Sociolinguistics and Language Education.pdf

Chapter 18
Conversation Analysis
JACK SIDNELL
Introduction
Conversation analysis (hereafter CA) is an approach to language and
social interaction that emerged in the mid- to late 1960s through the collaboration
of the sociologists Harvey Sacks and Emmanuel Schegloff as
well as a number of their students, most importantly, Gail Jefferson (see
Lerner, 2004). Although it originated in the United States within sociology,
today working conversation analysts are to be found not only in the United
States but also in England, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Japan, Korea,
Canada, Australia, Finland and elsewhere, in departments of anthropology,
communication studies, education, linguistics and others in addition
to sociology. In their earliest studies, Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson worked
out a rigorous method for the empirical study of talk-in-interaction and, as
a result, their fi ndings have proven robust and cumulative. Indeed, these
pioneering studies (e.g. Sacks, 1974; Sacks et al., 1974; Schegloff, 1968;
Schegloff & Sacks, 1973; Schegloff et al., 1977 among others) from the 1960s
and 1970s have provided the foundation for subsequent research so that
we now have a large body of strongly interlocking fi ndings about fundamental
domains of human social interaction such as turn-taking, action
sequencing and repair (see below). In this brief overview of CA, I begin by
outlining the main goals and principles of the fi eld. I discuss how CA
emerged out of a convergence of ethnomethodology, Goffman’s work on
social interaction and a number of other research frameworks of the late
1960s suggesting that a pivotal and transformative moment came when
Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson realized that analysts could use the same
methods in studying conversation that conversationalists used in producing
and understanding it. I then turn to consider a single fragment of conversation
in some detail, suggesting that it, as any other such fragment, can be
seen as the product of multiple, intersecting ‘machineries’ or ‘organizations
of practice’. In the next section of the chapter I consider the methods of CA
focusing in particular on the use of collections to isolate and defi ne a focal
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