Interaction at Work - Einzelansicht

Have you ever wondered why interaction is as unproblematic as it is? Why, for instance, do we manage to take turns in conversation without constantly interrupting each other? How do we know what our co-participants are trying to achieve with their utterances, and how do we accomplish larger projects? Why do we generally understand each other – and how do we deal with misunderstandings, slips of the tongue, or excessive background noise? These questions have been investigated by conversation analysts for about fifty years, and generally, we now understand the mechanisms underlying everyday conversation quite well. However, from the very beginning, CA literature has pointed out that ‘institutional’ forms of interaction, such as classroom talk, systematically differ from conversation in terms of these mechanisms – to a greater or lesser degree – and that it may be these differences that help us recognize that participants are engaging in, for instance, business meetings, courtroom interaction, classroom talk or police interrogations.

This class will serve as an introduction to basic assumptions, methods and findings of Conversation Analysis (CA). We will discuss general principles of turn-taking, sequence organization and repair in conversation and, on that basis, identify characteristic features of classroom talk, business meetings and other types of institutional interaction.

Selected readings:

Chapelle, Carol A. (Ed.) (2013). The Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics. Oxford: Blackwell.
Couper-Kuhlen, Elizabeth & Selting, Margret (2018). Interactional Linguistics: Studying Language in Social Interaction. Cambridge: CUP.
Drew, Paul & Heritage, John (Eds.) (1992). Talk at work: Interaction in institutional settings. Cambridge: CUP.
Levinson, Stephen C. (1983). Pragmatics. Cambridge: CUP.
Sidnell, Jack (2010). Conversation Analysis: An Introduction. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell.
Sidnell, Jack & Stivers, Tanya (Eds.) (2013). The Handbook of Conversation Analysis. Malden: Blackwell.

Successful completion of the Grundmodul Linguistik (or equivalent).

Analysis of data (this includes writing a short essay summarizing the findings of 1000-1500 words)