CHAPTER 18 CONVERSATION ANALYSIS This article is written by Jack Sidnell.

He discusses about the relevance of Conversation Analysis (CA) for research on classroom interaction and language learning. Sidnel begins the article by telling the history of CA. Harvey Sacks, Emmanuel Schegloff and Gail Jefferson did the research about CA in mid-to late 1960s. Their studies have provided interlocking findings about fundamental domains of human social interaction such as turntaking, action sequencing and repair. So that Sidnell considers a single fragment of conversation can be seen as the product of multiple, intersecting machineries or organizations of practice. When doing the research, conversation analysts insist on working from actual recordings of conversation rather than imagined, remembered or experimentally produced examples. There is an organised set of practices involved in first, getting and, second, constructing a turn, another such organized set of practices involved in producing a sequence of actions, another set of practices involved in the initiation and execution of repair. CA necessarily begins with the detailed analysis of a single instance of interaction. This is what Sidnell refers to as case-by-caseanalysis and it means taking each instance on its own terms, trying to get handle on its singularity and what the participants were doing in that case and what practices they were using to accomplish these outcomes. There are several cases. They are: a. Question-intoned repeats This case indicates that the speaker asks for confirmation about the accuracy and the truthfulness of what is talking about. b. Repeats with (falling) final intonation Here, the speaker wants to confirm about what a prior speaker just said. c. Next turn repeats and topical expansion It marks that someone says something important and need further explanation. d. Laugh-Token repeats

This case are associated with termination of talk and it can be proposed that the laugh token repeat is regularly associated with termination of talk with reference to its producct-item. In the interaction in the classroom, Sidnell provides the readers a case of conversation between teacher and students such as form-and-accuracy. Here, the teacher typically maintains tight control of turn-taking by modeling forms that students are expected to repeat. In the second language conversation, mostly Non Native Speaker (NNS) repairs the grammatical. After reading the article, I find the strenght of it. In my opinion, the strenght of the article is that Sidnell provides some cases that seem similar but actually they are totally different. They are called next turn repeats as mentioned above. As stated by............. (hand out 5)..........It is an evident fact about conversation is that it takes the form of turntaking: two or more participants take turns to speak. But how does this happen? How does someone get the floor? it may seem that people simply wait for the speaker to stop, and then talk, but the gaps between turns are generally too short for this to be case: sometimes they are just micro-seconds in lenght, and on average they are no longer than a few tenths of second. The another strenght is that Sidnell writes the conversations in transcription. It means that the form of conversation is given with the symbols. They are transcription conventions. They help the analysts in interpreting the conversation. First, the analysts record a conversation, either audio or audio-visual. Second, the analysts recode this conversation, using some standard nomenclature developed by Jefferson. For example, the (.) indicates a definite, but short, pause ; (1.3) indicates pause of 1.3 seconds ; .hh indicates inhalation. So recordings are CAs basic data. The transcriptions made after these are to be seen as a convenient form to represent the recorded material in written form, but not as a real substitu. By making a transcription, the researcher is forced to attend to details of the interacction that would escape the ordinary listener. Once being made, transcripts provide the analysts with a quick access to a wide range of interactional episodes, that can be inspected for comparative purposes. The last strenght is Sidnell gives some cases of how Native Speaker (NS) has conversation to NNS. We can see how NNS makes mistake n fails to use appropiate turn-taking signals in their intraction. Brown states that in the case of conversation between second language learners and native speakers, topic clarification

often involves seeking or giving repair of linguistic forms that contain errors. Repair involves a continuum of possibilities ranging from indirect signals to outright correction. I also want to analyse the weakness of this article. It is stated that classroom interaction has long been a focus of conversation analytic work. Sidnell does not give further explanation about why CA is applied in the classroom interaction and language learning since there is example of conversation between teacher and students. There is a debate over CA for Second Language Acquisition (SLA). According to Mitami, CA is not a learning theory. CA is not for longitudinal studies so it is not designed to describe long-term process of language acquisition. Markee in Mitami there are three major objections to using CA as a methodology for understanding SLA processes: i) CA and SLA are incompatible because CA is behaviorally oriented discipline while SLA is a cognitive discipline, ii) CA is formulated to analyse language use, not its acquisition, and iii) a turn in a conversation is not suitable unit of analysis for SLA processes. If CA can be applied in the classroom, Sidnell has not provided with a CA research in relation to: language proficiency assessment, material design and development, and language teacher education respectively. According to Sert and Seedhouse in their journal Introduction: Conversation Analysis in Applied Linguistics, CA has been employed to investigate classroom interaction and to develop areas such as teacher training, testing and materials design. It has helped to develop our understanding of how constructs such as learning and competence are realised in interaction. Sidnell gives the cases of NS and NNS but he does not show the implications for Second Language teaching. According to Long and Richard, an explicit comparison of NS-NNS conversation in ESL isntruction and in informal, non instructional talk then isolated several basic differences between them. Greatest significance was attributed to the relative lack of modification of the interactional structure of conversation in classroom discourse, with a concomitant poverty, bot quantitative and qualitative, in the input available to students. The use of twoway tasks in small group work is suggested as one way of introducing more communicative language use in the SL classroom, and more comprehensible input. When conversation is applied in classroom in Indonesia, teachers hope that the students can speak in English very well. But, inviting students to speak up is difficult. Mostly they are shy and afraid to make mistakes. Brown states the greatest difficculty that learners encounter in attempts to speak is not the multiplicity of sounds, words, phrases,

and discourse form that characterize any language, but rather the interactive nature of most communication. Conversations are collaborative as participants engange in a process of negotiation of meaning. If the students do not practise conversations in the classroom, it is hard to improve their english. Eventhough conversation does not need grammatical structure or complete sentence to understand each other, sometimes the students need to talk with others in grammatical structure. Brown adds among the many possible grammatical sentences that a learner could produce in response to a comment. So that teachers should have interesting way of teaching conversation. According to richards in Brown, two major approacches characterize current teaching of conversation, an indirect approach in which learners are more or less set loose to engage in interaction, and a direct approach that involves planning a conversation program around the specific microskills, strategies, and processes that are involved in fluent conversation. The indirect approach implies that one does not actually teach conversation, but rather that students acquire conversational competence, peripherally, by engaging in meaningful tasks. A direct approach explicitly call students attention to conversational rules, conventions, and strategies.