I den här undersökningen kartläggs och analyseras sambandet mellan olika lektioners struktur och uppbyggnad samt talartidsfördelningen i klassrummet. Jag har valt att undersöka elever och lärare mellan årskurs 3 upp till andra året på gymnasiet för att kunna jämföra talartidsfördelningen vid olika tillfällen. Mina resultat ställs också mot tidigare forskning för att se om det skett någon förändring i talartidsfördelningen i klassrummet under det senaste decenniet. För att kunna undersöka talartidsfördelningen har jag spelat in 7 klassers samtal. För att studera orsakerna till talartidsfördelningen har jag valt att använda mig av Conversation Analysis (CA). Min teoretiska utgångspunkt i uppsatsen är det etno-metodologiska perspektivet som CA vilar på. Ett övergripande resultat är att lektionens struktur hänger nära samman med talartidsfördelningen och att lärarens roll som samtalsledare spelar en central roll. Med tydligare nomineringar och avgränsningar kommer fler elever till tals och blir uppmärksammade i klassrummet. Åldersmässigt sjunker kraven på struktur ju högre ålder eleverna når och i samband med detta sjunker även elevtalartiden. Generellt sett talar pojkarna mer än flickorna i de klasser jag har undersökt, även med hjälp av lärarens samtalsledning.

Intervention is a successful method for families and friends in which they encourage addicts to change their lifestyles together with a professional interventionist. This study is a qualitative investigation on how language was used in televised interventions from the documentary show “Intervention Canada”. The focus of the study was to look into the intentional persuasion of the interventionist and trace patterns of the addict’s emotional driven response by using conversation analysis. The findings revealed that the interventionists used empathic- tone and body language, strategic pauses before and after voicing important information, and powerful words in short sentences when talking. Thus, even though they shared strategies, each situation required them to be flexible. Additionally, similar reactions among the addicts’ talk-in-interaction were indicated, where silence and ambiguous utterances were a sign of hesitation when responding the interventionist.

Power displays itself through talk-in-interaction in social situations; it can also present itself through appearances. Appearance is a personal feature that is immediately obvious and available to others to see. A person’s appearance makes a strong statement about ones values, attitude, abilities etc. People display power through different modalities of talk-in-interactions. This study investigates the linguistic tools that people with power tend to use and how a normal everyday person can change their social status by changing and giving out different linguistic signals. Tracing the patterns of what the verbal cues of power is and describes how an everyday character mastered the relationship between language and power.

In this study it is argued that spelling correction as a collaborative process benefits students. It is also argued that the correction process is a structured process which means that pupils tend to follow a pattern when it comes to who initiates and who executes the correction. As a teacher student within the subject of English as a foreign language, I find it interesting and useful to know more about spelling correction in collaborative writing and what pedagogical implications it has. Correction and repair from a Conversation Analytical point of view is a phenomenon which has been the main object of investigation for many researchers. I noticed that correction is used a lot in written assignments among the students as well as in conversational contexts. In the literature it is also clear that research about written correction is limited and hard to find. Hence, there was a need to investigate this area in the field of correction and repair.The process of spelling correction was investigated using conversation analysis and from a sociocultural point of view the pedagogical implications of this process were considered. The study is based on video-recordings of four pairs in an upper secondary school in Sweden within the subject of English as a foreign language. I found that there is a preference for self correction and that the pupils only intervene in the correction process when necessary. I also found correction to be a collaborative process which benefits the construction of knowledge as students scaffold each other during a correction sequence.

This study aims to examine possible differences in the way male and female politicians answer questions in a news interview, with focus on hedging expressions, answer resistance strategies and negative mentions of other politicians and political parties.The study is based on analysis of 13 interviews with British politicians made for the BBC One programme The Andrew Marr show in 2013 and 2014. The data used for analysis is transcripts and recordings of the interviews, and the study uses conversation analytical tools to in detail examine the answers in relation to conversational phenomena and techniques.The results show several significant differences in the way men and women answer questions. Women use more hedging expressions, minimal response and overt resistance than men, whereas men covertly resist questions to a greater extent than women. Men also seem more likely to mention colleagues or other political parties in a negative manner in a way to pass blame. These results are discussed in relation to social structures in society as well as former studies on the matter.

This paper discusses correction sequences in classroom interaction when teachers correct students’ erroneous answers. The focus of this paper is the relevance between types and techniques of correction used by teachers to correct students’ answers and face-work. The study explains face-work necessity in classroom interaction since it increases students’ motivation to participate in classroom activities.

In line with the call for a process-oriented and ecologically sound approach to planning in SLA (Ellis, 2005), and with the behavioral approach adopted in other fields (Murphy, 2004, 2005; Suchman, 1987, 2007), the present work applies Conversation Analysis to the study of group planning. The participants are four groups of adult learners of Italian as a foreign language, engaged in the preparation of a classroom presentation in their L2. The analysis focuses on: 1) the collaborative production of linguistic artifacts; and 2) the complex L1/L2 alternation patterns produced by the students. This type of fine-grained, emic analysis allows to respecify group planning as an intersubjective, goal-oriented activity that is done by multilingual actors as observable behavior, consisting of a nexus of laminated actions (Goodwin, 2013) that occur in the moment and over time in and through embodied talk-in-interaction.

The present dissertation concerns social organization of feedback in ongoing hairdressing education. The central aim is to explore feedback between teacher and student in multimodal interaction within classroom assessment, as co-production of action and student’s participation. Classroom assessment and feedback are understood as social actions situated in interaction. The empirical data consists of video recordings from two vocational schools. From 31 hours of video material, selections of feedback interactions were made. At first, teacher and student communication in feedback cycles and loops was analysed from a social semiotic perspective. Secondly, examples of student initiated feedback loops were analysed from a conversation analytic perspective. Thirdly, a single case of a teacher and a student interacting through feedback related to creative subject content was analysed from a conversation analytic perspective.  The analyses show the importance of collaborative use of artefacts and embodied communication in the production of mutual understanding; opening for student initiatives in actions of assessment as well as feedback. Silence and body position were found to be important resources giving the student space to display concern. Participation in feedback practices within creative subject content emerged in a trajectory of problem detection to problem solving, resulting in tacit dimensions of hairdressers’ knowing made explicit. The findings indicate the importance of taking a participatory perspective on multimodal interaction when exploring actions of assessment and feedback between teacher and student. This study shows how feedback is not only given from the teacher, but also locally produced as a collaborative practice between teachers and students, displaying tacit dimensions of professional knowledge and subject content. / Den här sammanläggningsavhandlingen handlar om återkoppling mellan lärare och elever i frisörutbildning. Med hjälp av videoinspelningar under pågående undervisning utforskas klassrumsbaserad bedömning och återkopplingspraktiker. Eleverna är dels nybörjare som arbetar på övningsdockor, dels elever i slutet av sin utbildning som tar emot kunder i sitt klassrum. Videoanalyserna ger möjlighet att få syn på multimodala aspekter av interaktionen och resultatet visar tydligt hur både kropp och material är viktiga resurser i deltagarnas samspel. Avhandlingen visar genomgående hur bedömning och återkoppling utgår både från lärares professionella yrkeskunnande och från elevernas egna initiativ på specifika områden där något problem behöver redas ut i relation till deras pågående arbeten. Studiernas detaljerade analyser av deltagarnas multimodala interaktion synliggör hur bedömning och återkoppling kan förstås som sociala handlingar där tal, kropp och artefakter samordnas för att skapa gemensam förståelse och mening. Avhandlingens bidrag riktar sig mot yrkesutbildning men även andra former för utbildning, eftersom bedömning och återkoppling praktiseras i varje klassrum och utbildningskontext. Avhandlingens delstudier ökar kunskapen om hur återkoppling kan förstås som sociala handlingar där varje deltagare bidrar i skapandet av ömsesidig respons. Att förstå interaktion som multimodal, synliggör hur återkoppling i pågående undervisning möjliggörs genom deltagande och samspel mellan lärare och elever.

Magister Artium - MA / Foetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder (FASD) is a global problem that affects various communities. FASD denotes a pattern of abnormalities intermittently seen in children born to women who consume huge quantities of alcohol during pregnancy (Church & Kaltenbach, 1997). Church and Kaltenbach (1997) suggest that FAS may be one of the primary causes of hearing, speech and other language problems in children. The two main approaches used to determine the effects of FASD on language are standardised language test (using a statistical approach to test some or all four domains of language, namely, phonology, syntax, morphology and semantics) applied to close-ended questionnaire answers and, to some extent, narrative analysis (in the course of which researchers use wordless picture books to analyse narratives in order to determine the social-communicative characteristics of individuals with FASD). Although the use of standardized measures of language might be helpful to determine problematic areas in relation to the different language domains (Wyper & Rasmussen, 2011), they do not show the difficulty with social-communicative functions which these children might be facing (Coggins, Friet, & Morgan, 1998). On the other hand, while narrative analysis addresses an important level of language (discourse level), it does not foreground the inherently interactive nature of language use and the problems that may be associated with communicative interactions. These shortcomings, in turn, suggest possible limitations in the interventions intended to address the language needs of children with FASD. There is, therefore, a need for complementary approaches that offer a more rounded picture of language impairment in children with FASD. In this study, three approaches are used in identifying features of the speech of children with FASD against the backdrop of comparisons with features in the speech of normally developing children. Firstly, conversational analysis (applied to spontaneous, open-ended speech) is introduced as a means to determine the more social-interactive aspects of speech impairment in children with FASD. Secondly, measures of linguistic aspects of speech (the mean length of utterance, Index of Productive Syntax and the number of different word roots) designed specifically for spontaneous speech are employed (they are applied to the same spontaneous data as the conversational analysis data). Thirdly, the more traditional standardized language test measures applied to non-spontaneous speech are used (covering the four domains of syntax, phonology, semantics, and pragmatics). The study’s objectives are to (1) compare patterns in the interactive speech of FASD children and normally developing children; (2) explore the relationship between FASD children and normally developing children in relation to both spontaneous speech measures and standardized measures of language; and (3) compare the impact of the primary caregiver's level of education on testing through spontaneous measures versus standardised measures. Using data from 14 children in the Bellville suburb of Cape Town, South Africa, the study finds that, on the conversational analysis measures, children with FASD, in contrast to normally developing children, tend to obey fewer rules of turn-taking, to overlap less, to engage less in self-repair and to struggle with management and maintenance of topics. The study also finds that children whose scores on the standardized language tests (with non-spontaneous data) suggest they have no language difficulty, especially in terms of phonology, obtained scores in measures of spontaneous speech that indicated language difficulty. The study also found that the socio-economic status of caregivers was a credible explanation for certain features in the speech of children with FASD is very similar to features in the speech of normally developing children. This finding highlights the role of family setting in mitigating the effects of FASD. / National Research Foundation (NRF)

Magister Educationis - MEd / This thesis aims to explore the ways in which space patterns regimes of language use and language attitudes among Cameroonian immigrant children in a primary school in Cape Town. The presence of migrants in any classroom represents a significant challenge from the theoretical as well as practical point of view, given that schools are responsible for both socialization and learning (Gajo & Mondada 1996). Most African countries are going through large-scale migration from rural to urban areas as well as increasing transnational migration due to recent socio-economic and socio-political trends. These flows affect the sociolinguistic economy of the places concerned, not only the individuals within them. Thus immigrants' movement into an urban area not only affects their repertoires, as they find themselves confronted with the task of acquiring the communicative resources of the autochthonous population, but also those of the autochthonous population who find themselves confronted with linguistic communicative processes and resources ‘alien’ to their environment. Similar effects are felt by local educational and other institutions, now faced with learners with widely varying degrees of competence in the required communicative skills. The participants in this study are a group of young migrants from Cameroon where English and French are the two official languages. These learners already have some languages in their repertoire, which may include their mother tongue or either of the two official languages. My focus will be on the multilingual resources of these learners and how they make use of these in the daily life of their new spaces, the school, the homes and community spaces, to construct new social identities. / South Africa