Classroom Discourse as Institutional Interaction: From the Perspective of Conversation Analysis

In this study, classroom discourse is chosen as the subject to be analysed in terms of the basic structures of conversation analysis (CA) which are turn-taking organisation, sequence organisation, repair and action formation, as developed principally by Harvey Sacks, Emanuel Schegloff and Gail Jefferson. As a form of educational talk, classroom interaction should be scrutinised not only in a conversational perspective, but also from an institutional view. Many controversies and debates regarding this particular discourse are present from the conversation analytic point of view, indicating that it is indeed an important subject that need extended studies on. This study analyses learner-learner interaction in task-oriented, learner-centred classrooms, instead of traditional classroom interaction, from the conversation analytic perspective. It helps expanding the research on this subject to a new focus, which is modern classroom interaction.

Talk labour and doing ‘being neoliberal mother’

This essay considers the gendered work of childrearing through Harvey Sacks’ (1992) concept of doing ‘being ordinary’. While doing ‘being ordinary’ under-girds social order, what constitutes ‘ordinary’ changes over time. Neoliberalism ushered in middle-class childrearing ideologies that encourage parents to share ever more intensive responsibilities; yet, mothers ordinarily continue to assume the lion’s portion. Central to the intensive parenting practices primarily carried out by mothers is what we call ‘talk labour’, wherein dialoguing with children as conversational partners, beginning in infancy, is constant. The ubiquity of talk makes ordinary for young children a communicative style of heightened reflexivity about their own and others’ actions, ideas and sentiments – skills conducive to becoming a successful actor in the knowledge economy. This essay ties intensification of child-directed talk, critical to ‘doing being neoliberal mother’, to social transformations in family life rooted in modernity and the Industrial Revolution.

Parties and voices

Since Harvey Sacks’ early observations on collaborative sentence-making, the joint production of turns has become a topic of abiding interest amongst conversation analysts. This paper offers a thematic review of the literature by looking into a number of issues surrounding joint productions, including their forms and interactional uses, major types and sub-types, syntactic and pragmatic contributions, unity and variation across languages, and reasons for its inherent fascination as a conversational practice. By re-examining a number of key concepts and distinctions, including completion, extension, projection, continuation, collaboration, and affiliation/disaffiliation, the paper offers a critical assessment of their perspicuity and usefulness for our understanding of joint production as a general phenomenon (which includes both co-completions and increments). In the second part of the paper, it is suggested that two further concepts be added to the analyst’s toolbox, namely, ‘parties’ (Schegloff 1995) and ‘voices’ (Bakhtin 1981). It is argued that with these notions, one would be better placed to explain the curious status of joint productions as at once collaborative and yet at the same time potentially transformative or even subversive. The overriding goal is conceptual clarification of this field, which hopefully will help place further research on firmer ground.

The Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Public Transport Passenger Categorization Practices: The Case of the Moscow Metro

The paper is concerned with the social categorizations and perception of social diversity of the Moscow Metro passengers. Drawing on the Goffman’s theory, I assume that the interaction between passengers is based on categorization, which links appearance and behavior of people with their cultural expectations. The categorization allows to make interaction participants identifiable and accountable. In 2020 face masks and gloves, social distancing transformed the process of categorization having directly affected per-sonal front of city dwellers and situational proprieties. Using the theoretical resources of Erving Goffman, Harvey Sacks, and contemporary urban researchers, I compare how passengers of Moscow Metro recog-nized and defined each other under the regular circumstances and during the self-isolation regime, which was enforced by the city authorities at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. The study is built around three general types of “Others” that were developed as abductive notions: non-specific, specific, and stigmatized Others. I analyze how these types are situationally produced and to what extent they change when the localized interactional order undergoes significant transformations. On the one hand, this study is aimed at a detailed documentation of the unique socio-historical situation that occurred at an early stage of the pandemic. On the other hand, I use it as a “natural” breaching experiment that helps to reveal the basic elements of temporal and local specificity of the social order.

Just what are we doing when we’re describing AI? Harvey Sacks, the commentator machine, and the descriptive politics of the new artificial intelligence

In dialogue with the work of Heather Love and colleagues, this article makes use of a peculiar ‘descriptive assemblage’ proposed by Harvey Sacks (1963) – that of the ‘commentator machine’ – to open up issues of ‘descriptive politics’ in the field of contemporary Artificial Intelligence (AI). We do so by reviewing the gameplay of Google DeepMind’s AlphaGo – an algorithm designed to outperform human players at the game of Go – with a focus on the incongruities of the much discussed, indeed (in)famous ‘move 37’ in a human-versus-machine challenge match in 2016 (e.g. Silver et al., 2017). Looking at move 37 in conjunction with the various layers of commentary that came to be woven around it, we explore the kinds of descriptive work involved in characterising the move, the troubles that work reveals and what we can learn about the practices and politics of description from encounters with ‘New AI’ applications like AlphaGo.

Conversation analysis: humor in conversation I

As the title indicates this is the first part of the discussion of humor in conversation. The focus is on Conversation Analysis (CA). The chapter starts with a discussion of CA methodology, which is quite different from that used in previous chapters, and then focuses on the analysis of laughter in conversation and on the definition of laughable. The foundational analysis of a canned joke telling by Harvey Sacks is presented and several issues related to CA analyses of humor are discussed, including that humor and laughter are not an adjacency pair, the non-humorous laughter is common, and that humor is not often a test of understanding and that the tellability of humor does not only come from its being funny, but may come also from its being a shared experience.

Speaking When You’re Spoken To

This chapter is concerned with what Harvey Sacks has called ‘the speaker sequencing problem’—how a group of people (or fictional characters) is able to decide which of them should speak next. It examines the model of speaker-sequencing now standard in conversation analysis and asks what this model has to offer for the student of dialogue. For literary critical purposes, it concludes, we will need a radically simplified approach. Happily, this is not difficult to achieve. We need only make a single, very reasonable, assumption—that the basic rule which underpins all conversational sequencing is ‘speak when you’re spoken to’. The implications of this assumption for the analysis dramatic dialogue are explored in Chapter 2.

Turn-Taking

In their informal verbal exchanges people tend to follow the ‘one speaker at the time’ rule posited by Emanuel Schegloff. The use of the term ‘turn-taking’ to describe the process in which this rule operates in human conversation is relatively recent. Especially since the famous 1974 paper by Harvey Sacks, Emanuel Schegloff, & Gail Jefferson in the journal Language, which marks the birth of the sociological discipline now called Conversation Analysis (CA), turn-taking in conversation has attracted attention from a variety of disciplines. This chapter briefly summarizes the main theoretical approaches and controversies regarding turn-taking, followed by some reflections on different ways it can be studied experimentally.