1. The document discusses approaches to discourse analysis (DA), focusing on Conversation Analysis (CA). CA aims to closely analyze talk-in-interaction to describe patterns of communication and social acts. 2. There are two branches of CA - Linguistic CA focuses only on language, while Ethnomethodological CA prioritizes social acts and how language enables them. 3. Ethnomethodological CA follows five stages of analysis: unmotivated looking, inductive search, establishing regularities, detailed analysis, and a generalized account. The goal is to understand social acts from the participants' perspective.

1. UNIVERSIDAD SANTO TOMÁS
VICERRECTORIA DE UNIVERSIDAD ABIERTA Y A DISTANCIA
FACULTAD DE EDUCACION
LICENCIATURA EN LENGUA EXTRANJERA INGLÉS
DISCOURSE ANALYSIS (DA)
Prepared by Edgar Lucero
APPROACHES TO DA
Towards an analysis of discourse
1. Conversation Analysis (CA)
Taken from: Lucero, E. (In publish). Speech Acts in EFL Classroom Interaction. Colombian Applied Linguistics Journal –CALJ.
Universidad Distrital Francisco José de Caldas.
In order to identify patterns of communication and social acts that emerge in
interactions, it becomes necessary to implement the Conversation Analysis (CA)
Approach. Schegloff (1997), Markee (2000), and Cameron (2001) agree on
defining CA as an approach to closely analyze details from data in talk-in-
interaction. For these authors, CA is a data-centered form of discourse analysis
whose purpose is to describe and interpret sequential patterns which are
observable in data.
However, according to Seedhouse (2004), several studies which have been done
under the CA approach have provided merely linguistic findings. This author claims
that this has happened because these works have put the context of the
conversations apart forgetting the original vision of CA in which its primary interest
must be in the social acts and not in linguistic interests. Therefore, CA must not
treat language exclusively as an “autonomous system independent of its use”
(Seedhouse, 2004b, p. 165). On the contrary, CA must treat language as a set of
resources by which participants perform their social acts.
This situation has created two branches of CA, one that is Linguistic CA, which
only studies linguistic aspects of interactions from data itself without taking into
account the context in which it emerges, and other that is Ethnomethodological CA,
in which the primary interest is in the social acts that occur in interactions and only
marginally in language. Social acts are understood in this approach as all those
utterances, or set of utterances, that serve as a function in communication
(Schegloff, 1988; Cameron, 2001; Seedhouse, 2004a).
Under this vision, CA studies, from an emic perspective1, “how social acts are
mainly organized in interaction, and, as part of it, how social acts are packaged
and delivered in linguistic terms” (Seedhouse, 2004, p. 62). In total,
Ethnomethodoligical CA studies explain the principles on which people act and use
language to interact in situ. By taking this into account, Seedhouse (2004, 2004a)
1
Seedhouse (2004b) makes the distinction between etic and emic perspectives. By citing K. Pike, Seedhouse
states that the etic perspective studies behavior as from outside of a particular system. On the contrary, the
emic viewpoint studies behavior from “the participants’ perspective within the interactional environment in
which the talk occurs” (p. 166).

2. highlights four main principles that an Ethnomethodological CA research must
always considered:
1. The analysis seeks to identify and describe the organization of social acts
and patterns of communication (speech acts in this research project) in talk-
in-interaction, and how those acts are produced, developed, and maintained
by the interactants.
2. The interaction (between the teacher and the students in this case) is
understood as a systematically organized construction due to the active
decisions of the interactants in regard to what is occurring. Therefore, there
is a rational design in the interaction. Any turn at talk becomes a display of a
cognitive, emotional, and attitudinal state, an analysis of context and of the
previous turns in the sequence which renews the context. It means that any
utterance is relevant to and deals with how the interactants attend to what is
occurring.
3. The interaction (between the teacher and the students) is context-shaped
and context-renewed. As a result, utterances in conversation are not treated
literally but are understood by reference to context and assumptions about
the other interactant.
4. Transcriptions show order of patterns of communication and their highly
empirical orientation of the interactants (the teacher and the student)
towards how the interaction is happening. Thus, transcriptions determine
how participants understand and respond to one another in their turns at
talk, with a central focus on how sequences of action are generated.
Procedures
The process of data analysis in CA proposed by Seedhouse (2004a, 2004b) is
composed of five sequential stages:
Table 3.1. Ethnomethodological CA Data Analysis Stages.
1. Unmotivated Looking Discovering new phenomena in interaction.
2. Inductive Search Establishing a collection of instances of the
phenomenon.
3. Establish Regularities and Patterns Occurrences of the phenomenon and how they are
methodically produced by the participants.
4. Detailed Analysis of the Phenomenon Explicating the rational organization of the
phenomenon and its normativity.
5. Generalized Account of the Phenomenon. Finding how the phenomenon relates to the
broader matrix of the interaction.
Unmotivated Looking: In this initial stage, the researcher must be open to
discovering new patterns or phenomena in interaction rather than searching in data
with preconceptions or hypotheses.
Inductive Search: After having identified a candidate phenomenon, the inductive
search takes place to establish a collection of instances of the phenomenon. It is

3. indispensable to characterize the actions in the sequence or sequences of the
interaction.
Detailed Analysis of the Phenomenon: This stage analyzes each single instance
of the phenomenon by uncovering any roles, or relationships of the instances
which emerge in the details of the interaction. The purpose of this stage is to
explicate not only the emic logic or rational organization of the patterns uncovered
but also the normativity of practices.
Generalized Account of the Phenomenon: This account is produced to find how the
phenomenon relates to the broader matrix of interaction. This stage locates the
patterns and sequences of the phenomenon within a broader picture looking for a
rational specification of the sequences which can uncover its emic logic and the
machinery which produces it and which places it in a wider matrix of interaction.
Ethnomethodological CA Validity and Reliability: Ethnomethodological CA validity
is concerned with the integrity and credibility of findings (Seedhouse, 2004a). It is
ensured as the emic perspective is developed in relation to the episodes that the
interactants create in interaction. Validity is guaranteed in line with the participants
in the data and the findings encountered in the interactions they create in context.
Reliability is given by three factors: the selection of what is recorded and how, the
manner the findings are repeatable, and the way data is presented (Seedhouse,
2004b). The first factor of reliability is guaranteed by the recording and transcription
of the whole interactions, from beginning to ending. It guarantees that the findings
reveal the interactional patterns and social acts that occurred in the sessions
without discriminating any moment. The second and third factors are guaranteed
by the excerpts that make transparent the process of analysis of interaction.
Therefore, the reader can analyze the data him/herself by following the procedures
used for the study. In this way, the level of repeatability of the findings is found by
the reading and testing of the analysis followed.
For an example of CA, please click on the link for this.
References:
Cameron, D. (2001) Sequence and structure: Conversation Analysis. Working with Spoken Discourse, London:
Sage, 87-105.
Markee, N. (2000). Conversation Analysis. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Inc.
Schegloff, E. (1988). Presequences and indirection: Applying speech acts theory to ordinary conversation,
Journal of Pragmatics 12: 55-62.
Schegloff, E.A. (1997). “Whose text? Whose context?” Discourse & Society, 8:165-187.
Seedhouse, P. (2004). Conversation Analysis as Research Methodology. In J. Richards and P. Seedhouse
(eds.), Applied Conversation Analysis, Palgrave McMillan.
Seedhouse, P. (2004a). The interactional Architecture of the Language Classroom: A Conversation Analysis
Perspective. Madison, USA: Language Learning Monograph Series.
Seedhouse, P. (2004b). Conversation Analysis Methodology. Language Learning, 54(S1), 1-54.