weekly reflection (week 10) by Ping and Yao

I have to thank Yao for taking careful notes in class. I only tweaked it by adding my own notes. I hope the commentary below grasps most of the main ideas we discussed in class. Please feel free to comment on anything I missed. Thank you.

Q: How refined should the transcription be?

From a CA perspective, any pause can carry interactional meaning. It's impossible to determine what a pause means beforehand. The entire interactional context, including prosody, gestures, pauses, and gaze, should be taken into account. Therefore, a careful transcription is necessary. The decision on how refined the transcription should be is really based on the researcher's analytical purposes. Transcriptions are always selective. The bottom line is to be as much faithful as possible to your data. And the transcription system should be consistent in order to avoid confusion. The final transcription is always the result of a series of compromises between faithfulness to the data and the readability of the transcription.


CA's emic interests: studying behavior from inside a particular system, looking at the subsequent turns to interpret the intended actions to be achieved

Emic vs. Etic

This emic vs. etic distinction comes from the study of anthropology.
emic: looking at the data, let the category emerge from the data. The term 'emic' comes from phonemic: study of sound as they represent category that can form contrast (e.g., very vs bury) v and b doesn't make phonemically difference but probably make phonetic difference. Meaning comes from within the participants in the context. From the participants' own perspective, analysts examine what is achieved in the sequential development and how meaning is made relevant to participants. In other words, meaning is situated in the context and can't be described outside the context.

etic: researchers impose the categorization onto the data. It comes from phonetics, study of sound as pronounced physically. The etic viewpoint refers to meanings from the outside perspective but not from the participants.

Hauser (2005): there are possibilities of interpretation and the teacher impose his/her interpretation but we don't know whether it's the intended interpretation is not known. Whether the meaning maintained depends on how the meaning is negotiated.

Q: how can we interpret the action of the participations?

Lourdes: It's like postmodernism: There is no truth out there. There is not the meaning of utterance independent of the context. Without looking at the context, it's impossible to understand how meaning is constructed through the sequence of utterance. In Hauser (2005), he is saying “this is one possibility” “this is my interpretation of this” He's trying to make the best proximal interpretation, but in the end there is no truth. Conversation analyst walks a fine line, it causes the tension how to use the evidence to make the interpretation, which can not be validated.

Ping: It helps to have outsiders to review the data together. It helps me to refine the data and consider alternative interpretations.

Yuki: Two types of approaches are possible:
interpretive approach
emic approach
Lourdes: However, critical conversation analysis is not real conversation analysis.

Subject: intersubjectivity between participants
objectivity is ideal.
Lourdes: Though there is no single true interpretation, but we need to interpret by the best methodology possible. It's a tension between taking “analyzing turn” as the universal methodology to understand “interaction”,while at the same time “turn” can not be interpreted without tightly linked to the context.
In CA studies, there's a lot of hedging in the interpretation, which indicate the author is presenting one interpretation, not the other.

Sangki: the main idea of the article is that meaning is always co-constructed and can not viewed without looking at the context.

Ping: For CA studies, there's a lack of longitudinal works, looking at the same phenomena over time. Also, there is this concern of how to apply results to the pedagogical context..

Lordes: Koshik (2002) is very pedagogically oriented. There's a lot more to meaning. We shouldn't underestimate the actual richness the interactions of how corrections are given and taken. It's a healthy reminder that we shouldn't just do counting. So we have one extreme of analyzing every second of turn to analyze meaning and another extreme of completely deviating from meaning and just counting the number of corrective feedback.
Koshik (2002) talks about how the teacher upgrades and downgrades assistance including the prosody cues. The idea that assistance is incremental is interesting. The utterance was designed to be incomplete to prompt self-correction. CA is all about local sequential context of interaction: How things unfold and build-up to something. For this reason, CA could be used to look at when the assistance is needed, when it should be upgraded, and when it should be withdrawn in the learning process. This is relevant to our reading for next week.


Ending comments from Lourdes: It's interesting that we don't treat other approaches (statistics, cognitive) as marked, but treat CA as marked (too much jargon). The truth is all approaches have their own jargon and they are equally ratified. So when we choose our approach, we don't treat it as default. The approach has to be a good match with the researcher.