Chapter 6
Conversation analysis
This chapter introduces conversation analysis
to researchers who are not familiar with this methodology for
analyzing naturalistic language use and how it has been applied
to develop behavioral alternatives to cognitive approaches to
second language acquisition. Specifically, I: (1) review what CA
is; (2) discuss typical research questions in CA and how these
questions are generated; (3) outline how CA data are gathered,
transcribed and analyzed; (4) review turn-taking, repair,
sequence, and preference organization; (5) discuss ethical
issues in CA; (6) outline important critiques of CA and how CA
researchers have rebutted these criticisms; and (7) summarize
the arguments presented in this chapter with a view to promoting
a constructive, critical dialog between cognitive and
socially-oriented SLA researchers.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.The ontological and epistemological foundations of
ethnomethodology and CA
- 2.1Ethnomethodology
- 2.2Conversation analysis (CA)
- 3.An overview of how conversation analysts set about doing emic
research
- 3.1What types of research questions do conversation analysts
address, and how do we generate them?
- 3.2Procedures of data collection, transcription, and
analysis
- 4.The formal structure of talk: Turn-taking, repair, sequence, and preference
organizations
- 4.1Turn-taking
- 4.2Repair
- 4.3Sequence organization
- 4.4Preference
- 5.Transcription conventions: From words to multimodality and materiality
- 5.1Jeffersonian transcription conventions
- 5.2Multimodal transcription
- 6.Critiques and responses
- 6.1Moerman’s contextual critique of conversation
analysis
- 6.2The epistemics debate
- 6.3The Schegloff/Wetherell/Billig debates
- 7.Ethical issues
- 8.Conclusions
-
Notes
-
References
-
Appendix