Classroom teasing: Institutional contingencies and embodied action

2021 ◽  
pp. 146144562098211
Author(s):  
Stephen Daniel Looney

This article compares the sequential position, action, and design of teasing sequences in classroom and mundane interaction. This collection of teases comes from a university Geosciences classroom, and the analysis demonstrates that, like teases in ordinary conversation, classroom teases are sequentially bound and designed in extreme fashions. Nonetheless, classroom teasing sequences are unique in terms of the actions and precise designs of teasables and teases as well as the sequential contingencies that create opportunities for teasing. This paper contributes to past conversation analysis research showing how teases as sequences of embodied action are subject to local contingencies and constraints.

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (s4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ajit Singh

Abstract This article investigates action plans not as mental but as situated and observable activities in social interactions. I argue that projections and action plans can be understood as complex embodied practices through which actors prepare and coordinate further actions as part of a trajectory of a “communicative project”. “Projections” within ‘talk-in-interaction’ are a central topic of conversation analysis (CA), e.g. for the micro analysis of the organization of turn-taking or for the identification of turn-constructional units. Aside from former CA-studies on syntactic and prosodic features, current research using CA from a multimodal perspective shows how embodied resources, such as gestures, serve as “premonitory components” of communicative actions. Using video data of communications in sports training in trampolining, I will show how communicatively situated “embodied action plans” are applied within pre-enactments and instructions for the production of embodied knowledge. Pre-enactments not only serve the production of an ideal imagination to corporally produce intersubjectivity. Pre-enactments are also used temporally for the multimodal and visibly situating of embodied action plans, to which actors can coordinate and orientate their current and prospective communicative actions.


2019 ◽  
Vol 82 (3) ◽  
pp. 274-302 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christian Heath ◽  
Lorenza Mondada

Institutional settings in which large numbers of participants have the right and in some cases the responsibility to contribute to the proceedings pose particular challenges to the order and allocation of turns. These challenges are organizational, how to enable and order participation between large numbers of people, as well as moral and political—the fair, transparent, and even distribution of access to the floor. In this paper, we address two very different institutional settings—one political and the other economic—and consider how participants are provided opportunities to contribute to the proceedings in a fair and transparent manner. Drawing on ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, we examine the systematic management of turn allocation and demonstrate how multimodality is critical to understanding how particular institutions achieve their principal aims and outcomes. This study is based on the analysis of a substantial corpus of video recordings of public consultations concerned with the discussion of major public and private sector initiatives and auctions of fine art and antiques.


2013 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 139-159 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Filipi

Withholding and pursuit are well-documented phenomena in talk between adults and in talk with children. They have been described as working to perform various functions that emerge locally between speakers in a variety of interactional contexts both in ordinary conversation and in institutional talk.In this paper I explore further the actions of pursuit and withholding in interaction between parents and their very young children, first described in Filipi (2003, 2009) by going beyond description and by examining how these features might be implicated in learning. Longitudinal change is thus a focus of the analysis. Examples of talk are drawn from one child aged from 11 to 24 months interacting with members of her family.Applying the microanalytic approach of Conversation Analysis, the study reports four contexts in which pursuit emerges as an important resource. They are pursuit relevant to sequence structure, linguistic pursuit, pursuit of understanding and pursuit of a particular response token. Analysis shows that while the adults orient to the need to move the action forward, particularly observable in the Summons/Response adjacency pair, withholding of completion can occur at any time in order for parent and child to work on particular skills. Finally, I argue that the micro details of the actions of withholding and pursuit provide a particularly useful lens with which to observe the dynamic qualities of asymmetry. Keywords: parent child interaction; Conversation Analysis; language development; asymmetry; withholding; pursuit


1998 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 195-219 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeremy Freese ◽  
Douglas W. Maynard

ABSTRACTRecent work suggests the importance of integrating prosodic research with research on the sequential organization of ordinary conversation. This paper examines how interactants use prosody as a resource in the joint accomplishment of delivered news as good or bad. Analysis of approximately 100 naturally occurring conversational news deliveries reveals that both good and bad news are presented and received with characteristic prosodic features that are consistent with expression of joy and sorrow, respectively, as described in the existing literature on prosody. These prosodic features are systematically deployed in each of the four turns of the prototypical news delivery sequence. Proposals and ratifications of the valence of a delivery are often made prosodically in the initial turns of the prototypical four-turn news delivery, while lexical assessments of news are often made later. When prosody is used to propose the valence of an item of news, subsequent lexical assessments tend to be alignments with these earlier ascriptions of valence, rather than independent appraisals of the news. (Bad news, good news, conversation analysis, prosody, sequencing).


1994 ◽  
Vol 11 ◽  
pp. 137-152 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Taylor

Abstract This paper uses conversation analysis to examine a feedback session between a postgraduate student of TESOL and a university supervisor who had just watched her lesson. The feedbacsk session seemed unsatisfactory to the supervisor and the analysis suggests that this could have been due to the role of trainee being resisted by the teacher. Evidence for this in the talk is examined in detail, in particular the number and shape of dispreferred responses found. It would seem that the rules of ordinary conversation may influence these feedback sessions just as much as the conventions connected with the institutional setting of the talk.


1994 ◽  
Vol 19 (03) ◽  
pp. 639-663 ◽  
Author(s):  
John F. Manzo

In ordinary conversation, speakers are often called on to defend their assertions. In talk that takes place in institutional settings, speakers must often account for their claims as well. This study concerns the methods of argumentative support employed by participants in a particular institutional setting: jury deliberations. Micro-interactional analysis of transcripts of two actual deliberations—using the theore tical and methodological perspectives of ethnomethodology and conversation analysis-reveals that when jurors present defenses or accounts of their positions, they often reference mundane experience and practical reasoning. Jurors do not, then, merely weigh strictly “legal” considerations. Three of the jurors' discursive methods are scrutinized: Normative assertions, claims of expertise, and declarations of knowledge. These techniques serve not only to establish “evidence” in support of a juror's position but also to deflect other jurors' disagreement


2021 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elwys De Stefani

In linguistics, if-clauses have attracted the interest of scholars working on syntax, typology and pragmatics alike. This article examines if-clauses as a resource available to tour guides for reorienting the visitors’ visual attention towards an object of interest. The data stem from 11 video-recorded tours in Italian, French, German and Dutch (interpreted into Flemish Sign Language). In this setting, guides recurrently use if-clauses to organize a joint focus of attention, by soliciting the visitors to bodily and visually rearrange. These clauses occur in combination with verbs of vision (e.g., to look), or relating to movement in space (e.g., to turn around). Using conversation analysis and interactional linguistics, this study pursues three interrelated objectives: 1) it examines the grammatical relationship that speakers establish between the if-clause and the projected main clause; 2) it analyzes the embodied conduct of participants in the accomplishment of if/then-constructions; 3) it describes if-clauses as grammatical resources with a twofold projection potential: a vocal-grammatical projection enabling the guide (or the addressees) to achieve a grammatically adequate turn-continuation, and an embodied-action projection, which solicits visitors to accomplish a situationally relevant action, such as reorienting gaze towards an object of interest. These projections do not run independently from each other. The analysis shows how, while producing an if-clause, guides adjust their emerging talk—through pauses, expansions and restarts—to the visitors’ co-occurring spatial repositioning. These practices are described as micro-sequential adjustments that reflexively affect turn-construction and embodied compliance. In addressing the above phenomena and questions, this article highlights the fundamentally adaptive, situated and action-sensitive nature of grammar.


1994 ◽  
Vol 11 ◽  
pp. 97-118 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rod Gardner

Abstract The first part of this paper presents the view that ordinary conversation is the most basic form of talk, and that Conversation Analysis (CA) in the ethnomethodological tradition, whilst widely known in Australian applied linguistics, has been very little used here as a set of research tools. The distinctiveness of the CA approach is presented, and it is argued that CA has the potential to make a more substantial contribution to applied linguistic research than it has hitherto. Second, the paper considers how some basic CA research – into receipt tokens such as mm, yeah, oh and others in Australian English – might be applied to a language teaching, and specifically into the development of teaching materials in an adult ESL context. It is argued that CA has the potential for wider application in Australian applied linguistics alongside some of the more widespread and better known qualitative research methods.


2014 ◽  
Vol 34 ◽  
pp. 171-212 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gabriele Kasper ◽  
Johannes Wagner

For the last decade, conversation analysis (CA) has increasingly contributed to several established fields in applied linguistics. In this article, we will discuss its methodological contributions. The article distinguishes between basic and applied CA. Basic CA is a sociological endeavor concerned with understanding fundamental issues of talk in action and of intersubjectivity in human conduct. The field has expanded its scope from the analysis of talk—often phone calls—towards an integration of language with other semiotic resources for embodied action, including space and objects. Much of this expansion has been driven by applied work.After laying out CA's standard practices of data treatment and analysis, this article takes up the role of comparison as a fundamental analytical strategy and reviews recent developments into cross-linguistic and cross-cultural directions. The remaining article focuses on applied CA, the application of basic CA's principles, methods, and findings to the study of social domains and practices that are interactionally constituted. We consider three strands—foundational, social problem oriented, and institutional applied CA—before turning to recent developments in CA research on learning and development. In conclusion, we address some emerging themes in the relationship of CA and applied linguistics, including the role of multilingualism, standard social science methods as research objects, CA's potential for direct social intervention, and increasing efforts to complement CA with quantitative analysis.


Author(s):  
Emanuel A. Schegloff

The text that follows offers in its first section four early engagements with brief bits of ordinary conversation that launched the form of analysis known as conversation-analytic work. This is followed by five subsections that sketch five of the several domains of analysis central to conversation analysis over the last fifty or so years: turns and turn constructions; sequences of actions-through-talk; trouble in talking actions and repair of that trouble; selection of words that compose the turns that compose the sequences; the overall structural organization of talk-in-interaction whether in recurrent clusters or sustained occasions of conversation. A brief upshot brings the text to conclusion.


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