Investigating Language As Social Inter Action

"Reviewing recent findings on linguistic practices used in turn construction and turn taking, repair, action formation and ascription, sequence and topic organization, the book examines the way linguistic units of varying size - sentences, clauses, phrases, clause combinations, particles - are mobilized for the implementation of specific actions in talk-in-interaction. A final chapter discusses the implications of an interactional perspective for our understanding of language as well as its variation, diversity, and universality. Supplementary online chapters explore additional topics such as the linguistic organization of preference, stance, footing, and storytelling, as well as the use of prosody and phonetics, and further practices with language"--

This volume consists of papers presented during the 15th Conference on British and American Studies, held at Transilvania University of Brașov, Romania. It reflects the work conducted by senior and junior researchers on a range of interesting topics falling into the wider scope of cognitive linguistics, language contact, translation and lexicography. The investigations reported here are streamlined into three chapters. The first, “Native Language Explorations and Acquisition”, has Romanian as its central theme. The second chapter, “Aspects of English – Insights into its Impact, Structure, and Descriptive Potential”, centres around the English language considered both as an object of academic inquiry in its own right, and against a larger cultural backdrop. The final chapter, “Translatability of Language, Translatability of Culture”, looks into matters concerning intra- and inter-linguistic translation, and their impact on intercultural communication.

This volume brings together empirical research that explores interaction in a wide range of educational settings. It includes work that takes a cognitive, brain-based approach to studying interaction, as well as studies that take a social, contextual perspective. Interaction is defined quite broadly, with many chapters focusing on oral interaction as is typical in the field, while other chapters report work that involves interaction between learners and technology. Several studies describe the linguistic and discourse features of interaction between learners and their interlocutors, but others demonstrate how interaction can serve other purposes, such as to inform placement decisions. The chapters in the book collectively illustrate the diversity of contemporary approaches to interaction research, investigating interactions with different interlocutors ( learner-learner, learner-teacher), in a variety of environments (classrooms, interactive testing environments, conversation groups) and through different modalities (oral and written, face-to-face and technology-mediated).

In this book sixteen international scholars of language and social interaction describe their distinct frameworks of analysis. Taking conversation analysis and interactional sociolinguistics as their points of departure and investigating ordinary conversation as well as institutions such as health care, therapy, and city council meetings, they often incorporate gesture, prosody, and the listener's behavior in the analysis of talk. While some approaches are grounded in a critique of the major schools of interaction analysis, others integrate the interactionist perspective with ideas from fields such as systemic-functional linguistics, distributed cognition, and the sociology of knowledge. Each chapter combines a statement of the terms and methods of analysis with an exemplary analysis of a moment of interaction. "New Adventures in Language and Interaction" gives an excellent overview of the novelty and diversity of interaction-focused perspectives on language and of the heterogeneity of approaches that have evolved from the pioneering work of Sacks and Schegloff, Gumperz, and their co-workers.

This book offers a close investigation of interactional practices in L2 classrooms. With an emphasis on the multimodal and multilingual resources, this is an essential study for researchers and postgraduate students in TESOL and Applied Linguistics.

The second volume of this introduction to discourse studies focuses on the fundamental interactional, social, political and cultural functions of text and talk, and shows that discourse is not merely form and meaning, but also action.

There has been a remarkable revival of interest in how we conduct social actions in interaction – particularly in requesting, where recent research into video-recorded face-to-face interaction has taken our understanding in novel directions. This collection brings together some of the latest, cutting-edge research into requesting by leading international practitioners of Conversation Analysis. The studies trace a line of conceptual development from ‘directive’ to ‘recruitment’, and explore the acquisitional, cultural, situational and species-specific differentiation of forms for requesting in human social interaction.They represent the latest explorations into the complexities and controversies associated with the apparently simple but essential matter of how we ask another to do something for us.

Studying Language in Interaction is a holistic practical guide with a hybrid purpose: To emphasize a particular approach to language in the world—a theory of language that has room for communicative repertoire and sociolinguistic diversity—and to provide a practical guide for new researchers of language in interaction. Each chapter focuses on one way of communicating, providing a set of strategies to observe, note, and reflect on context-specific ways of using multiple languages, of sounding, naming, using social media, telling stories, being ironic, and engaging in everyday routines. This approach provides a practical guide without stripping out all the wonder and nuance of language in interaction that originally draws the novice researcher to critical inquiry and makes language relevant to the humans who use it every day. Studying Language in Interaction is not only a practical research guide; it is also a workbook for being in the world in ways that matter, illustrating that any research on language in interaction involves both tricks of the trade and a sustained engagement with humanity. With extensive pedagogical resources, this is an ideal text for advanced undergraduate and graduate students of sociolinguistics, intercultural communication, linguistic anthropology, and education who are embarking on fieldwork projects.