Problem presentations in workplace meeting interactions

Conversation analysis (CA) is often seen as focused on the mundane and minute features of talk-in-interaction without concern for broader issues of social justice. Contrary to these preconceptions, however, CA has been exploring (in)justice, in/exclusion, and (in)equality since its inception. This article offers an overview of CA’s contributions to social justice based on a survey of 168 CA-for-social-justice studies published over the past 50 years. It provides a summary of major CA findings regarding participant orientations to (in)justice and practices for reproducing and resisting injustice in interaction. This is followed by a synthesized review of key methodological features of CA-for-social-justice studies and an illustration of how social justice issues may be explored within the CA framework. The illustration features conversations about gender (in)equality and in/exclusion video-recorded in adult second language classrooms in the U.S., and it showcases CA’s ability to illuminate tacit reproductions of injustice in institutional talk. The article concludes with a reflection on key methodological issues and pathways for future work, including in the form of multimodal, longitudinal, and reflective CA-for-social-justice research.

Talk and Social Structure: Studies in Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis. Deirdre Boden and Don H. Zimmerman. eds. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. 305 pp. $35.00 (cloth)

This article analyses conversation around classroom discipline to establish how teachers learn through professional conversation. The study was a qualitative study that originally adopted an ethno-methodological research design. Purposive sampling was used to select 6 primary school teachers from the East London Education District in the Eastern Cape. A video recorder was used to capture the conversation which lasted for 31 minutes 56 seconds after school hours. The recording was viewed repeatedly and transcribed verbatim. Three learning episodes were selected from the transcript for further transcription following Jefferson’s notations for conversation analysis purposes. Clayman and Gill’s (2004) conversation analysis levels were used to analyse selected episodes to establish how teachers learn through professional conversation. The findings show that teachers learn through requesting advice and testing ideas, and through the sharing of ideas. The findings also indicate that teachers use response preferences (response favourites both in agreement or disagreement during conversation), repairing or assisting one another through talking, nodding, and laughing as learning strategies. The study concludes that professional conversation is relevant for continuing teachers’ professional development. We recommend that teachers should embrace professional conversation for exchanging knowledge and experiences for learning purposes. We also encourage teachers to adopt conversational strategies highlighted in this study for professional learning purposes. Research experts on teacher learning should be involved in school workshops in order to further enhance teacher learning in specific areas.

Using Conversation Analysis, this study describes how ‘institutionality’ is accomplished in talk-in-interaction by analyzing how the Korean student group members construct themselves as ‘an institution’ through decision-making. Most conversation-analytic research on institutional talk has been of occupational settings. This study, with data from a voluntary student staff group whose meetings are sporadic and without formal phases, illustrates that the group members’ interaction reveals how they construct themselves as a decision-making group whose members embody different social roles, and ultimately as an institution. Two significant practices are discussed. First, the data show that the members actively search for precedents, which later become the most crucial basis for their decision-making. Second, as a strategy of gathering power over others within their institutional boundary, the members frequently depart from the preference structure of ordinary conversation. Overall, this paper contributes to a better understanding of institutionality with data from a quasi-institutional setting in the relatively under-examined language, Korean.

This paper sketches out and illustrates the research opportunities that come with the recent addition to BNCweb of very large numbers of audio files for the spoken component in the BNC. It aims to demonstrate that the availability of the audio files enables researchers not only to correct the orthographic transcripts, but also to re-transcribe the conversations using conversation-analytic transcription. It also shows that the CA transcripts can be integrated into the BNC’s XML annotation network and illustrates how XML query tools such as XPath and XQuery can be used to efficiently exploit the XML network. The main thrust of the paper is to argue that the integration of corpus-linguistic and conversation-analytic transcription in XML can make major contributions both to CL and CA. CL research into conversation can for the first time be performed on the basis of transcription that is “detailed enough to facilitate the analyst’s quest to discover and describe orderly practices of social action in interaction” (Hepburn and Bolden, in: Sidnell, Stivers (eds) The handbook of conversation analysis, Wiley Malden, 2013: 58) while CA research can gain a large-scale quantitative basis to substantiate claims about the generalizability of observed regularities and patterns in talk-in-interaction. To illustrate the benefits of doing research on re-transcriptions of the BNC’s audio files, a case study is presented on backchannels occurring in overlap in storytelling interaction. The case study reveals, inter alia, that backchannels produced by story recipients simultaneously with parts of the storyteller’s ongoing turn tend to increase in frequency as the storytelling reaches its climax. Backchannel overlap is thus in synchrony with story organization. This finding adds weight to Goodwin’s observation that recipients attend to the task “not simply of listening to the events being recounted but rather of distinguishing different subcomponents of the talk in terms of the alternative possibilities for action they invoke” (Goodwin, in: Atkinson, Heritage (eds) Structures of social action: studies in conversation analysis, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1984: 243). The case study also presents exploratory evidence to suggest that, arguably due to the extended length of storytelling turns (Ochs and Capps in Living narrative, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 2001), the proportion of overlap in running speech may be considerably lower in storytelling than in general conversation and telephone conversation.

Objective: Guidelines recommend that patients’ prognoses should be discussed by the palliative care multidisciplinary team. However, there is a lack of evidence on how multidisciplinary teams carry out prognostic discussions, and especially how prognostic talk is initiated during team meetings. This study explored how prognostic talk is initiated and responded to during meetings of a hospice multidisciplinary team. Methods: Video-recordings of 24 inpatient multidisciplinary team meetings in a UK hospice were collected from May to December 2021. A total of 65 multidisciplinary team members participated in the meetings. Recordings were transcribed and analysed using Conversation Analysis. Results: Prognostic talk was initiated during multidisciplinary team members’ patient case presentations. Case presentations followed a certain template, and prognoses could be initiated as responses to template items such as the patient's Phase of Illness and Karnofsky's Performance Status score and the patient's main diagnosis and issues. Prognoses also occurred as accounts for a lack of template item responses. Beyond the patient case presentation, prognostic talk was initiated in relation to discharge planning. Prognoses appeared with sequences of assessments that accounted for them. When a prognosis was provided, it received confirming minimal responses from other team members. Conclusions: Patients’ prognoses were embedded into other care discussions during meetings of a hospice multidisciplinary team. These findings can be used to inform the development of clinical guidelines and interventions aiming at improving multidisciplinary team discussions around prognosis in the future.

Patient participation in discharge planning decisions in the frame of Primary Nursing approach: A conversation analytic study

Conversation Analysis (CA) is crucial in discourse studies, focusing on everyday interactions. This study examines the conversational styles in the Indonesian talk show Endgame, hosted by Gita Wirjawan. Previous research on Indonesian talk shows has primarily explored speech acts and pragmatic aspects, with little emphasis on openings and closings. This study addresses that gap by applying CA to analyze these segments in "Endgame" episodes. Using a descriptive qualitative method, the study analyzes data from the four most-watched Endgame episodes as of November 2023. The findings reveal that Endgame adopts a high considerateness style, characterized by slow-paced dialogue, pauses, and minimal interruptions, creating a relaxed and friendly atmosphere. The opening starts by greeting viewers, introducing guests, and highlighting their roles, set as a preview to the following discussion. Meanwhile, the closings provide insightful messages, maintaining a relaxed ambiance. By examining adjacency pairs and interactional patterns, this study enhances understanding of how Endgame shapes its conversational style and engages its audience, contributing to broader discussions on media communication and talk show sociolinguistics.

Mandarin Chinese is a particle-rich language. Using conversation analysis as its research method, the present study examines one of the Mandarin final particles, namely the particle ba , and illustrates its interactional imports in complying responses to three types of directive actions including requests, suggestions, and proposals. It is argued that the particle ba serves as a conversational resource that is employed at the end of compliance tokens like hao or xing (good or okay) to modify or, to put it more specifically, downgrade its speaker’s commitment. By indicating the reserved or downgraded commitment in an off-record way, participants show their orientation to preserving and maintaining social solidarity. This study contributes to the understanding of commitment in social interaction, especially in responsive actions. Together with other conversation analytic studies on the particle ba , this study also contributes to the understanding of the core meaning and function of the particle ba as a conversational object.

In higher education, it is anticipated that English students should possess both proficiency in language and the capacity for critical thinking. Nonetheless, the dynamics of English as foreign language (EFL) classrooms often reveal a tendency for teachers to exert significant control over the class. Thus, this study aims to discover the scaffolding strategies applied by the teacher in an online EFL class in terms of classroom interactional competence (CIC). The participants were twelve English preparatory class students studying at A2 level of a state university in Türkiye. The majority of the students were Turkish and one of them was Somalian. They were enrolled in the same class. In the application process, the Microsoft Teams educational platform was used, and the lesson was conducted synchronously through this platform. The lesson lasted ninety minutes. By adopting a conversational analysis (CA) approach, a ninety-minute online English class was critically examined within the scope of Walsh’s (2006) self-evaluation of teacher talk (SETT) framework and concept of CIC. The interaction was analyzed by specifically focusing on scaffolding mechanism. According to the findings, the teacher was found to apply restating, reformulation, inviting participation from students, providing explanation, modelling, extension, further explaining students’ understanding and checking scaffolding strategies.

The FlourishCare Model (FCM) transforms primary care sites by addressing all determinants of health and focusing on helping patients to flourish. The FlourishCare Index (FCI) is a clinical measure to assess the effectiveness of the FCM to address all determinants of health. We will present data on the effectiveness of the FCM serving 159 older adults with MCCs. The sample was mostly female (77%), White (64%), retired (54%), married (30%) or widowed (20%) and living in urban areas (64%). The mean age was 69 (SD=15), with 13 years education (SD=3). Patients changed significantly over time on total FCI scores (57%-72%;□=3.80,SE=0.63). Results show significant growth over time for individual health behaviors (58%-67%;□=2.14,SE=0.84), health care access (71%-89%;□=4.43,SE=1.00) and social determinants (62%-85%;□=5.54,SE=1.02) with psychological determinants (54%-61%;□=1.74,SE=0.95) and environmental determinants (70%-81%;□=2.81,SE=1.62) showing a trend to significance. Interaction effects with time show that the FCM supported patients with lower education attainment to improve at a higher rate than those with higher education attainment, for the total FCI score (□=-0.59,SE=0.24) and health care access (□=-0.94,SE=0.38). Receiving mental health counseling resulted in more improvement in psychological determinants than those who did not receive counseling (□=3.43,SE=2.04). The FCM was able to support rural patients at a higher rate than urban patients to gain access to health care (□=4.13,SE=2.02). The FCM supported Hispanic patients the most in improving social determinants of health (□=8.40,SE=3.93). This study showed the importance of a systems approach to care using measures that focus on what matters most to older adults who value quality-of-life outcomes.

<h3>Objective</h3> The clinical differentiation of memory complaints attributable to progressive neurodegenerative disorders (NDD) leading to dementia and similar complaints due to FMD is a difficult task. Underlying factors include time constraints, vagueness of presenting symptoms and lack of training in early recognition. We created a teaching aid using video clips from memory clinics applying key findings of our conversation analysis studies. <h3>Method</h3> Participatory design and focus groups were used to produce, develop and validate a digital film based learning resource to aid diagnosis. Four case studies (2 FMD and 2 NDD) were shown following a teaching session with the new teaching aid to one primary care focus group (n=7) and at a regional dementia training day (n=25). <h3>Results</h3> Focus groups found the resource relevant for integration into practice, meeting the target audience needs. Clinicians (n=32) were able to make a diagnosis but scoring depended on complexity of case. <h3>Conclusion</h3> Further data collection and development is required but this resource can be developed as an on-line training module on dementia diagnosis.

Although conversation analysis (CA) has been widely employed in different languages, its application to Greek talk-in-interaction is still quite limited. For this reason, in our introduction we summarise briefly the foundations of CA and present international and Greek CA bibliography on different areas of analysis in a manner that will be accessible to conversation analysts of various interests but also to researchers who are new to the field. We begin by outlining the foundations of CA and then offer a brief background to its development and its relationship to other disciplines. The empirical basis of CA is stressed by focussing on the process of collecting and transcribing data for CA and the method and units of analysis. We also give background information on the main CA areas of analysis (grammar-and-interaction, prosody, narrative analysis, institutional interaction, feminist CA, membership categorisation analysis, multimodal interaction). Finally, we present a brief overview of past studies of Greek talk-in-interaction and conclude with a summary of the articles of the Special Issue. By placing the emphasis on the fine-grained, turn-by-turn analysis, its ethnomethodological underpinnings and the understanding of social action, our aim is to set the tone for this Special Issue and to encourage future study of Greek conversational data and cross-cultural comparisons.

Conversation analysis (henceforth, CA) emerged in the 1960s in the work of the American sociologist, Harvey Sacks, and his colleagues Emanuel Schegloff and Gail Jefferson. CA’s roots are in ethnomethodology (henceforth, EM: literally, ‘the study of people’s methods’), a programme developed by another sociologist, Harold Garfinkel (1967). His basic idea was that people in society, or members, continuously engage in making sense of the world and, in so doing, methodically display their understandings of it: making their activities ‘visibly-rational-and-reportable-for-all-practical-purposes’ (Garfinkel 1967: vii). Language was central to the EM project of explicating members’ methods for producing orderly and accountable social activities. Like Garfinkel, Sacks’s aim was to develop an alternative to mainstream sociology: an observational science of society and social action that could be grounded in the ‘details of actual events’ (Sacks 1984: 26). CA employs technical transcripts of recordings of everyday and institutional talk ofvarious kinds, and its empirical projects now comprise over forty years of findings about how conversation works. These projects include the analysis of how people take turns in conversation, how turns at talk are designed, what it means to overlap with another speaker or produce a delayed response, how people make reference to one another, how actions (e.g. complaining, questioning, assessing, inviting) are accomplished, how people develop and move through courses of action, how people solve problems in hearing, speaking and understanding, and a range of other conversational phenomena (see Sacks 1992; Schegloff 2007; for introductions see ten Have 2007; Hutchby and Wooffitt 1998). The various interactional contexts that comprise legal institutions (e.g. courtrooms,police stations, emergency services, prisons, legal documents, lawyers’ offices) have provided materials for EM and CA since their beginnings. For example, in hisgroundbreaking book on EM, Garfinkel (1967: 105) examined jurors’ decision-making practices in the allocation of blame and in ‘recommending remedies’ (see also Manzo 1996 on jury interaction; and see Bittner 1967; Cicourel 1968; Sacks 1972; Sudnow 1965; Wieder 1974, for other classic ethnomethodological studies of legal institutions). A key conversation analytic study was Atkinson and Drew’s (1979) investigation of the organisation of cross-examination in courtrooms, focusing on the design of lawyers’ questions – particularly those that were designed to allocate blame – and witnesses’ responses to such questions (see also Beach 1985; Bogen and Lynch 1989; Burns 2001; Galatolo 2007; Komter 1998; Lynch 2007; Maynard 1984; Pollner 1974; Pomerantz 1987, on courtroom interaction of various kinds). Other sites of investigation include the everyday workings of law firms (e.g. Travers 1997); the production of legal texts and records (e.g. Komter 2006; Meehan 1986; Summerfield and McHoul 2005); and encounters between citizens and the police (e.g. Meehan 1989; Sharrock and Watson 1989; Whalen and Zimmerman 1990). Interaction in places such as courtrooms can constitute some of the most highly consequential moments in people’s lives. This chapter focuses on another potent site of legal interaction: the police interroga-tion of suspects. More specifically, it focuses on the sorts of things that suspects’ lawyers do in police interviews, which is a hitherto unexplored aspect of interrogation settings. In presenting our analysis of lawyers’ interventions, we aim also to demonstrate and showcase CA as a method for forensic linguistics.

BackgroundA large number of the hospice patients have been reported to be with symptoms of pain. Thus, managing the patient’s pain is one aspect of hospice care provision. The delivery of pain care services could be facilitated through effective communication. However, little has been done to explore the interactional details of the delivery of pain care services in palliative care.MethodsConversation analysis is a useful method to explore the interactional details of interaction by hospice care providers and terminally ill patients. Using the method of Conversation Analysis (CA), this study aims to demonstrate how the hospice care provider employs different types of interactional practices to address the patient’s pain concerns. The data showed in this study are collected from the Alexander St website http://ctiv.alexanderstreet.com, an educational resource presenting a large collection of psycho-therapeutic videos.ResultsIn this study, an illustrative analysis is demonstrated to show the potential of conversation analysis for research on pain talk in palliative care. It has been shown that conversation analysis could contribute to unfolding the interactional details regarding “pain talk” in hospice care settings. Specifically, conversation analysis could provide a detailed description and interpretation of the conversational practices, which are used to construct hospice care provider participation in delivering pain talk. In addition, conversation analysis could also demonstrate the interactional resources by which patients disclose their experiences of physical or spiritual pain to the hospice care provider and the way how the hospice care provider responds to the patient’s troubles talk or feelings talk.ConclusionsThis study identifies five types of interactional resources which are used to deal with the patient’s pain concerns in hospice care setting. A conversation analytical study of pain talk in hospice care could provide a turn-by-turn description of how the hospice care provider communicates with the terminally ill patient in terms of the patient’s pain concerns. The findings in this study could inform how the hospice care provider initiates, delivers and develops a pain talk with the terminally ill patient effectively.