long time no blog

jewels
Originally uploaded by angie cat

I haven't blogged for some time but I have been doing a lot of other writing. It's that time of the year -AERA time - and this year I am heading to San Diego for the conference and three days of R and R. So, a paper had to be written. This year I am presenting a paper on transcription. Actually, it's a literature review of transcription and a discussion about qualitative research and transcription. It has been some time since I did the review so writing the paper meant dropping other things and getting my head back into the transcription space. It's done now.

One of the things I dropped temporarily was a journal article about children's game playing. I'm hoping to finish that today and send it off to Convergence.This journal takes longer articles and mine is about 9,000 words. I have analysed the playing of an entire Wiggles computer game and I am hoping not to have to cut out sections in order to get it published.

For about eighteen months I've had my eye on this journal and this issue. With themed issues like this, the editors request that you send off an abstract and if accepted then you go ahead and write the article. So that is what I did. I am going to use some of the lizards analysis because I think that the children's use of texts (online and in an information book) can be developed into some nice points about the teaching of English in the early years of schooling. Actually, I've written about three quarters of the paper including all the analysis section which contains four segments of transcript that I will use. It's great working with post PhD data although CA work is labour intensive.

When I return from San Diego I will need to shift into another gear for
this conference. I'm looking forward to this one because it is in Melbourne (smile) and I will be presenting as part of a symposium.

Davidson, C. (paper accepted). Accomplishing help: The social organization of children's activity during a writing lesson. Symposium presentation for 11th International Pragmatics Conference, 12-17 July 2009, Melbourne.

Gillian Busch, another conversation analyst from cqu, will also be presenting in the symposium. Gillian will be drawing on her analysis of family mealtime talk and interaction. The symposium is going to be fun because it will draw together a number of other analysts who focus on young children's talk and interaction.

Some more analysis also has to be done. I still have about an hour's interaction to analyse from the At Home in Cyberspace project. I have word only transcripts but will need to develop more detailed transcripts using Transana, and then begin the analysis. I have some ideas about the analysis as I have watched the recordings numerous times. I will probably analyse some entire sequences and then I would like to focus on one aspect of talk that runs across all the data. If i can do that, I would try for the level of analysis that might allow me to publish in a CA journal. I'd be very happy with my work if I could do that.

So ... all of the above should keep me busy for the next couple of months.