Blog #5 (9/19)

CONVERSATION ANALYSIS

At least part of the foundation for work in CA seems to be the belief that "...ordinary talk is a highly organized, socially ordered phenomenon" (page 11).  The focus of study should not be merely on words or grammar but on "the interactional organization of social activities" because 'CA seeks to unocver the organization of talk...from the perspective of how the participants display for one another their understanding of "what is going on"' (p. 12-13). Researchers in CA should give attention to next-turn procedure as well as membership categories.

While I've probably noticed that certain utterances often appear in conversation in pairs, I've never given much thought to it. Initially, I thought it was odd that they are termed "adjacency pairs" since there is no requirement that they actually be adjacent, but since the ideas themselves go side by side, it is a logical label. Again, I've noticed that when a person says they can't do something, there is more pause and explanation than if they say they can, but I never put too much thought into it. I have always wanted to be like Melville's character Bartleby who has no problem quickly and easily declining requests by saying, "I would prefer not to" as he carries on with whatever he was already doing. 

On page 25 the authors mention that in the typical conversation of asking how someone is doing, we expect them to respond that they are "fine" and that any other response sets up a "sequential trajectory." I disagree with this. There are some responses that would create a further line of inquiry; however, there are responses other than "fine" that would not (including "Fantastic!").

I was also interested by the idea that "when speakers produce a factual report they have to select which referential item or descriptive utterance they wish to use on any occasion." I'm curious how we learn to do this. Is it simply by hearing adults and older children doing it that we somehow identify a pattern and learn to follow it? If so, what are the implications for children with significant hearing loss raised by parents who are hearing and do not sign all the time?

It makes a lot of sense to refer to transcripts as referential tools and the tapes as the data because it seems like there is a lot of important information that would be difficult to convey in a transcript. I really like that there is a uniform way of doing transcription in CA. Is this what we will use?  It seems thorough, so I'm sure it is time-consuming, but I think I prefer reading these transcripts to the other styles we have looked at in class so far.

The Wiggins article helped me to better understand how CA can be used. It also made me curiously aware that my eating popcorn and drinking orange soda at 9:30 at night is probably not the healthiest decision I've made today (ha!). It was hard to focus on analyzing the conversation because I kept getting distracted by the humor in the conversation outtakes or I just felt bad for the teenage girls. I can't imagine how I would feel if my parents had focused our conversations on what I was or was not eating. Interestingly, in one of the conversations, when the mother repeated that Emily had eaten hers, I initially read it as an insinuation that she had eaten more than enough based on my assumption that the Chloe wanted her to eat the last bit of salmon. After reading what the author said, I then decided that it made more sense that the mother was supporting Emily's assertion that there was nothing wrong with the salmon as Chloe was suggesting in an attempt to avoid finishing her dinner. Clearly, completing CA (or DA) requires multiple readings of transcripts as well as reviewing the tapes repeatedly.