http://www.gse.upenn.edu/faculty/swagner

• What one piece of writing was most inspirational to you as an LSI researcher?

I think I’m going to be greedy here and claim two entire books. The first is Paul Drew and John Heritage’s (1992) masterpiece collection Talk at work. As a graduate student venturing into the field of discourse, Talk at work was a revelation to me. My copy still has all the post-its I attached, complete with giddy scribblings: “Read this again”, “procedural consequentiality – IMPORTANT”, and most eloquently, “YES! I totally agree!” (with what, it’s rather difficult to tell now – presumably the entire page). In particular, Paul Drew’s chapter on the contrasting versions of events put forward by the defense attorney and the alleged victim in a rape trial resonated strongly with my growing interest in conflict talk. The examination of how participants manage competing versions of the same events was a central concern of my dissertation. In a single case analysis of a harassment complaint, I examined how two male disputants and the mediator constituted, negotiated, and brought the dispute to resolution within the institutional constraints of a community mediation session. The second book is Janet Cotterill’s (2003)Language and power in court: A linguistic analysis of the OJ Simpson trial. I found this work striking not only for Cotterill’s wonderfully clear and accessible writing, but also for her judicious methodological eclecticism, and her ability to employ a range of tools to construct a fascinating and insightful analysis.

• What question you are currently trying to explore? How?

I’m working a project that explores the interface between what are considered “good” teaching practices for international teaching assistants (ITAs) and the concepts of interactional and pragmatic competence. The question that I’m currently attempting to address is “What are the interactional practices that distinguish “successful” ITAs from “unsuccessful” ones within the context of a classroom orientated performance assessment”? The project is an interdisciplinary endeavor, bridging assessment, discourse analysis, and teacher education. Working with researchers from outside our field is an exciting and challenging experience, and a pleasant change from the rather more lonely work of a dissertation study!

http://www.mountsaintvincent.edu/6131.htm

• What one piece of writing was most inspirational to you as an LSI researcher?

There are so many pieces of LSI writing that have been and continue to be a source of inspiration and wonder for me. While it is difficult to select one, the one that has been most inspirational and foundational to my research and career is W. Barnett Pearce’s (1994) text, Interpersonal Communication: Making Social Worlds. This was the textbook for my first communication course at the University of New Hampshire, “Introduction to Interpersonal Communication,” taught by Jack Lannamann. The text had just come out and Jack was excited to be using it for the first time in our class. The ideas in the text and the course were a revelation for me, broadly speaking, that communication creates our social worlds. At UNH, the interpersonal concentration took a social constructionist approach to the importance and study of ordinary language, which is the foundation of my research to this day. At UNH, we were fortunate to have several courses offered in language and social interaction, interpersonal communication, and culture and communication taught by Jack, John Shotter, and Sheila McNamee in which we read many primary sources (e.g., Nofsinger, E.E. Sampson, Shotter, O. Sacks, R. Rosaldo, Gergen; Bakhtin, Volosinov, Vygotsky, Harré, Wittgenstein and Vico were de rigueur in class discussions). The ideas they spoke of in class, many of which they were working through in their own scholarship, were just as inspirational and significant to my work as an LSI researcher today as Pearce’s text, if not more so.

• What question you are currently trying to explore? How?

The question I am currently trying to explore is, “How are identities, relationships, and community produced step-by-step in the contingent co-production of media references in social interaction?” A precursor to this question is a set of questions that I have been working on for some time: “What is the sequential structure, the component parts, functions and meanings of media references in social interaction in different cultures?” and “Do these vary cross-culturally?” In graduate school at the University of Massachusetts Amherst I focused on the Ethnography of Communication, thus my work today is blend of social constructionist and EC approaches to the study of ordinary language and interaction in particular cultures and in cross-cultural perspective. For the questions above, I am using an eclectic theoretical and methodological orientation. My data includes transcriptions and field notes from observations, video and audio recordings of people interacting in everyday contexts (at home, at diners, in cars, on the phone, on TV) as well as transcribed interviews. My theoretical orientation is housed broadly within the Ethnography of Communication, using Carbaugh’s “cultural discourse analysis,” with a heavy dose of additional constructs to help explain the practice of media referencing (e.g., Goffman’s frame analysis, Bauman’s work on performance, Bauman and Briggs’ work on intertextuality, Basso’s work on intertextual joking performances and mini-max forms of communication, Bakhtin’s and Volosinov’s work on reported speech, Sherzer’s work on verbal play and joking, Sacks’ work on joking – the list goes on!)

http://hstephaniekim.squarespace.com/

• What one piece of writing was most inspirational to you as an LSI researcher?

Many early studies in conversation analysis on turn-taking (e.g., Goodwin, 1979, 1980; Jefferson, 1984) have inspired me and shaped my thinking as an LSI researcher, but the study that had the strongest impact on me and still continues to be inspirational is A Simplest Systematics for the Organization of Turn-Taking for Conversation by Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson (1974). I encountered the work as one of the reading assignments during the first weeks of my first quarter in the Applied Linguistics program at UCLA. I had previously studied theoretical linguistics as an undergraduate in Korea, and still vividly remember being utterly struck by the study’s object (i.e., turn-taking in conversation) and the neat organization of the object (that there are actually analyzable patterns in seemingly “messy” conversation!). That human interaction can be described in such an orderly way was simply an eye-opener and led me to further pursue the study of language use.

The key notions in CA, such as “turn”, “turn constructional unit” and “adjacency pairs”, introduced in SSJ (1974) and other related works prominently figured into the analyses of English and Korean everyday conversation I undertook as a graduate student at UCLA. I have been engaged in detailed analyses of both beginnings and endings of turns-at-talk, based on a collection of audio- and video-taped everyday interactions. My interests in fittedness between turns and turn projection led me to my dissertation, which was an English and Korean cross-linguistic study of turn-beginning tokens in diverse sequential environments.

• What question you are currently trying to explore? How?

My primary research questions are: Which linguistic resources (e.g., syntax, lexis, prosody) do speakers use to construct social actions in interaction, and how do they influence ways in which social actions are organized in different languages? As I have been grappling with these questions, I have become particularly interested in comparing interactional practices found in different languages and describing language-specific and/or universal practices in social interaction.

My doctoral dissertation, which I completed in May 2011, was a collection of studies of turn-beginning design of second position (i.e., response) and third position turns in English and Korean. Although English and Korean have different syntactic constraints since they are typologically different languages, through my analysis I found that interactions in these languages exhibit a similar way of organizing a social action. Among many commonalities that speakers of diverse languages share is the turn initial position. Since interaction is produced in real time, there is always a place where one person’s turn ends and another person’s turn begins, placing a focus on turn initial position. One question I was interested in was what happens at the beginning of a response turn, for example, when the response speaker departs from answering the prior question. The response speaker, regardless of the language used for the interaction, commonly marks this departure at the very beginning of his/her response turn. However, the particular ways it is marked is constrained and/or determined by the medium of locally available resources in the language. This finding has been particularly remarkable for Korean since Korean is commonly described as a “right-headed” language and previous research has focused primarily on the interactional work accomplished towards the end of a turn, mainly by sentence-final particles. My study has shown that turn-beginnings in Korean also serve as an effective place for the management of an interaction. To further pursue my research interest in the uses of turn-beginnings, I am presently working with other researchers to bring together studies of turn-beginnings as an interactional resource across different languages.

Additionally, I am currently investigating (with my colleague Innhwa Park at UCLA) question and response sequences between test takers and questioners in the context of an English oral proficiency exam that measures international students’ language ability as related to their teaching assistant duties. With this study, we are hoping to draw practical implications for test administrators, curriculum developers and test takers.

• What one piece of writing was most inspirational to you as an LSI researcher?

One of the pieces that has had a strong influence on my own research thus far has been Bauman’s (1983) Let Your Words Be Few, Symbolism of speaking and silence among seventeenth-century Quakers.  I first learned of this work during my first semester as a graduate student at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, while serving as a TA for Professor Donal Carbaugh.  During one class early in the semester, Professor Carbaugh introduced communication studies of silence to the undergraduates, citing the research of Basso and Braithwaite and mentioning research on the silent worship of Quakers.  Having gone to an undergraduate school founded by the Religious Society of Friends, or Quakers, (Haverford College) I was immediately intrigued.  Later, reading Bauman’s analysis of the communicative practices of early Friends from the perspective of the ethnography of communication inspired my own dissertation work, an ethnography of the communication of a present-day Quaker meeting.  In the process of writing my dissertation, I went back to this text many times, each time impressed by the subtlety of Bauman’’s analysis of the symbolic vocabulary and cultural communicative forms of Friends, which I came to appreciate more and more as my own involvement in the community deepened. Although many differences exist between the practices of the speech communities of early and modern Friends, there are still numerous connections and Bauman’s work is an invaluable comparative resource.

• What question you are currently trying to explore? How?

I am still expanding upon my work among Quakers, posing questions about the role of silence in decision making and also about processes of identity construction and group formation.  For example, I ask, through what communicative processes is community among Friends created and reinforced? In particular, I am interested recently in narrative practices and in the connection between the cultural assumptions underlying the silent listening practiced during meeting for worship and the telling of “spiritual journeys” by meeting members in other contexts.  In analyzing recordings of the telling of “spiritual journeys,” I pose questions regarding the culturally shaped meaningfulness of this sharing for community members in terms of what it means to practice Quakerism and be a Quaker.

http://emmabetz.weebly.com/

• What one piece of writing was most inspirational to you as an LSI researcher?

I remember as both challenging and inspirational an early (1981) article by Peter Auer, “Zur indexikalitätsmarkierenden Funktion der demonstrativen Artikelform in deutschen Konversationen” (“On the use of the demonstrative article as a marker of indexicality in German conversation”) – challenging, because I read it very early in my conversation analytic (CA) training; inspiring, because it offered a beautifully straightforward illustration of core concepts in CA (e.g., the importance of position, the concept of the sequence, the notion of context as constructed by participants).

When we refer to persons or objects in conversation, our choice of reference formulation always reflects for whom it is designed, that is, what we believe our recipient(s) to know. If a formulation is inappropriate or insufficient (e.g., if recognition fails), a recipient can show this by initiating repair. Auer’s analysis demonstrates that the task of pointing to a problematic formulation is not exclusively a recipient’s; a speaker may ‘flag’ her own reference as potentially insufficient before a recipient can initiate repair. In German, a particular grammatical format is available for this purpose: the forward-looking demonstrative article dies-/’this’ before a noun (incl. names). With dies-, a speaker indicates that she expects the recipient to know the referent, but simultaneously conveys insecurity about the success of the chosen reference formulation. By thus eliciting a recipient’s confirmation, dies- initiates a sequence in which participants explicitly negotiate intersubjectivity – and thus create context.

It is also interesting to note that in English, prosodic ‘try-marking’ (that is, rising intonation on a word) serves a function similar to dies- in German. This shows how common interactional problems may be solved differently in different languages.

Auer’s work has helped me understand the tenets of ethnomethodological work, and it has shaped my thinking about language use. Certainly not coincidentally, my own research explores the connection of lexicogrammar and social interaction, in particular the function of ‘little words’ (response tokens, modal particles, reference terms) in German. In my research, but also through my teaching, I recently rediscovered Auer’s article, and in my students’ discussions in an introductory CA course last semester, I was delighted to observe a reaction similar to my own.

• What question you are currently trying to explore? How?

My current work explores the use of address and reference terms in German interaction and asks: “How can third-person reference terms carry functions beyond referencing? How can address terms do more than summoning and next speaker-selection?”

In trying to answer these questions, I have found that second-person pronouns used as turn-initial elements in German project the shape and type of an upcoming action, and that turn-initial and turn-final address terms are implicated in showing the larger sequential fit of an action. They thus carry crucial information about the relationship and interactional history of co-participants. My research also indicates that in German, choosing between different available grammatical forms of names for third-person reference (article+first name vs. bare first name) may not just be a matter of epistemics and sequential position, but also one of expressing affective stance toward a third party.

With this research, I hope to contribute to our general understanding of grammar (as practices that have evolved in and through conversation), but I also hope to offer findings that can be put to practical use, for example in the training of professionals in relationship and family counseling.

 

• What one piece of writing was most inspirational to you as an LSI researcher?

Goffman’s “Footing” was (and continues to be) an inspiration for me. I first read it as an undergraduate enrolled in a discourse analysis course taught by Deborah Keller-Cohen at the University of Michigan. I recall being struck by the scene described in the essay and Goffman’s analysis of it: After an Oval Office bill-signing ceremony, news reporter Helen Thomas is interactionally transformed; her footing changes from journalist to fashion model. While as a sophomore in college I was perhaps most alarmed by the sexism of the encounter (Helen Thomas being asked to perform a pirouette? For President Nixon? In the Oval Office?), I also recall being impressed by the power of footing as an analytic concept.

Later, as a graduate student in Georgetown University’s Department of Linguistics, I re-encountered “Footing” in courses taught by Deborah Tannen and Deborah Schiffrin, and more fully realized its utility in analyzing meaning making, relationship negotiation, and identity construction; as Goffman points out, “linguistics provides us with the cues and markers” that are critical to footing (1981, p. 157). Footing (and especially the related notion of framing) prominently figured into the analyses of family discourse I undertook at Georgetown; these eventually led to my book, Making Meanings, Creating Family: Intertextuality and Framing in Family Interaction (OUP, 2009).

In including Goffman’s “Footing” in the courses I presently teach in the Department of Communication and Rhetorical Studies at Syracuse University, I get nostalgic for the time when I was a nineteen-year-old just discovering discourse analysis. But even more enjoyable is witnessing how my students react to the essay, and how they use Goffman’s ideas in their own research pursuits.

• What question you are currently trying to explore? How?

When I’m not exploring the question “How can I get tenure?” my research centers on investigating the following: “How are identities created and negotiated in discourse as people put learned information into practice?”

I am presently examining interactions in two (quite different) contexts to explore this question. I have been collaboratively analyzing email exchanges between experts and novices in the context of counselor education and training (with Melissa Luke, my colleague at Syracuse in the School of Education); we are interested in how professional identity socialization occurs through email supervision. I have also been investigating nutritionist-layperson interaction on a lifestyle makeover reality television show that focuses on issues of parenting (Honey We’re Killing the Kids). I am especially interested in the discursive juxtaposition of expert (nutritionist) and parental identities, and how the advice and information provided by the nutritionist is depicted as impacting family members’ social interactions. While I am currently focused on email and reality television discourse, my ultimate interests are in everyday face-to-face talk; I am thus in the planning stages of a new study that will investigate how family-based nutrition education affects family interactions and the identities family members discursively create.

Website: http://vpa.syr.edu/directory/cynthia-gordon

• What one piece of writing was most inspirational to you as an LSI researcher?

Taylor and Van Every’s The Emergent Organization. Published in 2000 by Earlbaum.

• What question you are currently trying to explore? How?

Currently, I am playing with this question: What, if any, communication process is both constitutive of organizing and system-entropic? I am trying to answer this question through interaction and discourse analyses of working dyad’s talk.

Website: http://www.ou.edu/deptcomm/facpages/bisel.html