Conversation Analysis Techniques Research Articles

The role of the body in SGD-mediated interactions

Most research about augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) has focused on improving use of and access to speech generating devices (SGDs). However, many adults with significant physical and developmental disabilities express a preference for unaided, embodied forms of communication. This study used conversation analysis (CA) techniques to analyze the forms and functions of embodied communication that occurred during interactions between a young man who used unaided, embodied communication and an SGD to communicate with a familiar communication partner. Close analysis revealed that embodied resources were required for both unaided and aided forms of communication. Furthermore, both participants used their bodies to establish interactional spaces with different focal points during interaction, which placed different demands on the aided speaker. Unfortunately, when the SGD was the focal point, problematic demands were placed on the aided speaker, which in turn resulted in increased embodied effort on his part. The forms and functions of the body, differences in the participants’ interactions when communication did and did not involve the SGD, and implications for research and practice are all reported and discussed.

How Do Teachers Collaborate in Informal Professional Learning Activities? An Epistemic Network Analysis

Teachers turn to many sources for support and professional learning, including social media-based communities that have shown promise to help teachers access resources and facilitate productive exchanges. Although such online communities show promise, questions about their quality for providing a suitable learning environment remain insufficiently answered. In this study, we examine how teachers’ engagement on Twitter (now known as “X”) may adhere to characteristics of high-quality professional development (PD) activities. In that, we employ advanced conversational analysis techniques that extend the primarily descriptive methods used in prior research. Specifically, we collected data from three Twitter communities related to Advanced Placement Biology (N = 2,040 tweets, N = 93 teachers). Qualitative two-cycle content analyses derived both tweet content and sentiment. Using epistemic network analyses, we examined the collaborative structures to examine how participation patterns can identify characteristics of high-quality online PD. Results indicate that some teachers use Twitter with a content focus and coherent to their individual contexts and prior knowledge. Notably, differences in collaboration and participation patterns by teachers’ overall activity level hint at the existence of an online community of practice. More active teachers communicated more about how their individual contexts relate to instruction, whereas less active teachers exhibited more targeted engagement, for instance, related to sharing teaching resources and organizing learning opportunities. Overall, this study illustrates how Twitter may provide a meaningful learning environment to teachers so that it can serve as a relevant avenue for their professional learning.

Noticing nature on the waterways

ABSTRACT Noticing nature has often been described as a process through which young people come to know, understand, and care for it. This paper challenges these assumptions through examining practices of noticing nature, as together, young people and adults notice environmental features on urban waterways. Drawing on a project that provided opportunities for young people of Somali heritage to access waterways in Leicester, through canoeing, nature- and heritage-based activities, we examine instances of noticing young people recorded on film. Using the techniques of ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, three fragments of film are analysed: Noticing a heron, ducks, and a dead rat. Through these, we explore the intersubjective social production of noticing, how adults seek to structure that developing sense of noticing, and the role of technologies through which young people notice. Considering how young people disrupt adult spatial orderings, we find that adults and young people do not straightforwardly fall into expert and novice categories in terms of reinforcing norms of noticing nature. Instead, adults sometimes reinforce, sometimes dismiss, young people’s sense of what and how to notice. We reflect on how the urban waterway as disordered spaces are socially produced through in-the-moment noticings, and how young people and adults might categorise desirable and undesirable nature-to-notice.

Disalignment in the EU

Abstract European Union (EU) institutions are highly multilingual environments where international communication is very goal-oriented, as they produce and define policies and regulations applied to all member states. This paper aims at exploring how disagreements and conflicting opinions are conveyed in such contexts through the qualitative analysis of debates in recorded meetings of the European Parliament Committee on the Environment, Public Health and Food Safety. Two meetings from two different parliamentary terms (2014–2019 and 2019–2024) will be analyzed. The study will adopt a pragma-rhetorical approach, drawing on studies on politeness and conversation analysis techniques and focusing especially on the management of Face Threatening Acts in English turns. Attention will also be paid to language choice, codeswitching, and to the international use of English. Results show that conflict and overt disagreements in the data are very rare, with speakers displaying instead careful mitigation of the language used, especially when English is employed.

Interdisciplinary Study in Criminology and Sociolinguistics: Impact of Jail Environment on Teenager’s Linguistic Expression

Beyond the sphere of freedom, a whole new layer of subculture thrives within prison walls in most countries, which is often neglected. This research focuses on identifying the language attitudes among prisoners and their impact on youth incarcerated there. The study is based on conversational analysis techniques, and the research framework is established on the emblem of both the behaviourist and interactionist approaches in linguistic cognition. Also, it offers a unique opportunity to bring together the disciplines of sociolinguistics, behavioural studies and criminology. The target audience is highly specific as it comprises individuals directly exposed to jails. A semi-structured interview was conducted from the participants. This study finds that insulting and abusive linguistic expressions are largely practiced in Jail Systems which cause deteriorating harm to the well-being and social development of young individuals imprisoned there.

Poetic Confluence

This paper is an exploratory sociological analysis of poetic confluence, a spontaneous telepathic phenomenon that occurs in everyday social interaction. In poetic confluence, one person’s talk exhibits an enigmatic relationship to another’s unstated thoughts or imagery at that moment. The analyses draw from an empirical approach called Conversation Analysis, a formal qualitative method for the analysis of naturally occurring interaction in everyday life. In Conversation Analysis, talk-in-interaction is analyzed as coordinated and sequentially organized action. The focus on the action orientation of talk informs this analysis, treating poetic confluence as a form of social action. The data are (unavoidably) anecdotal accounts of experiences. Although the techniques of Conversation Analysis cannot be applied to anecdotal reports, its methodological principles and substantive focus can inform a systematic analysis of anecdotal data. A case is made for the robustness of poetic confluence via analysis of recurrent properties found in examples from three corpora of candidate cases. The analysis identifies three interpersonal functions of poetic confluence: its role in restoring mutual attention; its affiliative, affective function; and its role as a mechanism for managing threats to social propriety, or keeping “face.” In the discussion, alternative skeptical explanations are assessed; the empirical approach is framed in terms of Cardeña’s (2019) observations on the metaphoric quality of some psi phenomena and Carpenter’s (2012) first sight theory, and some suggestions are offered for further research on social interaction and psi phenomena.

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Methods and Techniques for Organizing Students’ Skills in the Study of the Topic «Detached Parts of a Sentence: Definition and Application»

This article aims to analyse the theoretical foundations of systematizing students’ punctuation skills and updating methodological conditions for optimizing this process. An analytical review of the data of modern linguistics, psycholinguistics, didactics and methodology was conducted, as well as the author’s extensive practical experience was generalized. While studying theoretical sources and practical experience, the necessity of implementing active cognitive activity in training, based on selection and control mechanisms, was recognized. The systematization of students’ punctuation skills is achieved by stimulating students’ intensive cognitive activity using problem-based learning methods under the dominance of the inductive method, which is implemented in the techniques of conversation, language visibility, differentiation, comparison, sentence composition and table analysis. Conclusions are drawn about the importance of systematizing knowledge and skills for the development of students’ cognitive abilities.

Interactional practices for online collaborative writing

This study aims to identify interactional practices to manage online collaborative writing. Conversation analysis techniques, which avoid researcher-driven theorisation and conceptualisation for collaborative processes but try to understand the meaning of actions in interaction from participants’ viewpoints, were used. This study examined one focal student’s changing interactional practices for paragraphing during computer-mediated writing tasks. Specifically, the changes occurred during negotiations over an essay’s introductory paragraph when a group of eight to nine students jointly wrote an essay across three tasks. The analysis shows that changes in online interactional practices rely on a learner’s ability to manage the asynchronous temporality of online talk as well as the timing of joining the task-based interaction; similarly, learners must manage linguistic and semiotic repertoires to design socially appropriate actions by exploiting the resources and constraints of text-based computer-mediated communication. The findings discursively support the argument that online collaborative writing provides students the opportunities to orient to other learners’ displayed understanding of organisational aspects of writing, as well as to acquire complex and multimodal interactional skills to manage computer-mediated second language writing.

Interacting With Persons Who Have ALS

Individuals with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) in later stages may rely on a variety of modalities to communicate. The current study used conversational analysis techniques to examine naturalistic face-to-face interaction between a man with late-stage ALS and his wife to understand the types of accommodations they made to ensure that successful meaning was established. Three extracts of talk were selected from a corpus of 30 videotaped interactions between a man with ALS interacting either with his wife or the first author of the study. The extracts were examined for the type of communicative resources used and the ways in which conversants worked together to maintain the temporal–sequential demands of in-person interaction. Conversants used a variety of communication modalities during their social interactions including voice, body, gestures, a speech-generating device (SGD), and the SGD screen to construct utterances for one another, establish meaning, and stay in-time. The pair were successful and maintained conversation expectations in many ways similar to those with nonimpaired voices and bodies. Conversations including an SGD are a highly coordinated and interactive affair that is experienced jointly by all conversants. In this study, the conversational partners were aware of, and sensitive to, the temporal–sequential demands of in-person interaction and the modality restrictions associated with SGD use. Clinical and device design recommendations are discussed.

Everyday conversation after right hemisphere damage: A methodological demonstration and some preliminary findings

Abstract Right hemisphere damage impairs lexical processing, prosodic processing, and discourse and pragmatics. Clinicians and researchers have observed that conversation is a challenging communicative activity for people with right hemisphere communication disorder, but previous studies have yielded inconsistent, equivocal, and marginal results, with few clear demonstrations of conversational dysfunction. There are also no empirical studies of everyday conversations involving people with right hemisphere damage and their familiar communication partners (e.g., family, friends). This study explores how a man with conversational problems following right hemisphere stroke formulated responses to communicative acts addressed to him in everyday conversation. It focuses on communicative acts that were “response mobilising”, i.e., set out clear expectations about who should speak, and how they should respond. This study employed an empirical descriptive case study design to examine 43 min of triadic conversation between the man with right hemisphere damage, his spouse, and a family friend. 61 communicative acts addressed to the man with right hemisphere damage were analysed using conversation analytic techniques. Few instances were found in which the man with right hemisphere damage was insensitive to the communicative contingencies implemented through these communicative acts. However, the instances where he was insensitive to them were salient. The findings of this study indicate that response mobilising communicative acts hold some potential for describing behavioural presentation of right hemisphere communication disorder in conversation.

Miscommunication in Pilot-controller Interaction

English is the preferred language for communication in the aviation industry. Pilots and air traffic controllers of different nationalities and proficiency levels interact with each other using a specialized form of English termed aviation English that comprises of aviation phraseology and “plain English”. Here, miscommunication could have disastrous consequences. This paper presents the findings of a study that explored instances of miscommunication in the interaction between pilots and controllers. Miscommunication is defined as a lack of understanding (or misunderstanding), non-understanding or misinterpretation of messages in communication. The corpus consists of 30 hours of actual pilot-controller audio communication collected from the Malaysian airspace. Data were collected from three different frequencies (Alpha, Bravo and Charlie) representing different phases of the flight. They were analysed qualitatively using conversation analysis techniques. The study found that miscommunication in pilot-controller communication is due mainly to two main factors, procedural deviation and problematic instruction or request. The paper concludes by suggesting that pilots and controllers should adhere to standard phraseology and avoid code-switching from aviation phraseology to plain English except when it is inadequate for the situation. It also suggests that proper radio discipline should be maintained. Keywords: aviation English; miscommunication; non-native speakers; pilot-controller communication; ESP

Developing the therapeutic conversation: a conversation analysis of information giving in Family Domains Therapy

Family Domains Therapy is an intervention based on the work of Hill et al. (2014). A key feature of Family Domains Therapy is the provision of information on the model that underpins the therapy. This study is the first to use applied conversation analysis (CA) to explore the interactional impact of giving information regarding a therapeutic model during therapy sessions. Using techniques of conversation analysis this paper offers a description of the four formats therapists used to give information in this therapeutic setting (non‐technical scenarios, ‘if X then Y’ format, technical paraphrase and formulation format). Additional turn‐by‐turn conversation analysis uncovered how families were more likely to give extended responses when information was given using the format of non‐technical scenarios. Implications of the use of this type of applied conversation analysis for the study of therapeutic processes for future research and clinical practice are discussed.Practitioner points Practitioners can use different ways of providing information in order to open up or close down topics of conversation Using everyday terminology often leads to family members sharing additional information Using the terminology of the domains model often leads to minimal acknowledgement from family members Corroborating findings from other settings suggest that therapists could use these ways of interacting strategically to structure therapy sessions

Judicious Use of L1: A Sociocultural Investigation of Teachers’ Use of L1 in L2 Classrooms

This study is a sociocultural investigation of the reasons why teachers use L1 in L2 classes through different classroom “modes” (Walsh, 2011). So far, a few studies regarding L1 have focused on L1 use in different classroom contexts, and none have used Walsh’s model of classroom modes. To this end, the present study used Walsh’s model which quarters the classroom context along with the Conversation Analysis techniques, to meticulously examine the classroom interactions. The classes were chosen from three different teachers in Mazandaran, Iran. A total of 6 sessions were recorded and transcribed. Results suggest that teachers use L1 mostly for managing purposes: drawing students’ attention, and making sure they have comprehended what they are supposed to do, and educational purposes: explaining difficult grammar and vocabulary, and eliciting desired structures or utterances. These findings might help teachers use L1 more efficiently and judiciously, instead of avoiding it when and where it might benefit the learners, as well as minimizing it in their classes as much as possible.

Task engagement: a potential criterion for quality assessment of language learning tasks

Maximizing learning opportunities has long been the focus of research in teaching English as a foreign language. Besides the degree to which learners are engaged with the linguistic aspects, investigating other potential of the tasks is of prime importance for maximizing learning opportunities. The present research investigates the potential of four different task types (translation, dictogloss, text reconstruction and jigsaw) performed by 80 Iranian English as foreign language (EFL) intermediate students in promoting learner engagement. Learner's movement from limited to elaborate behavioral, affective and cognitive engagement at verbal, paralinguistic and functional levels while performing the tasks was studied using conversation analysis techniques. The conversation and episodes were coded using a predetermined template of coding. The conversation and ANOVA (analysis of variance) results show that as mind goes through transformation, it is indicated in the transformation in dialogic discourse (speech). The results also indicated that although task engagement patterns were the same across all tasks, the tasks have different potential in promoting task engagement. The results imply that besides other task characteristics including task utility, naturalness and essentiality which focus on linguistic aspects, task engagement is an equally important criterion for the quality assessment of the tasks and should be taken into account since it not only creates sustained attention on linguistic aspects but also mediates learning as it engages learners behaviorally, affectively and cognitively. The results also shed lights on the concept of interactional authenticity and how it can be operationalized in practice.

Young children's use of laughter as a means of responding to questions

Techniques of conversation analysis are employed to reach a better understanding of the interactional competencies of young children. Drawing on audio–video recordings of mother–child interactions, this paper examines laughter by young children after questions by the child's mother. It is argued that by laughing the child is showing an orientation to the conditional relevance of a second pair part of an adjacency pair on the production of a first pair part. It is argued that possible bases for young children using laughter after a question are the child's inability to answer a question in full, and their unwillingness to do so. The children studied are in the second year of life and are making the transition from the single to multiword stage. All participants are native speakers of English and speak English throughout the recordings.

Improving Patient-Clinician Conversations During Annual Wellness Visits.

Health risk assessments (HRAs) have been implemented and studied for decades in various settings, but little is known about the effect of introducing HRAs on the dynamics and content of patient-clinician conversations during Medicare Annual Wellness Visits (AWVs) and whether the effective use of HRAs requires additional training and resources. We used Conversation Analysis techniques to analyze 40 AWVs conducted in an academic family medicine residency practice. After a 3-month baseline period, a low-intensity intervention was implemented to explore improvements in the dynamics and content of conversations. Short exit interviews with patients and clinicians were evaluated by standard content analytic techniques. Six overarching themes emerged that described the dynamics of AWV conversations. Patients and clinicians sub-optimally utilized the HRA report and missed many opportunities for promoting behavior change. However, a low-intensity, multi-component intervention significantly decreased the proportion of clinician talk time per visit by 9% (P < .001), while it increased the proportion of patient talk time by 7% (P < .001), robustly increased the number and duration of "change talk" by 639% (P = .0007), increased the number of patient cut-ins by 237% (P = .04) and tended to increase the number and duration of clinician "advice talk" (P = .065). Patients felt more informed, empowered, and motivated by the HRA-enhanced wellness visit. Clinicians found that the process helped them construct a more effective visit agenda and it facilitated the convergence of patient goals with evidence-based recommendations. Our study suggests that HRAs introduced without proper framing, education, and additional resources may not allow patients and clinicians to leverage AWVs for effective health planning and improvement. A targeted, low-intensity intervention may help patients and clinicians improve the quality of HRA-guided health conversations during AWVs.

A Rhetorical Analysis of Folk Linguistic Discourse: The Case of Twang

This article offers a new approach to dialect attitudes and ideologies that combines argumentation theory with conversation-analytic techniques. This rhetorically oriented, qualitative approach is used to explore how socioindexical and language-related meanings of folk linguistic concepts are constructed in conversations among Oklahoma English speakers. “Twang” was selected as a test case because it is often mentioned by nonlinguists as a common descriptor of differences among American English dialects. The analysis reveals a complex socioindexical profile of twang that integrates language-related, spatial, temporal, sociocultural, and historical associations. It also reveals implicit discursive schemes of speech valorization that represent twang as a socially authenticating linguistic resource. Participants use gradient representations of twang to index symbolic social boundaries between unmarked and “lesser” forms of whiteness in the American South. The article shows that propositional processes of sociolinguistic indexicality engage experiential, affective, performative, perceptual, and identity-related processes: participants demonstrate these interrelated engagements when they rationalize, justify, valorize, and illustrate their individual experiences with linguistic variability.

Facilitating Young Children’s Use of the Web in Preschool

ABSTRACTCurrent perspectives on young children’s use of digital technology suggest that preschool teachers need to provide more effective guidance for children. There is still little research, however, to inform how guidance might be understood and practiced during interactions with digital technology. This article employs an ethnomethodological perspective to examine video-recorded data of a young child and his teacher conducting a Web search to find and view a YouTube video in a preschool classroom. Sequential analysis of interaction, drawing on the techniques of conversation analysis, results in descriptions of the methods used by the child, his teacher, and the other children to accomplish their activity. Discussion considers how interactions produced management of the cohort, promotion of child-centered activity, and development of shared understandings. It is concluded that these constituted use of the Web for the specific setting of preschool.