Upping the ante

This year I took time off from attending conferences overseas. This decision was driven by financial concerns (needing to pay off a house loan) and by concerns for my energy levels. In 2011, I presented at two international conferences back-to-back and returned to Australian exhausted. Although it shouldn't have been exhausting, the need to write some papers while at conferences meant that I experienced a pretty stressful time overseas. Of course, I have regretted the decision as the year has progressed. So, for the last few weeks I have been developing proposal for conferences in 2013. I DO like to set myself more challenging targets over time, so I decided to try to get a symposium up for a conference (with myself as a co-chair).I had my sights on the Pragmatics conference in in New Delhi but lucked out (at least, I have been invited to resubmit and will do that in the next few weeks. After that I tried for this one but was worried that the proposal might not get up (after the previous experience of rejection).So, I put up two co-authored abstracts.

I was blown away yesterday when I received notice that both had been accepted. This is very exciting news and will also be exciting news for those people who have agreed to write papers. Here is one of those abstracts:

Interaction with the technology of written language: How children, young people and adults accomplish “doing reading” and “doing writing”

Written language is ubiquitous in our lives. The ways people acquire and use written language have been extensively examined in disciples or fields such as linguistics, cultural studies, literacy education and sociology; they remain under-addressed from the particular sociological perspective of ethnomethodology. The purpose of this symposium is to provide a detailed examination of techniques for accomplishing reading and writing from the perspective of ethnomethodology, and particularly through the application of conversation analysis to recordings of actual instances of reading and writing. Overall, papers encompass techniques used by children, young people and adults across a range of settings where they individually and collectively produce “doing reading” and “doing writing”. The focus of individual papers includes (1) how young children socially produce written texts to conduct internet searches in the home, (2) the ways the production of ‘easy information’ through talk and text supports comprehension of texts by learners with difficulties (3) how young children in school classrooms interact to do reading and writing socially during literacy lessons, and (4) the ways that interaction around texts produces readers and writers. Overall, the session addresses ways that people, young and old, make meaning during interactions with written texts; each paper contributes to understandings of the specific ways that interaction for reading and writing produces readers and writers of texts across a variety of settings, including during use of digital technology.