Reading notes for Sept. 8: Confessions of a "talk junkie"

This week I helped chaperon an elementary school learning expedition (a "field trip" from the days of yore). It was a great opportunity. I was eager to get to know my son's new teachers and classmates, and I observed and interacted with them in the classroom, on the bus, at the zoo, and at lunch. It was a full day.

I had hoped to "check out" for a while and not do any thinking of the academic variety -- no blogs, no emails, no journal articles, and especially no discourse analysis in social psychology.

But, as the morning progressed, I couldn't stop thinking of discourse, or, in this case, the constant effort to squelch it: the "quiet zones," the "duck tails and bubbles" method of line management, the mountain of copy paper in the teacher workroom that bespoke the sheaves of worksheets that my son will bring home this year in his Kindergarten backpack.

The worst offender of all was the zookeeper, who, when a little girl said, "I saw a dart frog on T.V.," admonished the child by saying, "That's not a question. That's a story. Do you have a question?"

I didn't mean to turn the Kindergartners' learning expedition into my own little research expedition, but over and over again, I was struck by the "resources and practices" of those "engaged in mundane life" (Edwards, 2006, p. 43). Or, more specifically, I was struck by the absence of resources and practices in a place that should be engendering them -- K-12 education.

So, why am I having such a hard time connecting with conversation analysis (CA)? Along with discourse analysis (DA), it is a field that focuses on the "interaction-oriented work done by talk and text" (Edwards, p. 42), and yet what I've read so far about CA just doesn't appeal to me. How will that affect my fledging efforts in DA?

At the beginning of the semester, I was admittedly very confused about the difference between CA and DA. Now, especially after reading Paul ten Have's interesting and well-written historical account of the origins of CA, I have a better perspective on how the two traditions connect. I think I understand the "basic analytic function" of CA as ten Have describes it. Or, as Edwards (2006) puts it: "...[R]ather than asking is there a way of seeing below the surface to motives, ideas, thoughts, and experiences, we can ask: are there procedures that participants have, for dealing with those notions?" (p. 43).

I am starting to think of the conversation analysts as topographers, providing the map on which the discourse analysts can stake their claims. Considering the discourse analysts' preoccupation with variability (which I like), it seems they need the conversation analysts more than the conversational analysts need them.  CA defines the rules of "interactional social order" so that it is easier to locate and identify the chaos and the disorder when it invariably happens.  I hope that is a good way of thinking about the CA and DA connection.

Now that I have a clearer sense of the interests and commitments within each method, I must say that my confidence as a novice research is shakier than ever! The more I learn about CA the more certain I am that I am not cut out for it. But what does that imply for my work in discourse analysis??

As I read (or tried to read) CA studies excerpted by Wood & Kroger and ten Have, the problems being explored and the analytic distinctions being drawn struck me as so fine grained, so specialized, that I just didn't care. Perhaps "getting it" will come with practice and additional readings of full-blown studies (Lord, help me). At the opening of Chapter 3, I found myself literally nodding in agreement with ten Have's acknowledgment of CA's "image" -- obsessed with details, resisting the obvious.

Clearly, ten Have's purpose is to enlighten, not feed resistance to CA.  So, it's me who has the problem. I think I lack the patience and "analytic mentality" necessary for this kind of work (p. 10). Moreover, ten Have makes no apologies for the fact that the CA community is mostly content to study "social life" without taking a stand on social issues (p. 27). In the absence of serving some socially significant cause, I wonder how one summons the will to do this work, to devote a career to it?

On the other hand, I was talking to my colleague, Renee, and we discovered that in Wood & Kroger's Chapter 1, we were both draw to the emphasis on variability and the implications this has for the practical side of DA.  This is probably owing to our backgrounds as classroom teachers, where variability is the order of the day (despite reformers' efforts to endlessly standardize and script). We were intrigued by the idea that DA "thrives on variability" (p. 10) and briefly discussed what that would mean for our work as novice analysts. I, for one, am energized by the prospect of performing research that can be applied to my own future practice as a teacher/learner and that might serve others in similar contexts. 

This idea of variability as an "essential feature" to be studied, not a problem to be controlled, reminded me of a powerful literacy study we read last year in REED603: Advanced Studies and Theoretical Models of Reading. The authors zeroed in on students' unconventional interpretations of text during classroom literature discussions and teacher-student conferences. Specifically, they took up a DA approach to look closely at one student, who responded unexpectedly to aspects of rural poverty as portrayed in a poem.  During teacher-student conferences the "mismatch" between the student's performance and the teacher's expectations were explored in great depth (Hull & Rose, 2004, pp. 268-269).

The resulting discourse analysis revealed that sometimes a student’s seemingly inappropriate response is highly situated in his or her personal history and social identity. Teachers can learn a lot from the results of the analysis, beginning with the implications for text selection. A second lesson revolves around what to do when students inevitably put forth unexpected responses to literary selections. The implication is clear: talk about it!

Two years of doctoral study have taught me one thing: I have a fundamental, epistemological orientation to dialog. I think I may be addicted to the "'methodological' use of discourse" that Edwards somewhat disparages in his article (p. 42). Simply put: I'm a talk junkie. A talk-aholic? And two back-to-back semesters of intro to ethnography didn't help matters. A year of interactive interviewing, participant observation, and co-reconstructing of experience have perhaps ruined me for good. Maybe I am too much the egotist, wrapped up in my own well-meaning agenda, but I want to engage and ask questions. I want to converse with participants. 

So, can an incurable conversationalist be a conversation analyst? Probably not.

Other questions:

• I am curious about "categories" as produced in discourse, not pre-existing (Wood & Kroger, p. 17).  Is this the emic vs. etic distinction? A priori vs. in vivo? 
• How does an analyst choose a "phenomenon of interest," a research context, participants, guiding questions, if everything hinges on what is said by participants? It seems you must always suspend your next analytic move, your orientation to the literature -- all of it -- until you've been in the field long enough to see/hear/observe talk in action.

References:

Edwards, D. (2006). Discourse, cognition and social practices: The rich surface of language and social interaction. Discourse Studies, 8(1), 41-49.

Hull, G. & Rose, M. (2004). “This wooden shack place”: The logic of an unconventional reading. In R.B. Ruddell & N.J. Unrau (Eds.), Theoretical Models and Processes of Reading (5th ed., pp. 268-280). Newark, DE: International Reading Association.  

ten Have, P. (2007). Doing conversation analysis: A practical guide (2nd ed.). Los Angeles: SAGE Publications, Inc.

Wood, L. A., & Kroger, R. O. (2000). Doing discourse analysis: Methods for studying action in talk and text. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, Inc.

 

Reading notes for Sept. 8: Confessions of a "talk junkie"