ABSTRACT. My opening keynote at NORDISCO 2016 will examine the variety and dynamics of new European discourses of non-belonging in the context of debates around the 2015-16 ‘Refugee Crisis’ in Europe. In my presentation, I will look for various instances of discursive shifts (Krzyżanowski 2013a) in European discourses of non-belonging and identity politics. I will argue that their accelerating change – indeed both in Europe and worldwide – depends on a strong politicisation and ideologisation of immigration-related debates as well as on the use of mediatisation as a political communication strategy deployed across various modalities incl. of social/online media (Krzyżanowski & Tucker 2017). In my analysis, I will first look closely at the case of Poland and focus on discourses of its right-wing populist politics where, despite the so-far relatively low politicization of immigration in the wider Polish post-1989 public sphere (Krzyżanowski 2014), recent months have brought an eruption of racist discourses of hate, marginalization and exclusion towards the incoming refugees and asylum seekers (Krzyżanowski 2018a). On the other hand, I will also examine the mediatisation and hybridisation of mainstream political discourse in Sweden where the recent months have brought many calls and actions aimed to tighten Sweden’s once very generous and humanitarian migration and especially refugee regime (Krzyżanowski 2018b). My analysis will draw on critical, discourse-historical studies of right-wing populism (Krzyżanowski 2012, 2013b; Krzyżanowski & Wodak 2009; Wodak 2015) and point to, inter alia, the power of recontextualisation of topics and arguments within and across various genres carrying political discourse (Krzyżanowski 2016). I will show how various discursive traits have been strategically combined in public discourses to argue against incoming migrants – or in favour of limitations of the free flow of migrants and refugees – incl. on the basis of their cultural and otherwise understood non-belonging in contemporary Europe.

References

Krzyżanowski, M. 2012. Right-Wing Populism, Opportunism and Political Catholicism: On Recent Rhetorics and Political Communication of Polish PiS (Law and Justice) Party. In: A. Pelinka and B. Haller (Eds.) Populismus: Herausforderung oder Gefahr für die Demokratie? Vienna: New Academic Press, 111-126.

Krzyżanowski, M. 2013a. Policy, Policy Communication and Discursive Shifts: Analyzing EU Policy Discourses on Climate Change. In: P. Cap & U. Okulska (eds) Analysing New Genres in Political Communication. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 101-135.

Krzyżanowski, M. 2013b. From Anti-Immigration and Nationalist Revisionism to Islamophobia: Continuities and Shifts in Recent Discourses and Patterns of Political Communication of the Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ). In: R. Wodak, B. Mral, M. KhosraviNik (Eds.) Rightwing Populism in Europe: Politics and Discourse. London:  Bloomsbury Academic, 135-148.

Krzyżanowski, M. 2014. Values, Imaginaries and Templates of Journalistic Practice: A Critical Discourse Analysis. Social Semiotics 24(3): 345-365.

Krzyżanowski, M. 2016. Recontextualisations of Neoliberalism and the Increasingly Conceptual Nature of Discourse: Challenges for Critical Discourse Studies. Discourse & Society 27:3, 308-321.

Krzyżanowski, M. 2018a. Discursive Shifts in Ethno-Nationalist Politics: On Politicisation and Mediatisation of the ‘Refugee Crisis’ in Poland. Journal of Immigrant & Refugee Studies 16:1, in press.

Krzyżanowski, M. 2018b. ‘We Are a Small Country that Has Done Enormously Lot’: The Refugee Crisis & the Hybrid Discourse of Politicising Immigration in Sweden. Journal of Immigrant & Refugee Studies 16:1, in press.

Krzyżanowski, M. & R. Wodak. 2009. The Politics of Exclusion: Debating Migration in Austria. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers.

Krzyżanowski, M. & J.A. Tucker. (Eds.). 2017. Re/Constructing Politics through Social & Online Media: Ideologies, Discourses & Mediated Political Practices. (Special Issue of Journal of Language & Politics 16:5). Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Wodak, R. 2015. The Politics of Fear: What Right Wing Populist Discourses Mean. London: Sage. 

ABSTRACT. Projektet Hälsolitteracitet och kunskapsbyggande i informationssamhället undersöker kommunikation om medfödda hjärtfel, från läkarsamtalet efter ultraljudsundersökningen till föräldrabloggar och patientforum. Projektet utforskar de olika kommunikativa sammanhang som de gravida med partner, och föräldrarna till barn med hjärtfel, deltar i. Syftet är att visa hur kontextuella ramar, interaktionella roller, tillgängliga resurser och omgivande gemenskaper påverkar hur kunskap om hjärtfelet kan utvecklas. Det material som samlats in är mångfacetterat och består av inspelningar av diagnossamtal och återbesök, intervjuer med gravida par och föräldrar, insamlade bloggar, faktatexter från nätet och från böcker mm. Vi strävar efter att sätta in de olika materialen i sina kontextuella sammanhang vilket bland annat innebär att de relateras till varandra, exempelvis genom analyser av intertextualitet och rekontextualisering. Som analysverktyg använder vi programvaran Atlas.ti, som möjliggör kodning på en rad olika sätt: på alla språkliga nivåer, utifrån innehåll, i ”kodfamiljer” etc – och dessutom av olika typer av material, som text, ljud och bild. Vid workshoppen kommer vi att illustrera några olika sätt att koda, och diskutera hur detta möjliggör gränsöverskridande analyser. Vi vill bland annat diskutera skillnaden i att undersöka fenomen på formuleringsnivå (som exempelvis fackord), på betydelsenivå (som värderingar) och på praktiknivå (som epistemisk gemenskap).

ABSTRACT. In nexus analysis (or Mediated Discourse Analysis, Scollon & Scollon 2004, Norris & Jonoes 2005), a core interest is how human actions transform into discourse (understood both as language in use and as abstract discourses), and vice versa. These transformations can be studied in shorter or longer cycles of discourse or discourse itineraries. Contributing with this development of the concept of intertextuality into several modes than texts, nexus analysis addresses needs in modern research of discourse. In this presentation, the case of the digital calender will show these posibilites. In a pilot study (Blåsjö & Jonsson 2015) we found that managers in commercial companies could regard themselves as victims of the digital calender and find themselves “a body just going in and out of rooms”. Based on a small data of discourse based interviews, it will be shown how one person’s action of meeting invitation turns into a written object in the calender which transforms into another person going to a meeting. What other discourses and actions are involved in this process? How has the practice of meeting invitation changed since the digital revolution? Why do people make resistance to this practice? Although a mundane acitivity, this phenomenon raises issues of the digital world of today, as well as the notions of text and action and their relationship. Also, the methodological questions of how to capture these kinds of transformations will be discussed.

ABSTRACT. Research on language and social interaction (e.g. Schegloff 1968, 2007; Mondada 2011, Streeck, et al. 2011) is interested in the temporal advancement of talk and action, i.e. how social interaction is lined up into successive turns and actions, and thus constitutes meaningful sequences of actions. Recently, LSI research has also begun to examine the ways in which objects feature in the moment-to-moment conduct of everyday interaction (e.g. Nevile et al. 2014). This paper takes as a starting point object transfers, i.e. the manual action of a participant passing an object to a recipient, and focuses on the ways in which object transfers feature in the sequential and temporal advancement of social interaction (e.g. Wootton 1994). The analysis is based on a collection of object transfers occurring in interactions at dinner tables, in families, in cars and at work. Preliminary findings suggest that object transfers can be realised as ‘hand-overs’ (e.g. handing over an object to a co-participant for a more detailed checking) or ‘returns’ (e.g. giving back the object to its owner). ‘Hand-overs’ and ‘returns’, in turn, can either constitute single steps in a sequence (e.g. as complying responses to verbal requests or as offers), or be designed so as to display sensitivity to the progression of a parallel activity. As to the latter, object transfers can occur in activity transitions, actively achieving the closure of an activity, but at the same time displaying sensitivity to an emerging activity. An object transfer can also be produced simultaneously with an on-going activity and achieved so that it avoids the interruption of the progressivity of that separate course of action.

References Mondada, L. (2011). The organization of concurrent courses of action in surgical demonstrations. In Goodwin, C., LeBaron, C. and Streeck, J. (Eds.), Embodied Interaction, (pp. 207-226). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nevile, M., Haddington, P., Heinemann, T. and Rauniomaa, M. (Eds.) (2014). Interacting with Objects: Language, materiality, and social activity. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins. Schegloff, E. A. (1968). Sequencing in Conversational Openings. American Anthropologist 70 (6): 1075-1095. Streeck, J., Goodwin, C. and LeBaron, C. (2011). Embodied Interaction in the Material World: An Introduction. In Streeck, J., Goodwin, C. and LeBaron, C. (Eds.), Embodied Interaction: Language and the Body in the Material World, (pp. 1-26). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wootton, A. J. (1994). Object transfer, intersubjectivity and third position repair: Early developmental observations of one child. Journal of Child Language, 21(3), 543–564.

ABSTRACT. This paper examines how ‘holding-away gestures’ (or Open Hand Prone VPs) are used in face-to-face interaction as pragmatic means for regulating the progressivity of a co-participant’s talk. The paper describes the interactional contexts in which holding-away gestures (and their variants) are applied and identifies the different actions they accomplish in their respective contexts of use. The analysis shows that one common feature in each of the cases presented in this paper is the action of stopping or halting a co-participant’s turn. Produced with accompanying speech, the stopping gestures can function e.g. as embodied elements of multi-unit suspension turns, or as/within an overlap resolution device. The data used in this study consists of audio-video recordings of natural everyday conversations and television interviews. The study employs the methodologies of multimodal conversation analysis and gesture studies.

ABSTRACT. The paper presents a study of the use of examples in teaching. Examples in this study are understood as textual elements in the oral discourse that have the purpose of specifying knowledge on a general level. The teaching in the study was conducted by five third year preservice teachers (PSTs), teaching classes of Secondary School students in social sciences and mother tongue. The PSTs conducted classrooms conversations with their students, they gave prepared and spontaneous examples during their lessons, and the lessons were videotaped. The material also includes semi structured interviews with the PSTs. The paper analyses the use of examples in the classroom conversations, focusing on two interrelated aspects. The first concerns the PST’s perception of when examples were needed to promote the students understanding, and secondly the way that the examples contributed in understanding concepts, theories and systematic knowledge within the topic being taught. The research question for this conversation analysis is: What characterizes the situations the students chose to give examples in, and how did they implement the examples in the common reasoning in the classroom conversation? Theoretical perspectives in the analysis will be from rhetoric (kairos, aptum and phronesis)and conversation analysis. The study presented in this paper has been a part of the research project Improvisation in Teacher Education (IMTE) at Stord/Haugesund University College (a 4 year strategic research project funded by NFR from 2012- 2016).

ABSTRACT. This presentation will highlight both content and form in a study of classroom interaction in Norwegian primary schools. We will discuss interaction as a didactic tool to stimulate literacy for all students, including second-language learners. Interaction is considered a central part of second language learning, as well as the need to meet cognitively demanding academic content (i.e. Gibbons 2006; Swain 2005). However, it may be a challenge for teachers to facilitate classroom talk and interaction in today´s schools, and Norwegian research shows that bilingual students do not always get sufficient possibilities to participate in oral activities (i.e. Grimstad 2012; Ryen 2010). Furthermore, classroom dialogues often lack academic depth (Alexander 2008; Hodgson, Rønning &Tomlinsson 2012). In a school environment driven by test results and curriculum goals, creating a variety of opportunity spaces for dialogic interaction is vital (Dysthe 2011). The project data are video observations and field notes from six different classes/groups from the first to the fourth grade. Two of the groups were introduction classes for language minority students; the other groups had approximately 50% bilingual students. The non-participant observations included both teacher led conversations in full class and in small groups. The conversations were about different subject matters and included reading and studying different kinds of texts, both fiction and non-fiction. The analyses indicate that both the content of the conversations and the form they had were of importance. Cognitively demanding themes engaged the students and the dialogic form seemed to stimulate and activate both monolingual and bilingual students.

ABSTRACT. This paper discusses the use of the Finnish particle “no” in responses to questions that do the work of a pre-action or at least have in the given situation a specific agenda that is not explicated in the question (e.g. asking ‘where are you’ in a mobile phone conversation to find out, how long it is going to take for the other party to arrive). “No” can be found as prefacing almost any kind of turn, and it is frequent in both responses and turns that initiate a transition. In earlier research, one function assigned to answers that are “no”-prefaced is that of a dispreferred answer (e.g. Raevaara 1989). I will argue, that in the context where the questioner has a business to attend, the response format “no + full clause answer” displays that the answering party already knows what is on the agenda. In cases, where the response is clearly dispreferred, the questioner is already orienting to a dispreferred response in her question. The agenda is rarely explicated, and the continuation relevance of the response in ambiguous. In this way, the particle “no” is used in this environment to align with the agenda that is only implied in the form of the question and/or the situation and to build mutual understanding.

References RAEVAARA, LIISA 1989: No – vuoronalkuinen partikkeli [No – a turn-initial particle. – Auli Hakulinen (ed.), Suomalaisen keskustelun keinoja I. Kieli 4, p. 147–161. Helsingin yliopiston suomen kielen laitos.

ABSTRACT. The data for this paper is recordings of the program The Radio Psychologist broadcast once a week on a Swedish state radio channel. The program is a half-an-hour telephone conversation between a psychotherapist and a person seeking help for a particular psychological problem. In the conversations a radio psychologist and callers face a number of communicative challenges such as how to formulate the problem and find a solution within a short period of time, and how to make the conversation interesting for radio listeners. One particular challenge is to close this single short help-intended conversation meaningfully. Using the methodology of conversation analysis, this paper identifies and describes conversational organization of a communicative practice used in a closing section of the psychotherapeutic conversation on the radio. The closing practice is initiated by the radio psychologist’s question “What are you taking away with you?”, and it elicits an upshot of the conversation with an account of insights into the problem discussed. The analysis shows how in the closing section of the encounter the radio psychologist and callers, on the one hand, are constructing the meaning of the conversation as helpful and, on the other hand, are reviewing the therapeutic progress. The communicative practice analysed is discussed with regard to its psychotherapeutic implications, as well as in the context of educational and entertainment tasks of the radio program.

ABSTRACT. Srikant Sarangi is the editor of Text & Talk as well as the founding editor of Communication & Medicine and founding co-editor of Journal of Applied Linguistics and Professional Practice. In this workshop he will present advice on how to get published in scientific journals.

ABSTRACT. Professional situations are linguistically demanding especially for nurses whose working language is a second language for them (e. g. O´Neill 2011, Kela & Komppa 2011). The Hospital District of Helsinki and Uusimaa (HUS) and Finnish language studies at the University of Helsinki have designed and started a research project (LangCare) to study the professional language of health care and to develop tools to support second language speaking nurses and doctors to learn professional language at work. The methods of the study are discourse analysis and conversation analysis.

In the presentation, I will discuss the study design which connects discourse studies with studies of second language learning and non-formal language learning on the one hand, and linguistic studies with professional healthcare interaction on the other.

References

Kela, M. – Komppa, J. 2011: Sairaanhoitajan työkieli – yleiskieltä vai ammattikieltä? Funktionaalinen näkökulma ammattikielen oppimiseen toisella kielellä. [Nurse’s language needs – standard language or professional language? Functional approach to professional second language learning] – Puhe ja kieli 4/11, pp. 173–192. Available also http://ojs.tsv.fi/index.php/pk/article/view/4752/4470

O´Neill, Fiona 2011: From language classroom to clinical context: The role of language and culture in communication for nurses using English as a second language. A thematic analysis. International Journal of Nursing Studies 48 (9), s. 1120–1128.

ABSTRACT. This presentation is based on our work with a complex data set that was collected in the context of an organizational planning project. The data set consists of video-recorded meetings of the project group and a fairly large amount of written documents such as memos, project plans, and reports. Working with this data, we have been interested in how written texts and face-to-face encounters are related to each other and form different kinds of intertextual networks in organizations. In this presentation, we will discuss two cases in which we have looked at related types of action in meetings and memos as a window to how such intertextual networks are linguistically organized. In the first case we investigated how discussions in the video-recorded project group meetings were recontextualized in the meeting memos. In the second case we addressed how smaller work group meetings – that we do not have video recordings of – are reported about to the project group in two related genres: in the memos of the small group meetings, in written form, and in the video-recorded meetings of the project group, in spoken form (where the spoken reports may or may not rely on the memos). Drawing from these cases, we will present some thoughts, firstly, on the role of written and spoken action as as parts of a larger organizational process, and, secondly, on the methodological challenges of coming to terms with a complex data set including both written and spoken activity types.

ABSTRACT. While texts and face-to-face encounters interact in diverse social situations, research has often treated them separately from each other. Respectively, studies investigating their interconnectedness have often focused on analyzing how written texts are constructed in social interaction (e.g. Nissi 2015) or used as a resource for its local organization (e.g. Svennevig 2012). In this presentation, we will address some of the challenges that we have faced working with a complex set of data in which written texts and spoken interactions appear as related parts of the same process.

Our data originate from a city organization that is conducting a large-scale organizational change in its service sector. More specifically, it consists of a series of interrelated meetings and written texts through which the change is being planned. Working with this data, we have wanted to demonstrate how collaborative decision making is managed through recontextualizations along an intertextual chain that consists of both written texts and spoken encounters. In the presentation, we will address the challenges posed by the vastness of the data for the selection and inclusion of elements to be analyzed. In particular, we will consider the methodological questions faced in situations in which it is not possible to trace everything in the data available that could be relevant for understanding how the process unfolds. On the other hand, we will discuss the importance of looking at the data set as a whole as critical cues to understanding the decision making process also sometimes seem to appear in unexpected places.

Nissi, R. 2015. From entry proposals to a joint statement: Practices of shared text production in multiparty meeting interaction. Journal of Pragmatics 79, 1-21. Svennevig, Jan 2012. The agenda as resource for topic introduction in workplace meetings. Discourse Studies 14 (1), 53–66.

ABSTRACT. Drawing on data from French talk-in-interaction, the talk will focus on the use of syntactically incomplete utterances in interaction as a resource for making various forms of enquiries, such as seeking information. The incomplete utterance makes the requested information relevant in the next turn, and the addressee typically provides this, in the form of a completion fitted to the incomplete utterance. Using a vernacular term, the practice could be described as ‘asking a fill-in-the-blank question’, where syntactic structure is distributed across the question and the answer. Thus, the syntactic incompleteness combined with the creation of a TRP allow questioners to project an answer syntactically fitted to the utterance-so-far. It will be shown how transition-relevance places can be set up in the absence of syntactic completion, and how this process sets fill-in-the-blank questions apart from other types of collaborative productions. The talk will also contrast fill-in-the-blank questions with alternative information-seeking strategies (e.g. wh-questions), and demonstrate their particular import and usefulness with respect to such alternatives. For instance, participants may use fill-in-the-blank questions in order to steer clear of the potential disaffiliative hearings associated with wh-questions. Apart from capturing the fact that syntactic completion and turn completion need not coincide, and showing how questions can constrain the form of answers through projection, this phenomenon demonstrates more generally that syntax is produced and interpreted on-line in talk-in-interaction, and in concert with prosody and other resources for action formation, such as epistemic status.

ABSTRACT. Thompson, Fox and Couper-Kuhlen (2015) call for a “positionally sensitive grammar” of talk-in-interaction. This approach identifies action positions in sequences, and examines how the choice of specific turn formats has interactional consequences. This paper investigates one of Thompson et al's action positions: aligning answers to “specifying” wh-questions. These questions request specific bits of information, as opposed to questions that request explanations, tellings, etc. In Thompson et al.’s American English data, “no problem” responses to “specifying” questions consist of a single phrase that matches the question and provides the specification that is requested.

The present paper presents the results of an investigation of a large collection of “specifying” questions that get aligning responses, taken from a 30 hour corpus of naturally occurring Danish talk-in-interaction.

Only a third of the responses are “phrasal”, and we have localized specific sequential environments where these are used. But most of the responses contain other material and more complex constructions. These responses are designed to show recognition of the contingencies and implications of the questions they respond to. More generally, we claim that participants in interaction orient to more than just the immediate action potential of a turn, and that this is built into the grammar in recognizable ways.

References Thompson, Sandra A., Barbara A. Fox, and Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen. 2015. Grammar and Everyday Talk: Building responsive actions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

ABSTRACT. The topic of our presentation is multi-unit questions in Estonian everyday interaction, where one type of the question (e.g. Wh-question) is reformulated as another type of the question (e.g. polar question) in the same turn. The use of those questions in everyday interaction have not been extensively studied in the literature. We compare two variants of multi-unit question turns in our presentation.

(1) The speaker reformulates a Wh-question as a polar question that can present the probable answer to the original question:

kule millal ma käisin kolmapäeval ve. Listen when I go-1SG-PST Wednesday-ADE Q. ‘Listen when did I go, on Wednesday?’

(2) The speaker reformulates a polar question that can present the probable answer as a Wh-question:

Õpid= sa= või mis= sa= teed Study-2SG you or what you do-2SG ‘Are you studying or what are you doing?’

In our presentation we analyze (a) in which sequences each variant of questions is used, (b) which social actions questions implement, and (c) how questions are related to the model of epistemic stance created by J. Heritage (Heritage 2012). Our data come from the Corpus of Spoken Estonian of the University of Tartu (2 million transliterated tokens). The method we use is Conversation Analysis.

References

Heritage, John 2012. Epistemic in Action. Action Formation and Territories of Knowledge. – Research on Language and Social Interaction, 45, 1–29.

Glossing abbreviations

1, 2 first and second person ADE adessive case Q question particle PST past tense SG singular

ABSTRACT. The cold song by Linn Ullmann is a novel of a Norwegian family who when faced with tragedy must confront their guilt, their longings, and their losses. The novel has the form of a crime mystery: a young woman is hired by a well-to-do family, but goes missing while working for them at their summer house on the Norwegian coast. In this household people are mentally active and intellectually vital, but they are not able to communicate with each other. This paper will investigate the metaphors used in interaction in the novel in order to see how people share or oppose each other’s metaphors and thus show willingness to understand or not understand. Traditional metaphor analysis in the cognitive tradition is often based on the theories of Lakoff & Johnson 1980 and Lakoff & Johnson 1999, that concentrate on conventional metaphors and image schemas. The analysis of metaphors in interaction in The cold song will instead be based on discourse-oriented metaphor theory seeking to study “deliberate” metaphors and how these are flagged or signalled to the reader (Cameron 2003, Cameron & Deignan 2003, Semino 2008, Steen et al 2010, Goatly 2011). The hypothesis is that the metaphors of communication in this novel will be different because of the different contexts for the interaction , but that they nonetheless will have something in common, namely the lack of willingness to accept each other’s metaphors.

ABSTRACT. As in this internationally unique Socialist encyclopaedia as a whole, science and technology texts typically adopt a neutral, objective manner that contrasts with the language and rhetoric used to write about topics such as literature, history and sociology. Despite its role as a political radical alternative to the established “neutral” encyclopaedia tradition, Workers’ Dictionary was relatively influential in Norway in its time, partly because it was written by a great number of outstanding young intellectuals. To what degree did these authors communicate their political views even when they wrote about science and technology? My preliminary supposition concerning two especially important authors are these: When economist, later Director of Fishery (1948–73) Klaus Sunnanå, one of the main editors, writes about fishery as economy, the Marxist analyses turn up in small, nearly hidden lacunae. When editor and medical doctor Karl Evang, later General Director of Health (1938– 1972), writes on health topics, his articles came to include several, partly disparate voices from medical-eugenic discourse. To answer the research question above and to qualify my supposition, I will analyse the combination of voices, representing distinct discourses, and topoi, i.e. groups of utterances linked to respectively logos, ethos and pathos in selected articles signed by Sunnanå and Evang.

ABSTRACT. In this paper, the method of finding the specific doxa in a rhetorical situation will be discussed. In the works of Scollon and Scollon on mediated discourse analysis (MDA), a “nexus” is defined as the center of the cycling of discursive practices. They make a simple, but illustrative, model that shows the overlapping circles of the mediated practices of the actors. The center of the model is the nexus that defines the nature of the practice, or what you, with a rhetorical concept, could call the doxa. Scollon and Scollon’s figure explains neither what gives the individual circle its form, nor how the single discursive practice is related to other practices. To be able to place the practices as rhetorical actions and performed values that are discovered into a figure, one must point out how the agent’s actions and values relate to the actions and values of other agents. In order to do so, I argue that correlates must be added to the figure. Each act and value get their meaning and modulation according to their relations. The definition of the correlates, as well as the number of agents and the size and shapes of the circles, are dependent on the practices and values in the specific rhetorical situation. In the paper, a methodological argumentation is presented. An argumentation of how the researcher can use the construction of the model as a tool for getting a better understanding of the practices and values performed in a specific rhetorical situation.

ABSTRACT. Internationally, student nurses' attrition after clinical practice is an increasing problem (Hamshire, Willgoss, & Wibberley, 2012; Pilegård Jensen, 2006). A better understanding of 'becoming a nurse' as situated practice in the hospital wards might help avoid pitfalls in the clinical practice. Thus a thorough insight into the field is necessary in order to change it. Using nexus analysis (Scollon & Scollon, 2004, 2007) as an ethnographic framework a study of the development of a professional identity among student nurses in Denmark was conducted. Scollon and Scollon’s notions on 'navigate' and 'engage' in the field provided a frame to combine both discourse (Edley, 2014) document (Prior, 2003) and interaction analysis (Jordan & Henderson, 1995; Sacks, 1992) in order to grasp the crucial social actors (nurses, students, patients, relatives) and their daily routinized practice in the health care settings. The paper contributes with insights into the field of clinical nursing education, gained through a thorough methodological framework of nexus analysis as an ethnographic way to conduct research in education and grasp the various multimodal social actions that constitute the practice. The paper shows how a combination of (video) observations, written interviews and workshops can be a way to obtain knowledge about the practice that consists of members generalizations, neutral observations, individual experiences and interaction with members (Scollon & Scollon 2004, p. 158)

ABSTRACT. Ambivalencies related to pharmacy practice as well pharmacist–client relationships, have been brought out in previous studies on pharmacy practice. Especially, it is discussed a tension between autonomy and dependency which is sharply stressed in self-medication encounters and gendered from the concepts of consuming and pharmaceutical care. The aim of the study is to investigate how the tension is manifested in interactions about over-the-counter medicines by looking at shifts, changes and confrontations in the pharmacist’s and client’s orientation to the task, interaction and to each other. Theoretically, the study connects the general framework of the relational dialectics theory (Baxter 2011) to the concepts of interactive frames and alignment (Goffman 1981, Tannen & Wallat 1986) and positioning (Davies & Harré 1992). The data consists of 28 audio-taped consultations for over-the-counters medicines in two Finnish community pharmacies among the voluntary participants. The data was transcribed verbatim according to a simplified version of the CA transcription notation and it was analysed in terms of linguistic markers and discursive practices expressing changes and challenges in the frames as well identities embedded in them. The five frames of communication: a commodity service frame, an informing and instruction frame, an advising frame, a medical interview frame, and a personal frame, were identified. It is shown how participants try to change frames and how they challenge the frames and identities offered in interaction. The tension is interpreted in the context of competing discourses of autonomy and dependency and within a wider framework of consumerism and professional care.

ABSTRACT. Medical interventions are often targeted at individual patients’ health, but they may also include measures to protect the general public. Such measures may be inoculation, anti-smoking campaigns, or assessments of patients’ risk behavior. The present study explores how the double agenda of helping individuals and assessing their risk behavior plays out in medical interactions.

The empirical case of this presentation, video-recorded treatment consultations between Obstructive Sleep Apnea (OSA) patients and nurses in Sweden, takes place after a diagnosis is established and doctors and patients have agreed to try a specific treatment. The aim of the encounter is therefore to personalize the treatment and provide a basis for follow-up rather than gaining new information about the patient’s problems. In addition, the consultations include the less patient-focused goal of assessing patients’ risk of falling asleep. OSA is the world’s most common sleep disorder and involves patients’ respiratory airways collapsing during sleep. This often results in recurrent episodes of excessive daytime sleepiness. Consequently, the Swedish Transport Administration states that untreated OSA patients should have their driver’s license confiscated.

The study uses conversation analysis to examine how patients manage the implications of questions concerning the risk to fall asleep involuntarily. The analysis shows how the participants raise and attend to expertise and experience as different epistemic domains with accompanying rights and responsibilities. I argue that an understanding of medical risk work benefits from taking into account how different agendas, responsibilities, and statuses are negotiated in social interaction.

ABSTRACT. This study explores moral character work accomplished through and in response to embodied displays of negative affect (anger/upset, sadness/crying, indignation) in heightened conflicts leading to walkout resolutions (cf. Dersley & Wootton, 2001). The analysis highlights how embodied displays of negative affect such as anger and crying, in various ways intensify the moral layering of blaming activities (e.g. insults, accusations, criticism, complaints) that become consequential to the recognition of deficiencies in moral character (Buttny, 1993). The selected data are from a videoethnographic study in a special teaching group with five children (8-10 years) diagnosed with ADHD and constitute a case study that explores how routinely performed conflicts lead to an accumulated record of deviant moral characters. Drawing on ethnomethodological conversation analysis and sociocultural linguistic approaches, the analysis focuses on the embodied and dialogical character of morality, affect and stance (M.H. Goodwin et al. 2012; Du Bois & Kärkkäinen, 2012). The analysis traces succeeding conflicts where one girl is singled out and blamed for faulty conduct, first among a group of children leading to the girl walking out, and second, as the conflict and the walkout event is recapitulated afterwards, in teacher-child interactions. The results of the study show that the emergence and expression of negative affect is intimately linked to particular kinds of interactional configurations that highlight the participants’ intimate and longstanding knowledge of one another. In conclusion, the study demonstrates how moral character work produced in the midst of emotionally intense interactions is part of affective relationships constituted over time in institutional practices.

ABSTRACT. Most tests of oral proficiency in a second language (L2) aim to assess learners’ competence to participate in social interaction; i.e., their interactional competence (IC). Viewed from a conversation analytic (CA) perspective on interactional organization, IC is “the ability to use the context-free interactional organizations (…) in a context-sensitive manner to participate in social activities” (Kasper & Ross, 2013, p. 24). In contrast, formal assessment criteria may express different IC conceptualizations as compared to participants’ in situ perception of competency. Furthermore, testing contexts entails domain-specific demands on talk (Seedhouse, 2013), and participants’ contributions are jointly accomplished. With an interest in the clash between emic and etic IC perspectives, our study contrasts two datasets: (1) an audio-recorded paired test of L2 English (9th-graders taking the mandatory national test of English in Sweden) and (2) video-recordings from an assessment training workshop for English teachers where the speaking performances of the students in the recording are discussed and graded by four groups of 3-4 teachers. The analysis compares test interaction, analyzed through CA, to sequences in teachers’ group work where particular student contributions in the test are reported, and then related to assessment criteria. We examine instances where students’ actions are treated by assessors as problematic in terms of IC, but where the test interaction shows orientations to local constraints. It is argued that if IC assessment should reflect students’ ability to participate competently in social interaction, assessment criteria ought to be informed by analyses of authentic L2 test interaction.

ABSTRACT. With the introduction of smartphones, participation in web-mediated social interaction has become an integral part in the communicative ecology of classrooms. Mobile phone use seems to affect well- documented classroom interaction patterns, where student participation is spatially, sequentially and structurally limited. The introduction of mobile phones into this participation framework is likely to have long-term consequences. The aim of the paper is to analyze recent and on-going changes in participation in classrooms of upper secondary school students, and to specify the impact of new digital media practices for the social mediation and creation of knowledge in classrooms. The analyzed material consists of two sources: approximately 200 hours of classroom video recordings of students’ interaction (2011-2013), from all of the subjects (28 different teachers) taught in the Finnish upper secondary school and recordings from upper secondary school in Finland and Sweden in 2015-2016, where classroom screen use in interaction is documented in detail. The results show that smartphone use is present and common in all subjects. The use is generally silent and non-disturbing, yet potentially interactionally rewarding for the students. This results in verbally quieter classrooms, where students can spend time on-line, and where the teacher, because of this, can continue to teach relatively undisturbed. This is the interactional reason for why smartphones are massively present, in the material, sometimes despite school rules to the contrary. The interactional space of the connected classroom has a new, multi-layered distribution of interactional spatiality, with previously non-present links between the outside world and the classroom context.

ABSTRACT. Research on linguistic diversity, cross-linguistic patterning and universality of practices of social interaction has gained increasing interest in research during the last couple of decades (see references below to examples of research). Especially an effort to compare languages and find commonalities of interactional practices in a more systematic way has become prominent, manifesting as special issues and edited volumes, as well as co-authored articles by groups of researchers. Simultaneously the methodologies of studies have become more varied, ranging from qualitative studies on a given topic to studies that make use of coding and quantifying. In my talk, I will explore the type of goals, theoretical and methodological assumptions, as well as analytic mentality of this recent scholarship by using empirical examples, for example, from research on questions and answers. I will contemplate the kinds of implications different premises of research may have for our understanding of the practices through which social actors manage their everyday tasks and relations to others when interacting with each other in particular languages and across languages.