Will Gibson (2009)
Negotiating textual talk: conversation analysis, pedagogy and organisation of online asynchronous discourse.
British Educational Research Journal, 5,705-721
Offers CA as ‘ a useful addition to analytic concern’ ‘provides an insightful comparative frame for thinking about how conversation can be achieved in face-to-face environments as against online environments’
P706
Definition of pedagogy: ‘the development of plans for the organisation of educational activities and for the structure of learning and teaching materials, resources and technologies’ The enactment of pedagogy i.e. practice ‘ in situ-interactional work in which such plans pertain’. Study practice to inform design.
Conversation analysis
‘sister discipline to ethnomethodology (EM)’…. CA ‘shares the concern of the latter with the investigation of the methods by which societal ‘members’ locally assemble a sense of social order’ ‘both are interested in the ways that people’s activities create what they regard as observable phenomena of some kind’ – e.g a conversation between friends’, a job interview.
For CA this led to the question of how societal ‘members organise their talk and analyse each other’s conversations in the construction and negotiation of social practices’
The analysis for this article focuses on just 3 general areas of CA .i.e. 3 analytical frames (KRO – ? all ways of manipulating power relationships’) that have been identified from an extensive amount of empirical evidence using CA in face-to-face contexts. Looking specifically at multi party conversation.
a. Sequential organisation – how do people take turns. In multi-party conversations the negotiation of who speaks next ‘has been simplified into a 3 part rule, a) the current speaker may select the next speaker, b) the next speaker may self-select c) the current speaker may continue speaking (Sacks et al, 1994)
b. Adjacency pairs – important for ordering conversation stems from (a) p207 ‘ how turns in conversation s can be hearably linked as two-part sequences, such as question-answer, complaint-apology, greeting-greeting’ Sacks proposed the following characteristics that ‘the first part of a pair implies a preference, the second be produced and where it is not produced it will be heard as absent and may require some kind of repair work’
c. Topic organisation . uses (a) & (b) to study the way in which topics are ‘brought about, closed off or otherwise negotiated’ They might be solicited by others, or presented, accepted or rejected .
Face-to-face
P708 ‘ there is a preference that the person who’s turn constituted the trouble initiate its repair’ ( McHoul,1990) argued that in the classroom repair work was usually done by the teacher by using the Initiation-Reply-Evaluation (IRE) sequence with pupil conversational turn sandwiched in the middle so that repair work could be done on the Evaluation turn. Studies have shown that without a teacher doing I & E pupils on their own rarely get to E rather they start off a new topic.
Question arises ‘how to transfer these ideas to text?’
How do people make sense of text? Particular asynchronous text
P706 ‘ how are technologies put to use in the playing out of interaction’?
What’s missing in asynchronous text ?
- Discourse markers (KRO question this)
- Gesture ( KrO ?substitution)
- Direct reference to some aspect of the preceeding conversation ( reply with quote discussed later by Gibson)
But evaluation of the analysis of evidence presented makes reference to ‘built in characteristics of how a post will be represented!)’ i.e. whether text intentionally or technologically mediated.
Another question – how are new topics that often emerge out of existing ones, managed
Method
Post graduate reading group, 6 week duration. 12 registered students 8-10 active each week. One discussion board each week. Encouraged to use the discussion boards as a general forum. Range of experience with CMC. Ethics, written permission from students, text anonymised.
Analysis based on just 1 discussion thread (5 messages) involving 4 participants from discussion of week 3(58 messages in total , 8 discussion threads )( reasons for choosing this particular thread was not made explicit).
Findings
Author claims p711 ‘ strong similarities with findings regarding the organisation of talk in face-to-face settings’
Post 1-Jane – poses two questions, Titled accordingly, discursively orientated.
(note this was 5th post on the discussion board so how do students know that it is the beginning of the thread? Have to track that down therefore contextual ambiguity ( but isn’t this given by the functionality of BB?) different students may access the messages in a different order therefore p712‘ absence of a shared experience of the discursive environment’
Post 2 tutor topic acceptance. In this case tutor has assumed discussion rights ie ‘part of the armoury of interactional strategies which include things like closing off discussions or nominating particular people’
Post 3 Sarah –uses terms contained in message one ( student design) and thread title (?intended design by student or automatic) and provides an answer to Jane and uses the answer position to pose a new question i.e. p715 ‘ Sarah replicates an observed preference in synchronous face-to-face talk that new topics are seen as coming from old topics’.
Post 4 Anne – topicalises the final section of the preceeding post p715 ‘ relicates the preference found in face-to-face talk that next turns are functionally orientated to directly preceeding utterances’ in this case by using quote – not readily available in face-to-face. Another topic shift with the same title. P716 ‘ this observation perhaps adds weight to the concern over the ways in which built in preferences of representation (i.e. message headings) may create ambiguities about interactional purposes’
Post 5 tutor addresses Ann by name ( first time names have been used) topicalises by selecting bit of text to quote but doesn’t mark where in the text that quote is coming from
P713 ‘two party f-to-f conversation operates with a preference that names are used minimally’ ‘ multiparty are often characterised by an increased use of names’
Conclusions
Author talks in terms of participation rights (KRO critique this view from a CoP approach)
P717 the similarity with face-to-face as to how topic development occurs is the interesting part of this analysis ‘the general rule of‘ use only appropriate places to make a new topic’ and ‘use existing talk as a resource for those topics’ are all visible.
P718 another similarity strictly sequential organisation of talk ( KRO but doesn’t make reference to the cognitive load from all the other threads that are taking place), the use of adjacency (question-answer pairs, differential interactional rights for students and tutors.
Overall the author sees this group of students as using the asynchronous environment in a synchronous way (KRO I would have like to see more detailed proof of this by seeing what the students were doing for the rest of the time)
Link to multi-modal
P717 “There are a number of distinctive writing strategies present in all the above posts: the use of italics, bold and colour to emphasise particular words; brackets to segment off sections of sentences; quotations to reference in detail the reading that is being discussed; paragraphs to visually represent separation; question marks, commas, dashes, quotation marks and full stops – all these visual devices serve as medium-specific resources for demonstrating the intentions of the authors’
