Search

How do native and nonnative English-speaking participants understand one another in front desk service encounters? Specifically, what are the resources that enable them to transact their business at the desk? In this paper, I use the notion of "shared background" to show how participants at the front desk of a university-sponsored English language program rely on the sequential and institutional contexts in which their talk is produced to accomplish their service activities. In particular, I show how receptionists' orientations to the institutional requirements of students' actions in the "request slot" are evident in the design of their responses to students, especially in how they manage both the discourse and institutional relevancies that students' actions pose. Then, I show how participants' opening moves prepare the way for, and render accountable, students' service-seeking activities by constraining the kinds of actions that students can relevantly produce next. I propose that such constraints provide an important resource for participants to understand and respond to one another in institutionally relevant ways, in spite of their (at times) limited shared linguistic resources.

This paper expands conversation analytic notions of recipiency by considering recipient proactivity. At issue are the methods by which an unaddressed participant of a story-in-progress makes claims on a teller's attention through a series of upgraded responses to the story. These claims range from gaze direction toward the teller, to displays of knowledge of particular story components. The recipient's displays of knowledge regarding the story provide a resource for her to elicit the teller's attention, thereby providing her a method of challenging the participation framework of the ongoing talk.

This article examines how very young children in a day care center make use of their peers' gaze shifts to differentially locate and prepare for the possibility of a caregiver intervention during situations of their biting, hitting, pushing, and the like. At issue is how the visible character of a gaze shift--that is, the manner in which it is produced and its position in a sequence of ongoing activities--constitutes gaze as differentiable social action and, further, provides children with a resource for discerning what is likely to "happen next". Children, sensitive to the epistemic status of what the peer may or may not have located in terms of the caregiver as an "already there," a "newly discovered," or a "yet to be discovered" feature of the scene cease, continue, or revise their harassments in accord with their discernments. (Contains 1 table, 3 figures and 7 footnotes.)

Looks at interactions between English-as-a-Second-Language students and English-speaking staff at the front desk of a language institute. Analysis focuses on the sequential organization of front desk encounters, revealing ways the participant's shared orientations to the organization and goals of these encounters facilitate native speaker-nonnative speaker interaction. (Author/VWL)

Examines methods by which an unaddressed participant of a story-in-progress displays her recipiency to a teller who addresses her talk to another participant, discussing how the unaddressed participant makes claims on the teller's attention through a series of upgraded responses to the story. The claims range from gaze direction to displays of knowledge of particular story components. (SM)

This paper demonstrates how children aged 1-2 1/2 years monitor the attentional focus of their caregivers in situations of their sanctionable acts toward a peer (e.g., pushing) and organize their conduct to evade, or alternately draw, a caregiver's attention to these events. A large literature in the psychological sciences documents a number of attention organizing behaviors that emerge in children's first 2 years, and links these behaviors to children's early understandings of intentionality. We propose, however, that children's orientations to their caregivers, and whether or not they will intervene, derive from their abilities to assess a range of 'real world' contingences having to do with the fundamental observability of their conduct, that is, with whether or not, and how, a caregiver comes to see their activities. Our investigation concerns the communication resources that enable children to 'read' the conduct of others, and position their own actions by reference to the actions of others, in strategic ways. Keywords: Very Young Children; Nonverbal Communication; Gaze; Joint Attention; Misconduct