Sociolinguistics and Language Education.pdf

520 Part 6: Language and Interaction
at least, ‘NNSness’ seems to present a particularly clear case in which
features of the talk are unavoidably linked to the speakers’ categorical
identity. Carroll’s important study shows that such assumptions are not
necessarily warranted even for those phenomena that, on the face of it,
seem most obviously associated with non-native speaker talk.
Conclusion
In this brief review, I hope to have introduced some of the main principles
and concerns of CA and also to have shown how the basic methods
and analytic tools of CA can provide signifi cant insight into the organization
of classroom interaction and language learning. Several key points
can be summarized and repeated here.
First, CA developed within sociology and has inherited from that tradition
a strongly empirical orientation. Analysis involves tacking back and
forth between the details of particular instances and patterns that occur
across a collection of cases.
Second, any given fragment of conversation can be seen as the unique
product of several different, interlocking ‘organizations of practice’ or
‘machineries’. An analysis of some particular fragment that aims to be
comprehensive must consider, at a minimum, organizations of turn-
construction and turn-taking, action sequencing, repair and overall structure.
CA is a fundamentally qualitative approach, and a collection-based
analysis of some recurrent and relatively stable phenomenon (next turn
repeats that initiate repair, compressed transition spaces, ‘oh’-prefaced
responses to inquiry) necessarily involves a detailed case-by-case analysis
of each instance on its own terms as a fi rst step.
Third, a basic fi nding is that, in conversation and other forms of talk-ininteraction,
intersubjectivity is accomplished and maintained through
publicly displayed understandings conveyed by responses to prior talk. A
fi rst speaker may fi nd that a response betrays a partial, incorrect or otherwise
problematic understanding of her talk and can attempt to repair this
in a subsequent turn. Because this ‘architecture of intersubjectivity’, as
Heritage (1984a, 1984b) described it, is, by its very nature, public, analysts
can use it to empirically ground their own analyses. Indeed, a key point
is that analysts can employ the same methods in studying conversation
that participants used in producing it.
Of course, a review like this one can only scratch the surface of what is
an extremely diverse area of research. The reader who wants to go further
should return to some of the pioneering studies mentioned at the beginning
of this chapter (Sacks et al., 1974; Schegloff, 1968; Schegloff et al.,
1977). These early papers sketched whole domains of interactional organization
(action sequencing, turn-taking, and repair) and continue to provide