Gibson, W., Hall, A. and Callery, P. (2006)
'Topicality and the Structure of Interactive Talk in Face-to-face Seminar Discussions - Implications for Research in Distributed Learning Media',
British Journal of Educational Research 32(1), 77-94.
Theorertical background
Stokoe reference to topic development. ( Stokoe apparently sees affordance in a cultural sense)
‘how do people interactionally negotiate topics’ comes from questions such as ‘ how do ‘societal members produce a sense of social order through orientation to normative intersubjectively recognizable features of talk’
work so far has tended to focus on turn taking. Of particular interest is p791 ‘conversational topics become connected through members ‘ orientations towards topic’ which has led to a research method whereby you consider how apparently unrelated utterances are linked – only problem is that the links are potentially limitless.
Stokoe used these ideas and came up with
· False first – off topic
· Teacher effect – provide some structural features, e.g. define discussion task, justify limits and orientate immediate context.
KRO – but in asynchronous there are several concurrent topics.
P91 the ‘interactive turn negotiation process placed topicality in continual flux the context of the talk was significantly shaped by the nature of the interaction process’
P92 ‘ G claims that ‘the lack of simultaneous participation has posed a barrier to the creation of interactive task. As yet, however, clear specification of the type of interaction that is required/desired from such environments has yet to be effected’ Even quite high profile interactional models often fail to state what they mean by ‘interactive discussion’
