A talk by Gail Jefferson, one of the founders of Conversation Analysis, has been recently made available, and Maurice Nevile undertook to transcribe it for the benefit of the language-in-interaction community. Here he reports on what it meant to him, and what we can all get out of such a powerful historical document.

Maurice Nevile, University of Southern Denmark

Transcribing Gail Jefferson: The 1977 Boston talk as it actually was

When I first saw the film recording of Gail Jefferson presenting at the 1977 Boston University Conference on Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis I was immediately keen to transcribe it. Continue reading →

As a bonus to the guest blogs the on IPrA conference, I’m delighted that Elliott Hoey has accepted an invitation to contribute a report on Tanya Stivers’ keynote address. This was one of the most thoughtful and original presentations, raising as it did the question: did the evolution of talk favour two, and only two, people?

Elliott Hoey, Max Planck Institute, Nijmegen

The taskmasters at IPrA convinced a sizeable crowd to attend an 8:30am plenary talk by Tanya Stivers, who suggested that conversation is “built” for dyadic interaction. Her abstract can be found here.  The following is not verbatim reporting, but simply what I recall. Continue reading →

In this final round-up of reports from the International Pragmatics (IPrA) conference in Antwerp, I’m delighted to have reflections of Barbara de Cock on CA and social media (including Twitter!) and then Catrin Rhys looking forward to her and her colleagues’ organisation of the next big IPrA, in Belfast 2017.

Barbara de Cock: CA, CMC and social media

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In the second of our guest blogs on the huge IPrA conference, Mark Dingemanse sends in this comprehensive and thoughtful report on one of the liveliest of the discussion Panels – how languages other than English fare in the research community.

Transcribing talk-in-interaction in languages other than English

Mark Dingemanse, MPI Nijmegen

Testifying to the power of CA methods and insights, a growing number of researchers study the empirical details of talk-in-interaction in languages other than English.

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I’m delighted to introduce a series of short guest blogs written by friends of ROLSI who were at the Antwerp IPrA conference, and took active roles in Panels and presentations. I’ll be publishing their reflections in a series over the next couple of weeks.

We start with a report by two early-career researchers on their experiences of one of the linguistics world’s largest international meetings, then a report on a panel of papers reporting research on “change-of-state” tokens. Continue reading →

In June 2015, the “Revisiting Participation: Language and Bodies in Interaction” conference took place at the University of Basel in Switzerland. It was a tremendous success, and I’m delighted that three of the organisers, David Monteiro, Hanna Svensson & Nynke van Schepen have sent this enthusiastic report. Continue reading →

Conversation Analysis (CA) is a particularly attractive research tool for investigating the communication of people with autism: its careful, moment-by-moment method picks up just how it is that their interactional moves fail (and succeed). In this very welcome guest blog, Tom Muskett explains the promises of CA in working with the complexities of this often distressing disorder.

Tom Muskett, now at Leeds Beckett University

I was a speech and language therapist with an interest in working with children on the autism spectrum. By definition, this diagnosis is associated with so-called deficits in social interaction and communication, but I had become increasingly dissatisfied with the accepted representations of these, particularly within research and clinical writing.

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In this guest blog, two enterprising young researchers, Fabio Ferraz de Almeida and Joe Ford, grapple with the slippery combination of ethnomethodology and conversation analysis. They ask: for a given research topic, which bits of each does one use?

Fabio Ferraz de Almeida and Joe Ford, Loughborough University

Ethnomethodology and conversation analysis (hereafter EMCA) have a long history of being used to examine social (inter)action in institutional environments. Moreover, they are also frequently used as a way of re-examining topics that have been previously studied using other approaches. This synthesis can yield a number of benefits – for the institutions, for our understanding of the topics and, of course, for EMCA.

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