This dissertation is about learning as changing understanding in social and situated activities. It takes part in the development of a reconceptualization of learning initiated within participationist perspectives. Multiparty interaction in situated activities is a primordial site for the exploration of human action and cognition. Through the theoretical framework of Conversation Analysis (CA), a method for the analysis and description of trajectories of learning is proposed. Departing from a view of learning, interaction, and cognition as closely related, learning is argued as gradually changing understanding in situated activities. The empirical material consists of video recordings from an elementary school and pilot training. The recordings are analyzed using CA methods, including detailed attention to embodied features of interaction. The analyses focus the development of trajectories of learning through the participants’ orientations. The trajectories are based on topicalizations and co-constructions of contents of learning, where interactional organization and content are interrelated. Participants are shown to make relevant relations between past, present, and future actions and material settings, and their ways of aligning and resisting participation and change are explored. A framework for the analysis of learning as embodied interaction in change is developed. The dissertation shows the fruitfulness of CA work for the understanding of learning processes. The results underline the importance of including embodied action, as constitutive of the co-constructions of contents, into learning studies. The value of highlighting learning as co-construction and of anchoring the analyses in the participants’ orientations is underscored. The results further the understanding of how people learn, and of how they make relevant knowledge and experiences in activity. The understanding of learning and change as action, which can be initiated, aligned with and resisted, opens up for future developments within CA, where learning researchers might be able to describe more precisely how human learning is constituted.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Open University.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Open University. BLDSC no. DX231422.

This study seeks to investigate this core research topic: how identity is involved in everyday interactions between Chinese microblogging website users? By understanding identity as an element in the interaction context of discursive practices, the investigation is achieved through the analysis of naturally occurring text-based online data. Conversation Analysis (CA) and Membership Categorization Analysis (MCA) are used to do the analysis. The former will focus on the interaction structure while the latter will be used to make some of the contents in the interactions relevant. This study seeks to make the “orderliness” (Sacks, 1972) and “members’ methods” (Garfinkel, 1967) under a particular context describable and analyzable. The sequential and categorical organization described in this study shows how members are oriented to identities in the in situ context when they exchange their ideas on a sensitive topic, and on a microblogging website. / text

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This dissertation offers a micro-analytic study of the use of language and body during storytelling in American English and Japanese conversations. Specifically, I focus on its beginning and explore how a story is projected. A beginning of an action or activity is where an incipient speaker negotiates the floor with co-participants; they pre-indicate their intention to speak while informing the recipients of how they are expected to listen to the following talk. In particular, storytelling involves a specific need to secure long turn space before it begins since unlike other types of talk, a story usually requires more than an utterance to complete. Drawing on conversation analysis, I investigate how various communicative resources, including language, gesture, gaze, and body posture, manage such negotiation of the floor during entry into a story. This study involves two focuses. First, it examines not only vocal means, but also non-vocal devices. Thus, I explore the linguistic resources employed to project the relationship between a forthcoming telling and ongoing talk. Specifically, I investigate how coherence and disjunction are projected differently – some stories are continuous with prior talk while others may start as a new activity. I also investigate the vocal resources for projection of a return to an abandoned story. Specifically, I demonstrate how a continuation and resumption are projected differently. Finally, I investigate the employment of non-vocal devices relevant to the projection of story entry. Secondly, this study takes a cross-linguistic perspective. By examining conversations in two typologically different languages, American English and Japanese, I investigate how linguistic resources are consequential to the way projection is accomplished. Also, since only few studies have been conducted on storytelling in Japanese conversation, I aim to contribute to a better understanding of how the previous findings from English storytelling can be applied to Japanese conversations. Storytelling is an important activity for human social life; telling of what we did, saw, heard about, or know helps us build good relationships with our interactants. This dissertation thus aims to explore how interactants co-construct a site for an important interpersonal activity in everyday interaction. / text

published_or_final_version / abstract / toc / Curriculum and Educational Studies / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

Conversation analysis (CA) was used to examine descriptions of pain, the design of questions and answers, and patterns of elaboration. I analysed audio- and video-recorded consultations involving six physicians and one patient in a supportive/palliative care clinic. The physicians enquired about a diversity of aspects of pain (e.g., severity). The patient’s answers aligned with questions indicating that his pain was stable (i.e., no change, no new pain, managed pain), which was consistent with the Clinic’s optimal health outcomes. Questions designed for a ‘no-pain’ answer were relatively infrequent. Whether or not these questions were problematic for the patient depended on when they were asked. The physicians used both single- and multi-unit questioning turns and an assortment of question types (i.e., yes/no interrogatives, yes/no declaratives, alternative questions and WH-questions). The questions were analyzed using four dimensions of question design (agenda, presuppositions, preferences and epistemic stance). While the patient accepted the topic agenda of aspects of pain, he rejected the topic agenda of pain management evaluation. He also rejected presuppositions that implied disease progression. Analysis of the action agenda showed that the physicians relied heavily on yes/no-type polar questions. Some of these encouraged elaboration (e.g., were problem attentive); however, a number of them discouraged elaboration (e.g., were optimized or included a negative polarity item such as any). Some questions that discouraged elaboration allowed the physicians to progress efficiently through a checklist of standardized questions, thus aiding in the progressivity of the talk. Change-implicative talk was pervasive in the physicians’ and patient’s talk; the patient’s answers often rejected the implication that his pain was worse. The characterization of the consultations as “difficult” by some of the physicians is considered in relation to the design of questions that elicited minimal information about the patient’s pain. Study limitations (e.g., the data sample) and directions for future research (e.g., on what constitutes an optimal health outcome) are discussed, and my findings are considered in relation to palliative care practice and training. The study fills some gaps in current palliative care literature regarding the dynamics of physician-patient interactions and contributes to the CA literature on medical interactions.

The Functions and the Ordering of Conditional `If Clauses' in English---A Genre AnalysisPrevious research studies are in agreement that the canonical order for English if conditionals is sentence-initial rather than final. However, earlier findings regarding the distribution of the ordering between initial and final if-conditionals represent only those patterns specific to the limited number of genres examined. This corpus linguistic study is based on a research approach which includes a larger sampling pool and a selection of representative genres as well as detailed statistical and content analyses. It examines the variations in the distributional patterns between initial and final if-clauses within each individual genre and across different genres. The findings of this study suggest that if-conditionals have significantly different distributional pattern across genres. In contrast to the consensus view in current literature that initial if-clause rather than final is the dominant clause order, in 3 of the genres examined in this study (Letters to the Editor, Recipes and Sports News) final if-clauses occur more frequently than initial. In addition, in 3 other genres (News Reportage, Science Fiction and Romance Fiction) these two clause types are equally distributed. This study thus identifies genre as a significant factor influencing sentential if-conditional placement.The study also argues that in addition to the expression of topic and focus discourse relations, the ordering of the conditional and consequence clauses is often used to convey specific pragmatic effects and to perform functions related to genre-specific needs, including social politeness and showing power deixis, hedging or strengthening a proposition. / Department of English

Alzheimer's disease irrevocably challenges a person's capacity to communicate with others. Earlier research on these challenges focused on the language disorders associated with the condition and situated language deficit solely in the limitations of a person's cognitive and semantic impairments. This research falls short of gaining insight into the actual interactional experiences of a person with Alzheimer's and their family. Drawing on a UK data set of 70 telephone calls recorded over a two-and-a-half year period (2006-2008) between one elderly woman with Alzheimer's disease, and her daughter and son-in-law, this paper explores the role which communication (and its degeneration) plays in family relationships. Investigating these interactions, using a conversation analytic approach, reveals that there are clearly communicative difficulties, but closer inspection suggests that they arise due to the contingencies that are generated by the other¿s contributions in the interaction. That being so, this paper marks a departure from the traditional focus on language level analysis and the assumption that deficits are intrinsic to the individual with Alzheimer's, and instead focuses on the collaborative communicative challenges that arise in the interaction itself and which have a profound impact on people's lives and relationships.