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
Category Archives: Teaching
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.
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.
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 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…
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
Guest blog: Charlotte Albury on teaching CA to clinicians
Conversation analysis is increasingly being rolled out as a method for practitioners to use in their work, or at least as a corrective to the idea that all qualitative research is simply a matter of interviewing people. If it has the effect of sensitising them to the ebb and flow of talk in their everyday practices , that’s a bonus. I’m delighted that Oxford early-career researcher Charlotte Albury has written us a blog about her experiences in putting CA in front of a group of medical practitioners.
Charlotte Albury, Nuffield Department of Primary Care
Recently I was invited to teach Conversation Analysis at the University of Antwerp. Their qualitative research methods summer school trains clinicians, quantitative researchers, and research students in qualitative research design; analysis; and appraisal, with a focus on clinical settings. Continue reading
Guest Blog: A survey of CA craft skills
How do you handle your data? One big file? Hundreds of randomly-lableled files, in odd folders? Or a carefully curated, updated and catalogued easy-retrieval system? Sarah J White set out to find the answer from her fellow Twitter users….
Sarah J White, Macquarie University
A few weeks ago I started thinking about processes and tools in conversation analysis. This year I have embarked on my biggest CA project since my PhD, so I thought it was time for a refresh to ensure I am keeping up. There are many, many resources available on how to do CA (I even have a methods chapter coming out soon), but that actual processes used to document the analysis seem less well defined. Continue reading
Guest blog: Melisa Stevanovic and Elina Weiste on impossible content analysis
Two of Finland’s most active and productive young Conversation Analysis researchers, Melisa Stevanovic and Elina Weiste, tried their hand at an intriguing experiment: analysing what people said about doing CA. The result was a thoughtful article (not in ROLSI) but clearly there was more to it than that, so I was delighted when they agreed to do a guest blog here.
The title they suggested was “On the impossibility of conducting content analysis: Back story of our data-session paper”, which sets the scene tantalisingly…
Dr Melisa Stevanovic, Helsinki University
Dr Elina Weiste, Helsinki University
Six ways not to do discourse analysis
A recent blog by Dariusz Galasiński about the poverty of some qualitative analysis has prompted me to dust down an old paper from back in 2003. Written mostly by Michael Billig, it was something of a succès d’estime among those who could find it – but it got lost when the online journal it was in folded. Its worries about discourse analysis are easily generalised to qualitative research more broadly; and, as Galasiński’s blog shows, still all too topical.
This is an abridged version; if you’d like to read the properly referenced full thing, probably the easiest place to get it is as a .pdf from Loughborough University’s repository.
Discourse analysis means doing analysis: A critique of six analytic shortcomings Continue reading
Loughborough’s CA Days – the 10th Anniversary
2016 was the 10th successive year we’ve held a Conversation Analysis Days at Loughborough University’s Department of Social Sciences. Here’s a brief account of how we got here, and why we think that it’s such a popular and enjoyable occasion. Charles Antaki and Liz Stokoe, organisers.
Charles Antaki
Liz Stokoe
It started out as a bright idea to invite friends and colleagues doing CA to come to a day’s meeting at Loughborough – no real reason, other than a sudden enthusiasm of the ‘let’s put a show on right here in the barn‘ type, and a list of people we wanted to see.
