This book provides interesting and critical insights into a common university practice, the academic office hour. Office hours are a discursive site for a variety of different issues, ranging from administrative matters to course-related and study-related concerns. The study offers both an ethnographic account of this speech event within the socio-cultural context of a German university as well as a more detailed analysis of the interactional organization of academic consultations. It draws on natural recordings of entire office hour interactions in order to show how participants actions at different stages of the talk organize and accomplish the consultation. The analytical focus is set on the sequential activities teachers and students engage in as they conduct a consultation. This includes, for instance, how participants open an office hour talk, how they establish an agenda, how they manage advice-giving, and how they close the consultation. As such, this book will be of practical use to students and faculty members as well as scholars from different disciplines who work in the areas of institutional talk and talk-in-interaction."
This book provides interesting and critical insights into a common university practice, the academic office hour. Office hours are a discursive site for a variety of different issues, ranging from administrative matters to course-related and study-related concerns. The study offers both an ethnographic account of this speech event within the socio-cultural context of a German university as well as a more detailed analysis of the interactional organization of academic consultations. It draws on natural recordings of entire office hour interactions in order to show how participants’ actions at different stages of the talk organize and accomplish the consultation. The analytical focus is set on the sequential activities teachers and students engage in as they conduct a consultation. This includes, for instance, how participants open an office hour talk, how they establish an agenda, how they manage advice-giving, and how they close the consultation. As such, this book will be of practical use to students and faculty members as well as scholars from different disciplines who work in the areas of institutional talk and talk-in-interaction.
Much of our daily lives are spent talking to one another, in both ordinary conversation and more specialized settings such as meetings, interviews, classrooms, and courtrooms. It is largely through conversation that the major institutions of our society - economy, religion, politics, family and law - are implemented. This book Emanuel Schegloff, the first in a series and first published in 2007, introduces the findings and theories of conversation analysis. Together, the volumes in the series constitute a complete and authoritative 'primer' in the subject. The topic of this first volume is 'sequence organization' - the ways in which turns-at-talk are ordered and combined to make actions take place in conversation, such as requests, offers, complaints, and announcements. Containing many examples from real-life conversations, it will be invaluable to anyone interested in human interaction and the workings of conversation.
The Japanese sentence-final particles, "ne," "yo" and "yone" have proved notoriously difficult to explain and are especially challenging for second language users. This book investigates the role of the particles in talk-in-interaction with the aim of providing a comprehensive understanding that accounts for their pragmatic properties and sequential functions and that provides a sound basis for second language pedagogy. This study starts by setting up an original particle function hypothesis based on the figure/ground "gestalt," and then tests its validity empirically with unmarked, marked and native/non-native talk-in-interaction data. The analysis illustrates not only expectable but also unexpected or strategic use of particles, as well as the problems posed for native speakers by non-native speakers whose use of particles is idiosyncratic. The study demonstrates that the proposed hypothesis is capable of accounting for all the uses of particles in the extensive and varied data set examined. This book will be of interest to students and scholars in pragmatics and CA and to teachers of Japanese as a foreign language.
"Reviewing recent findings on linguistic practices used in turn construction and turn taking, repair, action formation and ascription, sequence and topic organization, the book examines the way linguistic units of varying size - sentences, clauses, phrases, clause combinations, particles - are mobilized for the implementation of specific actions in talk-in-interaction. A final chapter discusses the implications of an interactional perspective for our understanding of language as well as its variation, diversity, and universality. Supplementary online chapters explore additional topics such as the linguistic organization of preference, stance, footing, and storytelling, as well as the use of prosody and phonetics, and further practices with language"--
In this lively and wide-ranging essay, Göran Ahrne sketches an organizational theory of society. Combining the insights of organization theory with the traditional concerns of social theory, he makes an innovative and creative contribution to both fields. Using a broad definition of organizations, the author shows that what goes on inside, outside and among organizations is central to understanding social relations. Organizations provide people with resources and motives, and they set the frames for human action. Although organizations do not form societies or systems, society is shaped and changed through interaction between organizations. Drawing on various schools of organization theory, including institutional, ecological and contingency theories, the book shows how their synthesis with social theory clarifies the nature and effects of organizational interactions.
′This book admirably fulfils its stated objective of describing social research methods in action and exploring, from a range of perspectives, the linguistic shaping of social context. Overall, this is a balanced, well-edited and coherent collection of papers, bringing together high quality work from recognized authorities in the analysis of talk-in-interaction. It is also highly accessible; it would certainly make an excellent resource book for undergraduate, graduate (and practising!) social scientists ′ - Rebecca Clift, University of Essex ′Talk and Interaction in Social Research Methodologies is a much-needed methods text. Focusing on research methods in action, the volume offers a new way of viewing the realities of social research. By taking language use seriously, the text reveals the details and depths of a wide range of research projects as they have seldom been presented before. This is the first book of its kind to offer such a powerful and insightful depiction of the role of talk-in-interaction in relation to social research methods. The book′s plan is creative and unparalleled. There′s nothing else like it. The editors—Paul Drew, Geoffrey Raymond and Darin Weinberg—represent the very best from multiple traditions of researching talk-in-interaction—from both sides of the Atlantic. The chapters are written by a sterling collection of researchers—a virtual honor roll of conversation analysts and kindred spirits. This book is a "must read" for social researchers of all disciplines who are interested in social interaction. It should be assigned reading for all graduate students being introduced to qualitative methods. It should be on every qualitative researcher′s book shelf. It is a tour de force in demonstrating the absolutely fundamental position that language use holds in social science methodology′ - James A Holstein, Marquette University This is a methodology text with a difference. It demonstrates the importance of talk in a variety of social research methodologies. Even documents, the seemingly least interactional form of social data, are shown to have important interactional dimensions. The book focuses systematically on how sociological methods are essentially conducted through forms of spoken interaction, and how these interactions shape the results that emerge in research. The book demonstrates: " How spoken interactions shape the outcomes of core research methodologies " The role which talk-in-interaction plays in key substantive areas of sociology notably race, crime, gender and media " Reveals the interactional underpinnings of research methodologies This is the first text aimed at an undergraduate and Master′s audience in Sociology and Social Research, which shows the crucial part that spoken interaction plays in the conduct and products of conventional sociological methodologies.
This book was first published in 2007. How do we refer to people in everyday conversation? No matter the language or culture, we must choose from a range of options: full name ('Robert Smith'), reduced name ('Bob'), description ('tall guy'), kin term ('my son') etc. Our choices reflect how we know that person in context, and allow us to take a particular perspective on them. This book brings together a team of leading linguists, sociologists and anthropologists to show that there is more to person reference than meets the eye. Drawing on video-recorded, everyday interactions in nine languages, it examines the fascinating ways in which we exploit person reference for social and cultural purposes, and reveals the underlying principles of person reference across cultures from the Americas to Asia to the South Pacific. Combining rich ethnographic detail with cross-linguistic generalizations, it will be welcomed by researchers and graduate students interested in the relationship between language and culture.
Winner of the MLA Kenneth W. Mildenberger Prize 2005 This monograph provides a model of the organisation of L2 classroom interaction and a practical methodology for its analysis. The main thesis is that there is a reflexive relationship between pedagogy and interaction in the L2 classroom; this relationship is the foundation of its context-free architecture. Explains the basic principles of Conversation Analysis and reviews the literature on L2 classroom interaction. Portrays the reflexive relationship between the pedagogical focus of the interaction and the organisation of turn-taking, sequence and repair. Describes the overall organisation of L2 classroom interaction and illustrates the use of the analytical methodology. Considers how Conversation Analysis can contribute to the research agendas of Applied Linguistics and Second Language Acquisition.
