how strange yet marvellous

Today I have been working my way through a chapter by John Heritage in David Silverman's edited book - Qualitative Research: Theory, method and practice. What I decided to do was to rethink my analysis using the "places" suggested by Heritage as a way to get into the conversational analysis of institutional interaction. As I went through the process, I used some data from my PhD that I have already analysed -it is the basis for the article that i am writing and have written about previously, in "appearing not to hear" posts.

Heritage proposes six "places" to prob when conducting analysis of institutional interaction(see p. 225 of the article).
1. turn-taking organisation
2. overall structural organisation of the interaction
3. sequence organization
4. turn design
5. lexical choice
6. epistemological and other forms of asymetry

I bit the dust on overall structural organization of the interaction. Not surprising to me cos i had encountered difficulties with this in my PhD although wasn't thinking of it, at the time, in relation to Heritage. Previous examples that i have seen that illustrate clear cut structures often illustrate two party talk, where only two people are physically present. For example, psathas and his examination of the blind student and teacher. Ditto, direction giving (was that also psathas, can't remember?).

Anyhow, trying to analyse the structure today, by writing about it, was interesting because I realised for the first time (and this isn't CA analysis talk here) that throughout my transcript data none of the kids were talking spontaneously about their writing. To better explain I wrote the following in my notes:


During independent writing the students were not sitting around writing and talking about that writing and related ideas. Rather they kept returning to their individual writing. Hence, their interactions with others appeared to take away from the task that they have to complete. Rather than sharing their writing they continually returned to doing their writing. There was no talk in this lesson where students told each what they were writing or read the writing of others and talked about it, save for questions about whether the writing of others was what they should be writing. Talk about writing occured only when others asked for information from someone else.

After having written that, I realised that it was strange in relation to previous research that has established the integral role of talk about writing in writing lessons. There is a great body of rich and fascinating literature about children's talk when they write, and yet on this day and in this lesson, no-one was talking about their writing.

Could it be the task? Gut reaction -yes. Could it be that over the course of a year in the classroom, informed by a writing program that emphasised tasks, students focused on doing tasks? Could this impact on students' interactions so significantly? can a CA analysis address this? don't know.