Conversation analysis (CA) is a method that studies how people organize and accomplish social interaction through talk-in-interaction. It examines recordings of real-life conversations to understand rules and practices from an interactional perspective. CA focuses on features like turn-taking, sequence organization through question-answer pairs, and repair when problems arise. Recordings are transcribed with notation to retain prosodic and sequential elements, allowing researchers to analyze how conversations are structured through turns and sequences of communicative actions.

1. CONVERSATION ANALYSIS
Muhammad Azam
Research Scholar
COMSATS Institute of Information
Technology Lahore, Pakistan

2. Conversation Analysis (CA)
• Conversation:
• A conversation is an exchange of thoughts and ideas between
two or more people.
• A conversation occurs when people cooperate with each other
in order to introduce and sustain a single focus of attention by
taking turns with each other.

3. Conversation Analysis (CA)
• It studies the methods of conversation which people use to
organize a social talk.
• It investigates rules and practices from an interactional
perspective and studies them by examining recordings of
real-life interactions.

4. Conversation Analysis (CA)
• Although the foundational work in CA focuses on talk in
conversations, the framework has gradually been extended to
research of other types of talk such as medical and clinical
interaction, lessons, or news interviews. This is why the more
general characterization ‘talk in interaction’ nowadays is
often preferred over ‘conversation.’

5. Studying Transcriptions of
Recorded Talk
• The recordings are transcribed according to specific
conventions.
• Transcription Notation:
It helps to retain features of prosody and turn positioning in
the transcription.

6. Transcription Notation

7. Transcription Notation

8. Transcription Notation

9. Transcription Notation

10. Organization of Conversation
• Two levels of Organization
1) Turn taking
The participants know where and how to change the roles of speaker and
listener
2) Sequence Organization
There is a coherent exchange of communicative actions for instance the
episode starts with a question and it ends with the answer to that
question.

11. Turn Taking
• Interruption and gaps are rare
• The basic organizational problem that participants have to
solve, each turn anew, is to determine when the speaker will
complete the current turn.
• The recipient is not only figuring out what the turn is about
and what the speaker is doing with it, he also has to be alert
for the moment it might become his turn to speak.

12. Turn Taking
• Interruption and gaps are rare
• The basic organizational problem that participants have to
solve, each turn anew, is to determine when the speaker will
complete the current turn.
• The recipient is not only figuring out what the turn is about
and what the speaker is doing with it, he also has to be alert
for the moment it might become his turn to speak.

13. Turn Taking
• Turn constructional Units (TCUs)
Each turn is built with at least one turn constructional unit. such as the
turns with no more than the words here, yes, or no.
Other TCUs have a syntactically more elaborate design, such as the
interrogative clause ‘is she there too.?’
• The construction of a TCU, the recipient will make different
predictions as to when the ongoing turn may be complete.

14. Turn Taking

15. Turn Taking
• TCUs help syntactically in anticipating the point of
completeness
• Prosody is the other way of knowing this point
a speaker can stretch or reduce the vocalization of the intended last
syllable of the turn, or mark it with a noticeable tone movement such as
the falling pitch movement in the last word

16. Sequence Organization
• The ways conversationalists link turns to each other as a
coherent series of interrelated communicative actions is
called sequence organization.
– Question/answer
– Request/decision
– Informative/receipt
– Criticism/reply
– These two-parts sequences are called adjacency pairs

17. Sequence Organization
• Adjacency Pair
• When a recipient of a turn at talk hears the speaker’s
utterance as the first part of a particular type of adjacency
pair, the appropriate thing to do next is to deliver an
utterance that may count as the second part of the same pair.
• Question; first part
• Answer to that question; second part

18. Sequence Organization

19. Sequence Organization
• Insertion Sequence
The delay in the answer of any question do to comprehension problems.
• The problems are solved by initiating repairs and by
repairing the problem.

20. Sequence Organization