What I'm thinking today

I've spent the last few days thinking about a possible focus for a journal article. This has resulted in me re-reading bits of my thesis, and thinking about whether I should target a literacy/early childhood journal or try for one of the sociology journals. Today I was thinking about my favourite bits of interaction -between Melodie and Wayne- and some important analytic points that I really couldn't bring to fruition in my thesis and so chose not to. This was mainly to do with the matter of extended/expanded sequences. Like all talk captured on video and in transcript, and partially analysed, it awaits me.

Here is a bit of what I gathered in my lit review:
Although extended sequences are discussed in some of the CA literature, generally much less attention is given to longer sequences of talk, in particular to those that extend over many turns. Early on Sacks (1995, p. 355) identified “long sequences of talk” as an appropriate area for investigation, though one that was only in its initial stages of development. In his discussion of long sequences of talk, Sacks made a distinction between talk that has a known pre-organisation (as in certain games for example) and talk that does not.
… a basic sort of investigation is that of long sequences as a coherent matter as compared to simply studying, utterance by utterance, a long sequence of talk which you then have as an in-some-way connected series of small fragments. (Sacks, 1995, p. 355)

According to Sacks, the analysis of long sequences of talk is not an additive process and treating it as such may not inform understanding of the whole. Psathas also adopted the analytic perspective that extended sequences, as he termed them, “need to be analyzable and understandable as whole units” (Sacks, 1992, p. 99). Psathas (1992) claimed that extended sequences are more than just a string of sequences. So they need to be considered and examined from the perspective of their whole, and complex, structure rather than through a sequence by sequence analysis strung together (Psathas, 1992, p. 100). He considered extended sequences to be longer than four turns.

According to Psathas, this type of sequence includes types of lessons (Mehan, 1979; Psathas, 1992), stories (Sacks, 1970) and direction giving (Psathas, 1986a, 1986b; Psathas & Kozloff, 1976, cited in Psathas, 1992). Sacks analysed a competition sequence (Sacks, 1995) and stories (Sacks, 1995) as examples of long sequences. The latter involved his analysis that a story preface asks for the right to take an extended turn in order to tell the story (Sacks, 1995, p. 226). According to Sacks, the story preface also contains within it the ‘seeds’ of the closing of the story since it gives information about what will be in the story for it to be over.

Psathas approached the analysis of extended sequences from three points: how do parties enter into the activity; how do they exit, and what is the internal structure of the activity. He used this analytic approach to examine direction-giving (Psathas, 1986a, 1986b, 1990). Psathas worked from a gross characterization of the features of direction sets and determined that directions appeared as “coherent conversational units” (Psathas, 1995, p. 23) that involved methods for entering, proceeding with directions through a sequence of talk, and closing the direction giving. Directions were shown to be collaboratively produced and to consist of “multi-turn extended sequences of talk” (Psathas, 1991, p. 196).

According to Psathas (1991), entry into direction giving is usually initiated by a request and sometimes this will be answered by a request for a starting point. This conversion sequence functions to establish the starting point for directions. Apart from destination and starting point, initial talk establishes time and mode of travel and membership categorization of the parties involved in the talk. As well, direction-giving involves insertions (Schegloff, 1972), or suspensions from the on-going main activity. These result from orientations to repair or requests related to further detail. They can be initiated by either party and do not disrupt the overall function of the activity (Psathas, 1991, p. 205). The activity is closed in two parts. The talk hearably “arrives at” the destination, and the first party produces an acceptance and a positive assessment. Once this is accomplished the conversation moves into closure or shifts to other topics.

The organisation of giving and receiving directions was found to be both context sensitive and context free. It was both responsive to particular parties involved in it and showed orderly and patterned ways that could be found across any number of instances (Psathas, 1991, p. 214) of direction sets. Internal features of directions sets included: named and shared understanding of destination; presumption that movement to the destination was possible; presumption that there were “recognizable-locatable” sets of operations related to movement; naming or ordering in sequence; and the sequence of operations that involved a sequence of utterances or single utterance of talk (Psathas, 1991, p. 215).

I wrote all of that yonks ago in my thesis. Today, i was thinking about the following and made some notes about independent writing which I examined in my thesis:

1. long sequences e.g. story -certain stages
2. Spelling a word suggests question and answer
3.related action of writing as word is spelled introduces another activity other than talk
4. spelling a word for someone to write when you've copied the word (and don't know how to spell it without looking) is another thing
5. spelling a word for someone to write when you've ccopied the spelling of the word yourself and the other person doesn't now the alphabet is another thing entirely).

so, i was thinking today (might be different tomorrow) -if we take sack's definition of long sequences e.g. story, then we have a parallel with spelling ie. it has a certain structure but for adults. the introduction of young children into the mix presents rather a problem unless we take young children as using methods to accomplish just their problems in relation to that moment in the classroom. in which case, we have to consider what they do as competent, or NOT use CA.