Category Archives: Teaching

Guest Blog: Can you use an AI-generated podcast of a ROLSI article to help teach CA?

No one in higher education will escape the urgent debate about the role of AI in teaching and learning. But what, specifically, does it mean for teaching conversation analysis? Is there anything about the peculiarities of generative AI that could actually be useful? Bogdana Huma, Nthabiseng Shongwe, Borbála Sallai, all from the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, take us through an intriguing experiment which tries to answer that question. Along the way, Bogdana links to an intriguing AI-generated podcast of a ROLSI article, which is a fascinating artefact in its own right, and a novel teaching resource.

Bogdana Huma, Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam

In academia, the availability of generative Artificial Intelligence (genAI) through platforms such as ChatGPT, Claude, or NotebookLM has started to transform how we work, how we teach, how we learn, and even how we think. When we seek information, it is tempting to turn to these platforms, even though we know that their answers can be unreliable. Referred to as “hallucinating”, “falsifying”, or “fabricating”, making up facts is genAI’s well-known Achilles’ heel for which there is no remedy in sight.

Continue reading →

Guest Blog: 93% of all misinformation is nonverbal: How a zombie statistic came and stayed

Students of language all too often have to sigh and turn away when they hear yet another expert claim that 75% – or is it 85%? Or 93%? – of communication is via body language. Where does this zombie stat come from, and why won’t it go away? I’m delighted that Gonen Dori-Hacohen has taken on the job of tracking it down, and it makes for some fascinating reading.

Gonen Dori-Hacohen, U Mass., Amherst

“Although some have suggested that as much as 93% of conversational meaning is communicated nonverbally (Mehrabian, 1968), more conservative estimates indicate that nonverbal behaviors account for 60 to 65% of the meaning conveyed in an interpersonal exchange (Birdwhistell, 1970; Burgoon, 1994). That is, even conservative estimates ascribe nearly twice as much meaning-making power to nonverbal communication as to verbal—and it is not difficult to understand why, given the number of nonverbal channels and the range of nonverbal behaviors to which people have access.” (Guerrero & Floyd, 2006, p. 2)

Continue reading →

A new bibliography of all articles in ROLSI, 1987-2022

Back in 2015, Maurice Nevile tracked down and listed every single article published in ROLSI between 1987 and 2014. That was an enormous feat of scholarship, and now he’s updated the catalogue.

Maurice Nevile, University of Canberra

Now Maurice’s 2023 revised version of the bibliography presents, in chronological order, all items published in the journal ROLSI, from 1987 to 2022 (excluding editor comments).

The list makes it easier to view the journal’s contents at a glance, or to track and find specific items, authors, analytic interests and phenomena, settings and situations, or data languages, etc. The list begins in 1987, when the journal changed its name and orientation, after starting in 1969 as Papers in Linguistics.

Continue reading →

Guest Blog:  Building an EMCA community at CADSS

Groups of EM/CA analysts have sprung up all over the world to share expertise, pore over data together, bounce ideas off each other and provide a sense of shared community. Here Simon Stewart gives an enthusiastic account of recent developments of the group based on the south coast of England.

Simon Stewart, Southampton

This post is intended to share with the CA community some of the resources and learning that have come from our group, CA Data Sessions South (CADSS), in its first 18 months.

Continue reading →

Guest blog: Sharing CA with the public at a research festival

CA is blessed with some exceptionally able communicators, and there is a growing appetite to reach out to members of the public with a show of what CA can do (see the other blogs in this “CA Teaching” section). One now well-established tradition is for members of York’s Centre for Advanced Studies in Language and Communication (CASLC) to engage in York’s research festival (“Yornight“), and I’m delighted that Rose Rickford has sent in a report of what happened this year. Continue reading →

Guest blog: Rebecca Clift on teaching CA in China

The global reach of Conversation Analysis is ever-expanding, as illustrated by the interest generated in CA workshops wherever in the world they take place. Here Rebecca Clift gives us a brief but evocative account of her trip to China with colleagues from the UK and the USA.

Screenshot 2019-08-02 at 10.10.56

Rebecca Clift, Essex University

There was a happy gathering for the third National Workshop in Conversation Analysis at Shanxi University, China, from 15th-19thJuly 2019. The huge group photo (see the  foot of the page) more or less gets everyone in! Continue reading →

Guest blog: How to make CA fun for 182 kids (and 171 adults)

How do you make Conversation Analysis intelligible to children? And make it enough fun that they actually want to see how it works, and try it out? That is the challenge happily taken on by the enterprising team of postgraduate students Reihaneh Afshari Saleh, Zhiying Jian, Marina Cantarutti and Yumei Gan. I’m delighted that they agreed to write it up; their report makes for lively reading.

Screenshot 2019-06-24 at 09.40.54.png

Zhiying Jian, Marina Cantarutti, Yumei Gan and Afshari Saleh

One of the most fulfilling things when doing our sometimes lonely PhD research is being told that what we do matters. Public engagement gives you a chance to experience that. We know that making our research accessible to the public can be daunting, and when your audience is potentially 200 kids aged 5-11, even more so! The PhD students in Language and Communication at the University of York, Reihaneh Afshari Saleh, Zhiying Jian, and Marina Cantarutti, and our PhD student visitor from the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Yumei Gan, decided to rise to the challenge and make Conversation Analysis (even more) fun! Continue reading →

Guest blog: Ruth Parry on how to use analogies to introduce CA to new audiences

CA research is increasingly finding application to real-world problems, but getting its virtues across to a lay audience – and potential collaborators – is not always easy. I’m delighted that Ruth Parry, who has extensive experience, has agreed to let us into some of the tips and tricks of the trade – especially the power of using analogies to get the message across.

Ruth head&shoulders

Ruth Parry, Loughborough University

When your scientific approach is one few people have heard of, is pretty technical, and has a conventional title that doesn’t help much (or could even mislead), tried and tested ways to introduce and explain it are a boon. In this blog I describe some ways to explain conversation analysis to others – whether we’re presenting our research, delivering CA-based training, or building collaborative projects with teams from diverse backgrounds. Continue reading →

Guest Blog: Marina Cantarutti on presenting CA to the public

Explaining what we do to the general public can be a daunting exercise, but the rewards can be well worth it.  Marina Cantarutti, doing her doctoral research at the University of York, took on the task, and presented her work at a science fair of the kind that hosted Saul Albert and colleagues’ excellent CA Rollercoaster. She lived to tell the (happy) tale…

Screenshot 2018-11-19 at 15.55.41
Marina Cantarutti, University of York

For some areas of linguistics, it may be a bit difficult to make your work accessible to the public without feeling you are betraying yourself, or your knowledge. The fear of trivialising is always at the back of one’s mind. Moreover, when you’re out there on your own, you are the sole representative of the discipline … daunting! Continue reading →