Alright, so this is probably a dangerous statement, but I think I'm starting to understand what CA is: unmotivated looking at conversations, focusing on how people respond to common phrases within various contexts. The idea of unmotivated looking is SO hard for me. As a teacher, I know what I want to improve about myself, so any time I do something like this, I want it to strengthen one of my areas of weakness. Selfishly, I keep hoping to learn very specific things from my data.
What on earth does "po-faced" mean? Where did that even come from?
The more I read and reflect on what I've read, the more I find myself thinking about how I engage in conversations. Continuers are an interesting component of conversation that I've noticed other people as well as myself using. They are most obvious for me over the phone and in long conversations because speakers seem to require them in these instances. Over the phone, if you are not using continuers, the speaker will check to make sure the phone hasn't been disconnected. Similarly, when one speaker is telling a looong story, he will often check to be sure you are still paying attention if you don't use continuers. While I was reading about interruptions, I was thinking that not all overlap is an interruption, so I was pretty excited that the authors, and apparently Jefferson, think similarly. I thought it was interesting that Dutch speakers tend to answer the phone with self-identification because to me that is a formal way of answering the phone. For my cell phone, I answer with a greeting, but for our work phone or if I am answering another person's home phone for them, I use self-identification. I also thought the labeling of certain comments in the transcript on pages 115-116 as complaints was interesting. I didn't initially recognize those three comments as complaints, but after the authors labeled them as complaints, it made sense to me. I love that the authors talk about "fishing." I do this all the time with topics my mom taught me it was rude to ask about. I always assumed if I didn't ask outright and they told me, then I wasn't being rude, but after reading this book, I'm not sure. I guess it's not so bad since I'm giving them an out, right? And most of the time I think I do this more out of concern than curiosity; I want to let the person know that if they want to talk about it, they can but still give them an easy out in case they don't. It seems so illogical to respond to, "How are you?" with "Pretty good" as a means of foreshadowing bad news, and, yet, the authors seem correct in their observations. I don't know how many times I've done this with my parents, or they've done this with me, but as I reflect on the times we've used that phrase, it has been to set up bad news. We first tell all of the good things that are happening and then mention the one bad thing. How is it that this response has come to mean this for so many people?
While I appreciate the authors' summary of how to analyze phenomena in conversation on page 104, I'm still not sure how I'm going to do this. I watched my videos so many times over the weekend, and I just don't know what should be standing out to me. Last week in class, I thought I was getting the hang of it, but alone in front of my computer screen, I felt incredibly lost.
I said I thought I was starting to understand CA; well, the section about analysing conduct in news interviews reminded me that this is all still very new to me. My head hurts just thinking about trying to analyze whether different portions of an interview are following question-answer-evaluation, question-answer-formulation, or question-answer-acknowledgement formulations (I think I could handle question-answer-next question formulas). And this is followed by interviewers possessing and injecting their opinions into questions but still maintaining neutrality but not adhering to neutralism. How does that make sense? In my mind, neutral is neutral. If you indicate your opinion, you're not neutral. The end. There's no defending it.
I have transcribed the first two videos in my HU (about 16 minutes worth) and am waiting for more videos. I am still working on getting parental consent from all of the participants' parents, so I haven't uploaded my HU to DropBox. I've tried to synchronize my video to my transcript but haven't been successful. I plan to ask around in class tomorrow and see if anyone successfully synched theirs; if not, I will e-mail Ann.
"The more I read and reflect on what I've read, the more I find myself thinking about how I engage in conversations." Good, I always feel like this in and of itself is a satisfactory outcome of the class from my perspective anyway.
ReplyDeleteI have to say that I've never thought of "pretty good" in and of itself as foreshadowing bad news - the TONE of how it is said would matter a lot. People can say "fine" in a certain tone of voice that makes it clear they are NOT fine, hence the importance of capturing that detail in the transcript (or listening to the recording.)
There has been some well-established research done around courtroom trial and the construction of rape and victims, and that is the work that seems to be getting cited a lot. I am really sorry in that yes, it is disturbing and not a real fun topic.
In terms of neutrality - I don't think it's quite that cut and dried. It's rare that someone overtly states their opinion, but it's very common that people say things in very indirect ways or in a certain tone that makes their opinion pretty clear, but they don't actually say it...these are the subtleties of CA.
In terms of analyzing your data, we will talk more in class about this and also get a status check with where everyone is with their HUs (which is all over the place at the moment - ha!)
Also there are step by step instructions in Dropbox in the Advanced ATLAS.ti workshop materials Ann shared that takes you through synchronizing the transcript - did this not work?
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