2. Introduction
• the role of social context
• organization of talk-in-interaction
• ethnomethodology and CA
• “conversation may be taken to be that familiar predominant kind of
talk in which two or more participants freely alternate in speaking,
which generally occurs outside institutional settings like religious
services, law courts, classrooms and the like.”
Levinson (1983, p.284)
• Approaches to the study of talk: linguistic approach, systemic
functional linguistic approach, interaction analysis, discourse
analysis, critical discourse analysis, ethnography, conversation
analysis.
• The purpose of presentation
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4. Introduction
• The importance of talk or talk-in-interaction
• The use of language in talk
• Different approaches to the study of talk
• The aims of Ethnomethodology:
-to focus on how in the use of language, people
employ commonsense knowledge and practical
reasoning.
-to study the methods or practices that people use to
accomplish their everyday lives; it is interested in
how social actors provide accounts of situations.
-to investigate how members of society construct
and manage their sense of social structure by
examining taken for granted realities.
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5. Historical Background
• Origin
It is a fairly recent sociological perspective, an approach to sociological
inquiry founded by the American sociologist Harold Garfinkel in the
early 1960s.
• The term
-ethno+method+ology
-the study of ‘ethnic’ (the participant’s own/insider perspective)
methods of production and interpretation of social interaction
-member’s method
• Harold Garfinkel (1917 –2011)
-Studies in Ethnomethodology (1967)
-He is influenced by Talcott Parsons and Durkheim and Max Weber
and then phenomenologists Alfred Schutz and Husserl . And also
Martin Heidegger's phenomenology of being / Existential
Phenomenology.
-He inspired Harvey Sacks, Emanuel Schegloff and Jail Jefferson
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6. EMapproachasareactionto mainstreamsociology
• mainstream sociology imposed sociological categories on
the ordinary person
• EM rejects the view that sociologist’s knowledge is superior
to the knowledge of members of society.
• EM is closer to reality and the everyday actions of the real
person; it is the interpretation of everyday life by the social
actors themselves
• commonsense knowledge is not recognized in the sociology
of the time
• EM emphasized on the local, moment-by-moment
determination of meaning in social contexts while the
mainstream’s emphasis was on grand theorizing and
abstracted empiricism 6
7. Garfinkel’s experimentsof “routinegrounds of
everydayactivities’
• the two most typical strategies of ethnomethodological
research are breaching experiments and the use of tapes
and transcripts.
• Breaching experiments are experiments where "social
reality is violated in order to shed light on the methods
by which people construct social reality.“
• Different Cases of experiment
• All these examples are designed to illuminate the
"common background understandings" that exist in all
relationships
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11. A Critique of ethnomethodology
• EM is neglectful of the importance of studying society on a
wider scale. It neglects that mundane activities of people are
constrained by social factors that cannot be appreciated
through such small-scale analysis.
• It does not promote equality changes to the existing social
world, especially constrained by its methodology, and
therefore from this perspective is limited in its usefulness of
studying the everyday functioning of society.
• the invisibility of commonsense’.
• lacks both a formally stated theory and a formal methodology
• Garfinkel’s breaching experiment is challenged from an ethical
point of view.
• The conversation analysis sphere of ethnomethodology also
has its own limitations;
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13. Overview
• CA emerged out of EM
• CA is a set of method for working with audio and video
recordings of talk and social interaction. it is the result of
applying EM principles to naturally occurring talk. Talk-in-
interaction is the object of inquiry in CA. CA studies the
organization and the order of social actions in interaction. This
organization and order is produced and oriented to by the
inetractans and should be uncovered an described by the
analyst’s emic perspective.
• Difference between CA and EM
• Ethno studies any kind of human action but CA only studies the
human actions manifested through talk or language.
• Main uses of conversation analysis
• to analyze ordinary conversations
• to analyze institutional talk.
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14. The Objectives of CA
• to uncover the shared norms or cultural conventions
governing who can say what, when in particular
communicative situations.
• to describe and explicate of the competences that ordinary
speakers use and rely on in participating in intelligible socially
organized interaction
• to describe the procedures and expectancies by which
conversationalists produce their own behavior and understand
that of others.
• to search for patterns, ‘objective’ patterns or in Garfinkel’s
term (natural facts or routine grounds of every day activities)
• to study the organization and the order of social actions in
interaction
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15. History and Development of CA
• During the 1960’s and 1970’s conversation analysis emerged
from within sociology and, in particular, from EM sociologists
• The chief originator of CA is Harvey Sacks although in
collaboration with two of his colleagues Emanuel Schegloff
and Geil Jefferson.
• They were inspired by two important sociologists, Erving
Goffman’s conception of the interaction order and Harold
Garfinkel’s structure of social action through EM approaches.
• Sack’s idea was radical in his time where the dominant view
was Chomskian linguistic view
• How did CA start in sociology? With a puzzle
• Sack’s story…
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16. (From Sacks, 1992, vol. I: 3)
A: this is Mr. Smith, may I help
you?
B: I can’t hear you.
A: This is Mr Smith
B: Smith
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17. Sacks examined the caller’s utterance ‘I can’t hear you’. He did not treat
it as a straightforward report of a communication problem, he examined
it to reveal what it might be doing (the action). Sacks raised if there is a
the possibility of investigating utterances as objects which speakers use
to get things done in the course of their interactions with others.
Sacks observes that there are norms concerning where in conversation
certain kinds of activities should happen; and in conversation between
strangers names tend to be exchanged in initial turns. Developing this,
Sacks argues that the caller is using the utterance ‘I can’t hear you’ to fill
the slot in the conversation where it would be expected that he return
his name. and he has not had to refuse to give his name.
Sacks was not claiming that on every occasion when someone says ‘I
can’t hear you’ they are avoiding giving their name; nor was he saying
that doing ‘not hearing’ was the only method of avoiding giving a name.
He was simply noting that it was possible to analyze how, in this instance,
this particular utter-ance performed this particular activity in this
particular slot, or place in the interaction.
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19. (Heritage, 1984)
1) interaction is structurally organized
2) contributions to interaction are contextually oriented
the significance of any speaker's communicative action
is doubly contextual in being both context-shaped and
context-renewing
1) these two properties inhere in the details of
interaction so that no order of detail can be
dismissed, a priori, as disorderly, accidental or
irrelevant.
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20. (Seedhouse, 2004) principles of CA
1) There is order at all points in interaction
2) Contributions to interaction are context-shaped (reference
to sequential environment) and context-renewing (context
of any next action is renewed by the current action)
3) No order of detailed can be dismissed as disorderly or
accidental. This refers to the highly detailed transcription in
CA
4) Analysis is bottom-up and data-driven without any prior
theoretical assumptions
The essential question we ask at all stages of CA of data:
Why that, in that way, right now??? Related to interaction as
action (why that) expressed through linguistic forms (in that
way) in a developing sequence (right now).
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21. CA methodology or methods
• collecting data, transcribing it, analyzing it, creating data
collections, developing an analysis and theorizing the
observation.
• Collecting data
*CA uses naturally occurring interaction as a source of data
and it embraces both verbal and non-verbal conduct.
*Early CA used everyday, mundane conversations and
until recently the various forms of institutional
interactions
*In transcription: attention to details
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22. The reasons or major advantages of using recording in contrast to surveys,
questionnaires or experimental methodology :
1) sociology is about human actions, recording can best show you how
people 'did' actions and other methods like surveys and questionnaires are
about what people say they did.
2) With tape-recorded conversation the analyst can hear it repeatedly and
can study it again and again
3) It permits other researchers and the readers to have direct access to the
data about which claims made and to look at the analysis to check and
allows for unanticipated noticing by others. making analysis subject to
detailed public scrutiny and helping to minimize the influence of
personal preconceptions or analytical biases.
4) It provides a level of complexity can be recovered from recordings of
actual conversation, recordings can open up a range of phenomena that
no one can expect them to happen.
5) because the data are available in 'raw' form they can be reused in a
variety of investigations and can be re-examined in the context of new
findings.
6) It is contrasted to quantitative and experimentally produced data.
And why video-recording?
The best way however is video recording because it provides a rich source data,
not just talk but also the body and gaze and gesture
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23. The main concepts & findings in CA
types of or aspects interactional organization :
• Turn-taking organization
• Organization of action/sequence organization
• Preference organization
• Repair
• Topic
• Story telling
• Opening and closing in telephone calls
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24. Turn-taking
• Turn-taking is a basic form of organization for conversation.
• It means taking, holding and relinquishing speaking floor
• It provides coherence and orderliness and it is the
requirement of any joint action
• turn-taking system in conversation is “locally managed” (it
organizes current turn and the next turn) and “party-
administered” (there is no referee to determine who should
speak next) rather participants themselves work this out.
• Sacks’ “one party at a time” rule
• turn-constructional units (TCU)
• “transition-relevance place” (TRP)
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25. Adjacency pairs
• It is described in terms of five basic characteristics.
An adjacency pair is:
• (1) A sequence of two utterances, which are
• (2) adjacent,
• (3) produced by different speakers,
• (4) ordered as a first part and second part, and
• (5) typed, so that a first part requires a particular
second part (or range of second parts)
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26. Organization of action/sequence
organization
• This focuses on how actions are ordered in conversation
• analysis involves attention to both: the actions being
accomplished by a turn and the practices of speaking which
make the actions to happen through linguistic forms within
some context.
• adjacency pairs is a basic form of action sequencing. We
replace the strict criteria of adjacency pair with the notion of
conditional relevance: the criterion for adjacency pair that
given the first pair part the second is relevant and expectable.
If the second fails to occur, it is noticeably absent and
accountable. What binds the the parts of adjacency pair is not
the formation of a rule that specify that a question must be
answered but the expectation should be attended to.
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29. CA’s notion of context
• Schegloff (1992) and context:
He has indicated that context can be considered in two
different ways. Context may be external to the interaction
itself; this includes context in the form of social categories,
social relationships and institutional and cultural settings.
The second is internal to the interaction and is created by
participants through their talk.
CA think of 'context' as something endogenously
generated within the talk of the participants and, indeed,
as something created in and through that talk.
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30. CA vs other approaches
Differences between the methodology of linguistics and CA
methodology
Ca’s interest is in the social act and the interactional
organization of social activity while linguistics is interested in
language and the structure of language; in CA words used in talk
are not studied as semantic units but as products or objects for
negotiation of activity or action in the talk (Hutchby and
Wooffitt)
differences between conversation analysis and discourse
analysis
Both approaches explains how coherence and sequential
organization in discourse is produced and understood 30
31. CA and DA
1) In focus, CA’s focus is on processes involved in social interaction and
does not include written texts or larger sociocultural phenomena
2) In method
• CA uses a bottom-up, emic, data-driven approach is perfectly capable
of portraying the interactional architecture ; DA the traditional top-
down, etic, theory –driven method.
• CA is aimed at determining the methods and resources that the
interactional participants use to produce interactional contributions
and make sense of the contributions of others.
• DA uses the methodology, principles and concepts of linguistics and -it
extends techniques in linguistics beyond the unit of sentence. The
procedures employed are: 1) isolation of a set of categories or units of
diocese and 2) formulation of rules to decide well-formed sequences of
categories/coherent discourses from ill-formed sequences/incoherent
discourse. And there is an appeal to intuitions. And Its two types: text
grammarians and speech act theorists
• Conversation analysis is an empirical approach to the study of
conversation avoids pre-identified categories; the method is instead
inductive, the search is for recurring patterns and it does not use no
intuitive judgments 31
32. A critique of CA
Collecting data
• The difficulty of recording data because of the noise present in the
context as well as getting permission for the recording.
• transcription is time-consuming and tedious, mechanical and needs a
great deal of accuracy.
• use of a very restricted data base, i.e. only recordings of naturally
occurring interactions. and no use of other sources such as participants
personal background as the usual macro-sociological variables (age,
gender), interviews, their comments and interpretation of data
• Transcription is a subjective process
Data analysis
• the potential methodological risk of CA lies in the analyst's inferences
and presuppositions.
• The analytic process is sensitive to misinterpretation and over-
interpretation
• Aneclotalism which means a few well-chosen examples (Dorneiy, 2007)
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33. “We must see …thata conversationhas a life of its
own and makes demandsof its own behalf.Itis a
littlesocialsystemwith its own boundary-
maintainingtendencies;it is a littlepatchof
commitmentand loyaltywith itsown heroesand
its own villains.”
(Goffman, 1957,p. 47)
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