Ethnography of Communication A Comparative Analysis of a Casual Conversation and a Formal Interview INTRODUCTION (original) (raw)
CHAPTER 62 CONVERSATION ANALYSIS: ISSUES AND PROBLEMS
Conversational analysis (CA) is a methodology for analyzing a broad range of speech exchange systems, or spoken interaction. This chapter begins by briefly describing what ethnomethodologically oriented conversation analysis is and then considers the intellectual roots of CA. It then describes how CA researchers typically set about developing analyses of interactional behaviors, and shows how such analyses may be used to address questions that are of interest to specialists in applied linguistics (AL) and second language acquisition (SLA) studies. Finally, it outlines some of the major issues and problems that must be addressed if CA is to become widely accepted in AL and SLA studies.
INVESTIGATIONES LINGUISTICAE , 2018
Intercultural differences in discourse patterns have been considered the most important cause of communication problems. It is less certain if these differences are relevant for talk participants in handling communication problems in intercultural interactions. The aim of the case study presented in this paper is observing if talk participants orient to intercultural differences in discourse patterns and what knowledge of these differences they have. I use ethnomethodological approach in analyzing the interaction of Polish students with their Chinese interlocutor. The interactions is an interview conducted in English as a lingua franca. I also conduct an ethnographic interviewwith the Polish speakers to study their knowledge concerning communication problems which appeared in their interactions with the Chinese speaker. Analyzing the ethnographic interview as interaction, I focus on the content co-construed by the interview participants.
Jack Sidnell (ed). 2009. Conversation Analysis. Comparative perspectives
Language and Dialogue, 2011
This volume brings together a series of articles written by academics with experience and expertise, all involved in the study of spoken interaction from a conversational analysis perspective. The twelve contributions are grouped together into five parts, the first containing an "Introduction" and "Comparative perspectives in conversational analysis" by Jack Sidnell who puts forth the topic of diversity and commonalities between languages spoken in different sociocultural and linguistic communities. It also includes theoretical reflections about the differentiation between CA and other approaches to the study of interaction, the most interesting one being the comparison between CA and cross-cultural pragmatics methodologies, general aims and possible outcomes, which helps differentiate between the two theoretical frameworks. Sidnell also offers interesting information about the organization of repair in relation to grammar and culture and, in general, about previous work done from CA perspectives, some of it made by contributors to this volume; this gives the reader the opportunity to appreciate the researchers' evolution and to better evaluate their present articles. Finally, the focus is on the mobilization of local resources to solve generic interactional problems. Lexical and syntactic practices are looked at mainly in relation to turn construction in various languages. Part I "Repair and beyond" deals with repair and repetition practices and is developed in Chapters 2, 3 and 4. "Repetition in the initiation of repair" by Ruey-Jiuan Regina Wu addresses the topic of the organization of repair across languages through the study of repetition in Mandarin interactions and compares it with English. The analysis of the intonation of questions might have been improved if the curves had been considered as adding independent meaning to utterances in a given language. In English and Spanish, for example, both rises and falls may add to the elicitations of different assumptions about the expected answer (see Brazil 1997 for English intonation and Granato 2005 for Spanish). The consideration of prosodic aspects often ignored as meaningful resources is a strength of this work. In "A cross-linguistic investigation of the site of initiation in same-turn self-repair",
Dealing with Communicative Problems in English as a Lingua Franca
Kalbotyra, 2008
The aim of the article is to discuss, first, how the differences in socio-cultural interaction styles can influence communication, second, what is interaction participants’ orientation to the problems originating in those differing styles and finally, how such troubles are negotiated, and more specifically, repaired in communication. Conversation analysis (CA) will be used to analyze an illustrative excerpt of interaction in English. [...]
Review of Liddicoat, A.J. (2007) An Introduction to Conversation Analysis
Australian Review of Applied Linguistics, 2009
An Introduction to Conversation Analysis makes a valuable contribution to the study of talk-in-interaction by fulfilling the promise of the title: this book is a clear and systematic guide to the methodology (and method) of conversation analysis for those who are new to the field. The book opens with a brief history of the sociological roots of conversation analysis (CA) and then progresses in three stages: the first dealing with turn taking (chapters two and three); the second is concerned with the sequential organisation of turns (chapters four, five and six) and the third describes particular contexts in which turn taking and the sequential organisation of talk have been studied at length, in conversational openings and closings and storytelling in conversation (chapters seven, eight and nine). This structure is likely to prove useful as a reference guide for students looking for explication of a particular feature of interaction studied by conversation analysts. The introductory chapter does not so much set up the scope of the book but instead briefly covers some essential ground in conversation analysis by identifying key tenets of orderliness and recipient design. This first chapter does well to stipulate that 'context needs to be seen more as something which is invoked in interaction, rather than something which impacts on interaction" (p.8) underscoring a preoccupation in CA with what participants treat as relevant at any given point. Anthony Liddicoat makes the sagacious decision to present the transcription conventions of CA early in the piece, introducing the reader to the tools used for the 'unmotivated looking' that characterises the analysis in CA. Chapter two presents a logical and useful guide to transcription-particularly of paralinguistic features of the interaction-which provides an ideal place for the student to begin. This chapter presents a more comprehensive account of how nonverbal features of the interaction can be captured in a transcript (particularly gaze and interaction with inanimate participants e.g. computer) than is provided for elsewhere. The introduction to transcription in CA provided in this book is an excellent resource for a novice-or indeed experienced-reader. Chapter two also provides a background to the extracts that are used throughout the remaining chapters to illustrate key principles of talk-in-interaction. Chapter three sets out the most fundamental of these by illustrating the properties of turn-taking, namely the turn constructional component, turn allocation, transition relevance place, BOOK REVIEWS 14.1
A Sociocultural Conversation Analysis: Broadening the context of Empirical Research
Traditionally, CA has argued for a 'sequential' view where context is not defined in a fixed manner, but is something that continuously shifts as talk unfolds (Schegloff, 1992a). As a form of Ethnomethodology (Garfinkel, 1967), CA aims at understanding how intersubjectivity is formed and maintained through turn-taking (Heritage, 1984b; 1987; Hutchby & Wooffitt, 1998; Peräklyä, 2004; Sacks et al., 1974). Typically, researchers do not consider wider social contexts, so that questions like Goffman's (1974) "What is going on here?" would attempt to understand an interaction from its setting and social influences. This question is fundamentally different from Sacks' (1992b, p. 530) "Why that now?" which focuses on the unfolding sequence of an interaction. The differences between these two questions cannot be overstated. Sacks' question is a methodological one relating to how people construct their language, while Goffman is asking a more global question and its influence on talk. III. An Example By way of example, the following sample, showing two Japanese university students conversing in English illustrates how their turn-taking operates:
Conversation Analysis: Communication Across Cultures
2020
The study of intercultural communication continues to grow in importance in response to greater population mobility, migration and globalization. Communication across culture explores how cultural context affects the use and interpretation of language. It provides accessible and interdisciplinary introduction to language and language variations in intercultural communication. This is done by drawing on both classic and cutting-edge research from pragmatics, discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, anthropology and politeness study. This study aims to discuss the variety of linguistic and non-linguistic features generated by participants in social interaction. The first part will examine turn-taking dynamic in a conversation between three students who have different cultural backgrounds. Later, the last four sections of the study also take into account power relation among the participant, the collaboration, politeness strategy employed as well as embedded speech act in the conversation.
An Introduction to Interaction: Understanding Talk in Formal and Informal Settings
Language Value, Volume 7, 2015
This textbook is a comprehensive guide for (mainly, but not only) linguistics, sociology, communication and even business students on the theories and research methodologies of conversation analysis. Based on ethnomethodology, a theoretical perspective of sociology which appeared in the 1960s and which explored how people create social order, social structure and situated action (Garfinkel 1967) through the direct observation of human behaviour, conversation analysis emerged in the 1980s as an approach to the study of talk in interaction. Sacks (1984), a graduate student who worked with Garfinkel, thought of talk as the ideal source of data to study human action, as it could be tape-recorded and carefully and repeatedly examined. The conversation analysis methodology was soon found useful for the study of a wide range of conversations (formal, informal, institutional, etc.) held for a great deal of different purposes and in diverse contexts (business, education, media, legal settings, etc.)
METHODOLOGICAL ISSUES IN CONVERSATION ANALYSIS (1
Conversation Analysis (CA), a research tradition that grew out of ethnomethodology, has some unique methodological features. It studies the social organization of 'conversation', or 'talk-in-interaction', by a detailed inspection of tape recordings and transcriptions made from such recordings. In this paper, I will describe some of those features in the interest of exploring their grounds. In doing so, I will discuss some of the problems and dilemma's conversation analysts deal with in their daily practice, using both the literature and my own experiences as resources. I will present CA's research strategy as a solution to ethnomethodology's problem of the 'invisibility' of common sense and describe it in an idealized form as a seven step procedure. I will discus some of the major criticisms leveled against it and touch on some current developments. Conversation Analysis is a disciplined way of studying the local organization of interactional episodes, its unique methodological practice has enabled its practitioners to produce a mass of insights into the detailed procedural foundations of everyday life. It has developed some very practical solutions to some rather thorny methodological problems. As such it is methodologically 'impure', but it works. Interests and practices of Conversation Analysis Most practitioners of CA tend to refrain, in their research reports, from extensive theoretical and methodological discussion. CA papers tend to be exclusively devoted to an empirically based discussion of specific analytic issues. This may contribute to the confusion of readers who are not familiar with this particular research style. They will use their habitual expectations, derived from established social-scientific practice, as a frames of reference in understanding this unusual species of scientific work. But a CA report will not generally have an a priori discussion of the literature to formulate hypotheses, hardly any details about research situations or subjects researched, no descriptions of sampling techniques or coding procedures, no testing and no statistics. Instead, the reader is confronted with a detailed discussion of transcriptions of recordings of (mostly verbal) interaction in terms of the 'devices' used by its participants. Some of the early articles reporting CA work, such as Schegloff & Sacks (1973), did include some explanations of the purposes of CA, however. And more recently, a growing number of introductory papers and chapters has been published that present an accessible overview of CA's theoretical and /or methodological position and/or substantive findings (2). An important addition to this literature is an edited collection of fragments from Harvey Sacks' unpublished Lectures that deal with methodological issues in CA (Sacks, 1984 a). The 'methodology' that is presented in these sources is, however, rather different in character from what one can read in the established methodological literature. There are hardly any prescriptions to be followed, if one wants to do 'good CA'. What one does find are summary descriptions of practices used in CA, together with some of the reasons for these practices. What is given may be called, in the terminology of Schenkein's (1978) introduction, a 'Sketch of an analytic mentality'. The basic reasoning in CA seems to be that methodological procedures should be adequate to the materials at hand and to the problems one is dealing with, rather than them being pre-specified on a priori grounds. While the essential characteristics of the materials, i.e. records of streams of interaction, and the
Reflections on conversation analysis and nonnative speaker talk: An interview with Emanuel A
Schegloff. Issues in Applied Linguistics, 2000
is, along with Gail Jefferson and the late Harvey Sacks, one of the founders of conversation analysis, a mode of inquiry and research methodology. While he is most widely known for the foundational articles on turn taking (Sacks, Schegloff, & Jefferson, 1974) and repair (Schegloff, Jefferson, & Sacks, 1977) published in the journal iMiiguage, and the first published paper in conversation analysis (1968), Dr. Schegloff has published over 70 articles on talk and interaction, and continues to publish his ongoing research widely, including recent articles in the American Journal of Sociology, Social Research, Language in Society, Discourse and Society, Discourse Processes, Research on Language and Social Interaction, Language and Speech, Discourse Studies, Aphasiology, and Applied Linguistics. He co-edited the 1 996 volume Interaction and Grammar with Elinor Ochs and Sandra Thompson and is currently writing a synthesis of work in conversation analysis that might also serve as a textbook for students. Dr.
Crosstalk and Communication in Professional Interactions in English
2009
This paper emphasizes the kinds of problems or crosstalk which arise in professional communication among non-native English users. It is assumed that professional type of discourse differs from talk in the private domain. This is because in the professional domain there is common knowledge and experience about a specific profession and mutual comprehension among members of a profession is based on shared concepts and terms. The concept of crosstalk [Harnisch, 2008] is used here to refer to the types of obstacles and communication breakdown when English is used by non-native speakers of the language. Three types of crosstalk in professional interactions are discussed. These arise from (1) mispronunciation; (2) conceptual misinterpretations and (3) semiotic interference.