WORKSHOPS

Turn-final position has long been recognized as crucial in interaction, because it can project possible turn completion and potential speaker change (Sacks, Schegloff & Jefferson, 1974). Participants can also use this turn-final placement to index their stance on the utterance so far (Schegloff, 1996). It can also be used to modify response constraints and index epistemic stance (Drake, Golato, & Golato, 2021; Drake, 2015; 2016). Particpants thus can take advantage of this particular environment to accomplish a variety of interactional work via the use of tag questions and other turn-final particles. In this workshop, participants will have an opportunity to engage in data analysis of turn-final particles and tag questions in English and German. They will have a chance to do hands-on work that will guide them through the stages of conversation analytic research. We will begin with a data session on turn-final particles. Participants’ noticings about turn-final particles based in this data will guide us to formulate a potential research question together. We will then develop a research plan that would allow us to tackle this potential research question. We will discuss how to build a collection of cases, how to organize the data analysis, how to make sense of the data, how to categorize emerging findings, and how to incorporate prior literature. Finally, we will also discuss how to move from this data analysis stage to publication.Throughout the workshop, I will share my experience of building a body work on turn-final particles and how to overcome potential challenges on the road to publication. The workshop is designed to be interactive with data sessions, group work and general discussion

“Noticing” is a term that interactants often use to refer to the communicative action of calling joint attention to a selected, publicly perceivable referent so others shift their sensory attention to it. During this workshop, we will consider the different terms that have been used in interaction analytic literature to refer to what is apparently the same underlying social action, including the terms noticing, announcing, registering, setting talk, comments on the physical surroundings, and local sensitivity to elements in participants’ field of perception. Among these, the term noticing is most common and recognizable, since the earliest CA works used this vernacular metalinguistic term to invoke and parlay the reader’s experience without having to offer a definition.

To advance attendees’ dexterity at identifying and analyzing this social action in interaction, this workshop will offer a mix of short presentations, data sessions, and exercises, all focusing upon naturally occurring video-recorded episodes of face-to-face/copresent encounters during which English-speaking participants invoke a present, personal perceptual experience so they may immediately share it—thereby making the sensory social. This workshop illuminates how interactants use this social action to not only achieve joint attention (shared awareness of the same referent at the same time), but also to achieve a common understanding of the meaning and value that they are attributing to that referent by examining moments during copresent interaction when participants topicalize and manage how they and theirs look, smell, and sound, and deal with others’ displayed stances toward those sensory perceptions. We will also consider how people use this social action as a vehicle for doing other stance-implicative actions, including complimenting, self-deprecating to preempt a fellow participant’s potential criticism, fishing for another’s praise, or implicitly criticizing a fellow participant—thus revealing it to be important for the achievement and renewal of interactants’ social relationships.

Conversation Analysis has always been concerned with the behavioral practices that participants in interaction enact to communicate with each other. Partly because of its sociological origins and partly because of the emphasis on documenting what is demonstrably public and mutually accessible, the field has long rejected any attempt to include into the analysis anything that would concern a participant’s intentions, goals, desires. This resistance to include cognitive processes into scholarly descriptions has often been likened to behaviorism in psychology. Yet conversation analysis as a field has not been immune to using language that at least at a folk level appears to be hedging into intentionality. Think for example of “why that now?”, “recipient design”, “action formation and action ascription”, etc. Moreover, while Stephen Levinson has long emphasized that “responses are actions and intentions, not to behaviors” (2006), Erving Goffman has equally complained about conversation analysis limited focus on social relationships, the taken-for-granted in a social situation, and all the inferences that participants make in social interaction (1983). The rejection of cognition has partly gone hand-in-hand with the resistance to quantification and the rejection of experimentation, as an artificial simplification of social complexity. Yet things are changing and it is critical to appreciate both where the field is coming from, the reasons for specific resistance and ultimately what could be the benefits and the risks of a more open dialogue with cognitive science.

In this workshop I will start by providing the historical background that shaped the resistance to including inferential processes, intentions and theory of mind into conversation analysis. I will then introduce participants to some of the key differences between conversation analysis and psychology, discussing both experimentation and quantification. I will specifically highlight how cognition can be studied through observational methods, without requiring experimentation, and will provide examples of the work that has been done along those lines. I will then proceed to outline my personal pathway between the fields, that has led me to obtain a faculty position in a Cognitive Science department and to create and teach the largest ever cognitive science course at UC San Diego, in which conversation analytic papers and insights constitute the core of the readings. I will end by proposing some of the ways in which conversation analysts can begin to engage in a more fruitful dialogue with cognitive scientists. I am expecting and encouraging vibrant discussions and disagreements during the workshop. “Come as you are, […] as a friend, as an old enemy” (Nirvana, 1992)

As essential underpinning of the analysis of data with Conversation Analysis is the analyst’s own competence in the practices of the participants (Turner, 1970). Which raises a methodological hurdle for new researchers in CA, how do we acquire a competent understanding of the practices in which participants are engaged? For ethnomethodology Garfinkel (2002) argued the necessity of what he called the ‘weak’ version of the unique adequacy requirement of methods. This essentially stated that in order to engage in an adequate* description of members methods* an analyst must be able to produce those methods themselves in a passing-as-basically-competent way. They need not be an expert, but they need to be able to recognize the difference between an expert and a novice. This is a transparent problem for those engaged in the analysis of institutional talk but is often more opaque in projects with a more ‘everyday talk’ orientation. This workshop will highlight the various problems involved in addressing the concern of being a uniquely adequate analyst. 

Drawing on the research projects examining powerlifting, internet forums and arguments in public, we will discuss the practical and ethical concerns of being an adequate analyst. As part of the workshop, we will explore the basic ethnographic data collection strategies that may be useful as a pre-requisite for analysis with an emphasis on the value of Sack’s Gloss (Garfinkel, 2002) in that regard. We will also explore some of the problems with presuming an adequacy with ‘everyday’ settings, in which ‘whose adequacy, whose ordinariness’ is at odds. Finally, we will experiment with the praxeological validity* of practicing practices, a taken for granted method of conversation analysts’ own competence in the formal* technologies of CA. This workshop will provide participants with what they need to develop a roadmap to being competent in the practices exhibited in their data.

Silences, by virtue of being found everywhere in talk, require some account. Or as Sacks put it: “There’s a lot of talk going on in conversation. There is also a lot of silence going on. How can we turn silence in to a thing that can show something?” (1992a: 672). Carving up silence into analytic objects was the focus of much early work in CA, and these investigations developed much of the technical apparatus that has come to define CA. The question of ‘how to render silence as occurring outside the conversation?’ (Schegloff & Sacks, 1973; Sacks, 1992b: 364), for instance, yielded the notions of adjacency pairs, noticeable absences, pre-closing sections, adequate utterance completion, and transition-relevance. Similarly, the matter of ‘how to minimize inter-turn silence’ (Sacks, Schegloff, & Jefferson, 1974; Sacks, 1987) led to the concepts of turn-constructional units, the turn-taking ruleset, speaker-selection devices, silence classification (pause, gap, and lapse), and the preference for agreement.

In this workshop, we will continue this analytic pursuit of making something out of nothing. We will begin with a review of these seminal early works and then turn to more recent studies of lapses, incipient talk, and silent action. After this brief introduction, the bulk of the workshop will be devoted to hands-on analysis of silences in the format of exercises, data sessions, and guided group work. Using data provided by the facilitator, workshop participants will analyze silences as social objects with the aim of identifying potential phenomena and developing collections.

With the use of Conversation Analysis (CA) as a research methodology, there is a growing body of research analysing naturally-occurring talk in interaction in the classroom viewed as a social context in itself. It is now acknowledged that meanings and actions are co-constructed in and through the interaction of the participants, and understanding the actual dynamics of classrooms is possible through the analysis of the micro-details of classroom talk-in-interaction. As a methodology that requires a micro-analysis of naturally occurring data on a turn-by-turn basis in a sequential environment from an emic perspective, CA can potentially reveal the complexity of classroom interaction and the instructional practices which may create learning opportunities and construct micro-moments of understanding. Against this background, in this workshop, I aim to describe and demonstrate the steps involved in conducting conversation analytic classroom interaction research mainly with reference to Can Daşkın and Hatipoğlu (2019). Drawing on video-recordings of an EFL classroom (55 classroom hours) in a preparatory school in higher education, I will demonstrate how I collected data, produced transcriptions, reviewed the research literature, built a collection, developed my analyses and eventually published my findings. I will first highlight the place of CA in classroom interaction research in comparison with other research methods and present the principles and methods of CA. I will then provide an overview of the scope of relevant research conducted in the literature. This will be followed by a demonstration of the steps in doing conversation analytic classroom interaction research along with hands-on activities and data sessions in which the active participation of the attendees is expected.

Smartphones now inhabit our domestic and professional worlds. As a result, a great deal of our everyday life actions is accomplished in digital settings. This workshop focuses on the use of Conversation Analysis to the study of one of these settings: dyadic text chat, i.e., synchronous or quasi-synchronous exchanges that take place through online platforms or applications (e.g., WhatsApp). Using a corpus of chat logs of geographically dispersed multilingual speakers/learners of English, German, Portuguese and Spanish interacting on the learning application Tandem, we will explore some of the unique aspects of text chat interaction with regard to how action formation and ascription are constrained and afforded by the specific features of the medium, how the interaction is sequentially organized, how coherence is maintained and how texters manage trouble. First, the participants of the workshop will be introduced to the state of the art in CA research on text chats and to some key notions stemming from this body of research, e.g., the notion of affordances (Hutchby, 2001; Meredith, 2017). For the purpose of providing an example of how microanalytic research on text chats may be carried out, I will share the process of collecting, transcribing, analyzing and publishing findings related to a recent project on requests in multi-party text-based interaction. Then, through hands-on guided group work, the participants will look through selected excerpts in order to identify potential phenomena/collections related to the discussed topics and share their results with the whole group. The final part of the workshop will be dedicated to discussing issues and challenges associated with the use of microanalytic methods to study text chats.

With the pandemic as a catalyst, the use of digital communication technologies is booming in practically every corner of social life, including the medical domain. This involves video technology through tools such as Teams, zoom and Google meet, but also digital platforms and textual communication in various multimodal configurations (with video, images, other functionalities). In this workshop we explore virtual consultations through various modalities from a conversation analytical perspective with the aim of encouraging research in this area. The workshop will be “recipient designed” as much as possible, depending on participants’ interests and data.

The first part is roughly focused on the early stages of research, that is, data collection, familiarizing with the setting, developing research questions and transcription. The second part focuses on doing analysis with an interest in the affordances of the technology and the interrelation between the (institutional) interaction / goals and the communication technology as it is oriented to by the participants. I will discuss and give examples from two different projects: one on post-surgery videoconsultations with oncological patients and one on paramedical treatment for children with motor disabilities through the exchange of video clips and written feedback on a digital platform. The data are in Dutch, but English translations are provided, at least in transcripts.

Part 1 focuses on the development of research questions and data collection, part 2 on developing analyses and part 3 on drawing conclusions and the publication of findings across disciplines and domains.

• Part 1 (60 min): round of introductions, research preparation and early stages
• 15 min break
• Part 2 (90 minutes): developing analyses including short data sessions on virtual consultation from both case studies
• 15 min break
• Part 3 (60 minutes): conclusions and publication practices + time for questions from the participants

Multimodality has become a staple in both conversation analysis and interactional linguistics. Studies have continued to expand into various domains of research, including materiality, mobility, and multisensoriality, documenting an increasing range of embodied, material, and linguistic resources, and their complex physical and sequential coordination in interaction. Increasing uses of video-recording technologies (including wearable cameras and drones) necessitates more nuanced approaches in analysing the mobilisation of multimodal resources in participants’ collaborative work.

This workshop provides a primer for conversation analysts investigating multimodality in situated interaction. While the main focus will be on materiality and multisensoriality, we will also touch on other topics including gesture, embodiment, and mobility. The workshop is primarily hands-on: after a brief discussion on some of the issues and methods, the remainder of the workshop will be dedicated to practical sessions and hands-on analytic work on data provided by the facilitator, with the objective of understanding its multimodal underpinnings, and how these relate to other aspects of interaction, including turn-construction, action-formation, sequential organisation, and activities. Participants will work in small groups, identify phenomena, and share their findings in a short, informal group presentations.

This workshop will equip participants with theoretical knowledge and practical skills in analysing multimodality in situated interaction with audio-visual data. The workshop is open to postgraduates, post-docs, researchers and faculty who have familiarity with CA as a research methodology.

Race and racial relationships are interwoven in myriad ways with practices that make up everyday life. However, we know little about how racial identities are invoked and made relevant in everyday interactions, what inferences are associated with particular racial categories, or how race features in the moral orders of institutions such as medicine, education, family, politics and so on. A growing body of work in Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis (EMCA) has started to address these issues. EMCA is particularly well-equipped to provide an empirically-grounded understanding of race and racial relationships in contemporary society because it takes a people-first approach that starts with the examination of everyday interactions and focuses on what participants themselves select to make relevant. EMCA can provide researchers with the methodological tools to excavate hidden or obscured manifestations of race and racism and thus bring to light racial inequalities that are recreated through casual interactions which become ingrained in our institutions. 

In this workshop, participants will explore how racial identities are invoked and made relevant in everyday conversations, and learn how to analyze race, racism, and discrimination in social interaction. Participants will build on their training in EMCA to learn how to conduct fine-grained analysis of language and culture. The workshop will be divided into two sessions. Participants will watch on their own time a one-hour pre-recorded lecture for each session (a total of two hours for both sessions), and then participate in a two-hour facilitated session that reviews and works with the material introduced in each lecture (a total of four hours for both sessions). The themes of the two sessions are ‘theories of race and interaction’ and ‘analyzing race in interaction.’ Lecturers include Kevin Whitehead, Natasha Shrikant, Rahul Sambaraju, and Tim Berard.

This workshop will provide a practical overview of ways interactional analysis can usefully be
incorporated into a multidisciplinary and/or mixed methods study design, using examples from
applied health communication research to illustrate key benefits and considerations. It will be most
useful for participants working in academic settings where conversation analysis and other kinds of
interactional research are less well understood, thus making it challenging to gain institutional support
or funding.
CA is now a proven methodology and is increasingly being built into applied health and social
research studies. Analysis of interactions can be crafted into research designs in a number of different
ways, depending on the study aims and research questions, and also on the expertise of the
researcher(s) involved. It is often combined with other qualitative methods (e.g. thematic analysis of
interview data, ethnographic observation and document analysis) to build in-depth comparative or
longitudinal case studies. Some researchers have also successfully used conversation analysis within
larger scale mixed methods studies involving quantitative methods, including RCTs and intervention
studies. In institutionally based research, mixed methods study designs also often mean working with
a multi-disciplinary team that includes both professional and interactional expertise, and identifying
potential applications of the research to practice or policy in order to attract funding.
The workshop will include a mix of short presentations, data exercises and other practical activities.
Participants will develop a scenario-based outline of a mixed methods research proposal, generate
a checklist of key ‘design considerations’, and ‘think ahead’ to reflect on issues around data
management, publication planning, and data archiving.

In this workshop we will explore how the emic methods of conversation analysis are ideally suited to detail the principles and practices of early childhood education teaching, providing a valuable resource for professional learning, reflection and practice. We will explore extended sequences of interactions between teachers and young children to identify how opportunities for learning are co-constructed. In particular, we will study how participation frameworks are established by teachers, and what this makes possible for children’s participation. We will explore how the concept of ‘fairness’ is enacted in early learning environments, as invoked in children’s peer talk, and modelled by the teacher in group interactions. Workshop participants will be able to articulate how conversation analysis builds resources for understanding the how of high-quality learning-in-interaction.

The ethnomethodological concerns of CA and the ecological validity of naturalistic data make it well placed for investigating autochonous ‘ways of speaking’ in minority or endangered language communities, an essential dimension of language documentation. And although the documentary linguistics community usually regards conversational data as an essential ‘genre’ for collection, documentation of minority and endangered languages proceeds with only limited engagement with CA methodology, despite increasing acceptance of Interactional linguistics and CA within mainstream linguistics. While linguists occasionally draw on interactional corpora in their grammatical and lexical descriptions, meaningful engagement with interaction itself is generally limited, perhaps because the bottom-up approach of CA can be daunting for the uninitiated.

This workshop examines the application of EM/CA methods in documenting of the use of under-described languages within interactional settings. It considers the place of grammar within interaction and of interaction within grammars by asking such questions as

• How CA can feed linguistic descriptions?
• How to involve community members in research on talk conducted in a language that you do not know when you are starting off?
• How to conduct research in your own community, on your own language or languages?
• How to navigate the insider-outsider status with regard to community membership?
• For whose benefit should language documentation proceed, and how can it be useful for the community concerned?
• Whether and how to obtain representative sampling of the speech community for cross-linguistic comparison?

Participants are encouraged to develop their own questions and/or bring their own data along to the workshop for discussion.

Conversation analysis can seem like a daunting process for those new to the discipline, particularly given the time commitment required and the terminology involved. As conversation analytic works extends more into interdisciplinary spaces, as well as the increasing interest in and need to provide coursework-based research opportunities for students, effectively engaging with novices is important for successful and fulfilling projects for all involved. Working with novices who may only be in the CA space for the duration of a project can be fruitful in terms of research output and in professional development for both the novice and the conversation analyst.  

Drawing on over a decade of experiences of (and mistakes made) working with conversation analytic novices, from undergraduate students to practicing health care professionals, in this workshop we will explore how to effectively engage those previously unfamiliar with CA. 

In this workshop, I will guide participants through the process of engaging novices with conversation analytic data and theory. This will cover multiple aspects of CA research including ethics applications, literature and theory, data collection, transcription, and analysis. We will also consider the different roles that novices might have within the research team and what other experience and expertise they may bring to the work, including how to work with those who may be resistant, distrustful, or disengaged. Participants are encouraged to have a project idea to work on throughout the workshop, which will be used to create a plan for engaging with novices in a future project. Participants will receive templates and a resource list to help them in doing this. 

From its outset, conversation analysis has been linked with a wide range of scholarly disciplines and sites of professional practice. As conversation analysis has matured into the dominant approach to researching spontaneous social interaction world-wide, its relationships with traditional scholarly disciplines have grown and flourished (e.g., Interactional Linguistics, Discursive Psychology), as has its application to important sites of human social activity (e.g., operating theatres, emergency calls, classrooms, cockpits, inter alia). In parallel, researchers have faced increasing encouragement (and pressure) to undertake interdisciplinary research that has real-world impact. Although such research is appealing for a variety of reasons, and well-suited to the topics and methods of conversation analysis, it can be challenging to conceptualise and accomplish. This workshop will consider the relationship between conversation analysis and basic science in other scholarly disciplines and in professional practice. In particular, it will draw on examples from the fields of communication disorders and speech pathology, psychology and family therapy, and linguistics and language documentation. In doing so, this workshop will support participants to reflect on how their own research initiatives employing conversation analysis may articulate with different, but complementary scholarly and professional objectives.

https://researchers.mq.edu.au/en/persons/scott-barnes

Affiliation Senior Lecturer, Department of Linguistics, Macquarie University

Contact scott.barnes@mq.edu.au; +61 2 9850 7960 https://macquarie.zoom.us/j/6755914137

Race and racial relationships are interwoven in myriad ways with practices that make up everyday life. However, we know little about how racial identities are invoked and made relevant in everyday interactions, what inferences are associated with particular racial categories, or how race features in the moral orders of institutions such as medicine, education, family, politics and so on. A growing body of work in Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis (EMCA) has started to address these issues. EMCA is particularly well-equipped to provide an empirically-grounded understanding of race and racial relationships in contemporary society because it takes a people-first approach that starts with the examination of everyday interactions and focuses on what participants themselves select to make relevant. EMCA can provide researchers with the methodological tools to excavate hidden or obscured manifestations of race and racism and thus bring to light racial inequalities that are recreated through casual interactions which become ingrained in our institutions. 

In this workshop, participants will explore how racial identities are invoked and made relevant in everyday conversations, and learn how to analyze race, racism, and discrimination in social interaction. Participants will build on their training in EMCA to learn how to conduct fine-grained analysis of language and culture. The workshop will be divided into two sessions. Participants will watch on their own time a one-hour pre-recorded lecture for each session (a total of two hours for both sessions), and then participate in a two-hour facilitated session that reviews and works with the material introduced in each lecture (a total of four hours for both sessions). The themes of the two sessions are ‘theories of race and interaction’ and ‘analyzing race in interaction.’ Lecturers include Kevin Whitehead, Natasha Shrikant, Rahul Sambaraju, and Tim Berard.