Doing things with language: Investigating everyday and workplace interaction - Einzelansicht

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Dear students, all courses will be taught as online courses with asynchronous access until further notice. Once you have signed on in PULS, make sure to also sign up via moodle (course ID: 22930, or follow the link above; please contact me for the password) to access the online material. Testatsleistungen (course requirements) may be subject to change. Students who cannot (yet) access PULS (or moodle): Please email your instructor directly. It is possible that classes can be switched to classroom teaching (Präsenzlehre) at some point during the semester. If this happens, your instructor will let you know and classes will take place at the times originally scheduled.

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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? Which role does language play to accomplish all of this, and which other means are available to interactants to make themselves understandable to each other? 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 forms of institutional and workplace 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, courtroom interaction, broadcast interviews, teacher-student interaction 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 constitutive features of classroom talk, news interviews and other types of institutional interaction.

Please note: Teaching for this class will start on 20 April. Please enrol in the course moodle (ID: 22930, or follow the link above; please contact me for the password) for the study material.