by the host and guest. Are they given the same status as a `call', and if not, where do the differences lie? In our analysis we show how the introduction of this new media form into a well-established context opens up new structural possibilities for both host as interviewer and politician as interviewee, in terms of how questions get framed, and how they get responded to.