Sample Reading Syllabus

Possible core texts

Garcia, A. C. (2013). An introduction to interaction: Understanding talk in formal and informal settings. A&C Black.
- A book that discusses many of the base concepts of EMCA and methods. Probably most suitable for those new to CA/first year students with good attention to institutional talk.
Sidnell, J. (Ed.). (2009). Conversation analysis: Comparative perspectives (Vol. 27). Cambridge University Press.
- Discussion of many CA concepts/phenomena in languages/contexts other than “English middle-aged phonecalls”. Probably suitable for beginner- intermediate students. It does not have examples of all ‘core concepts’ but could bring diversity to these concepts.
Clift, R. (2016). Conversation analysis. Cambridge University Press.
- Arguably a bit ‘tougher’ reading than the average introductory textbook, but good and interesting. Probably most suitable to students who are already familiar with academic writing styles/are at intermediate level/for a more demanding course. Already having some well cemented basic knowledge of linguistics would be advantageous.

Adjacency pairs

Wong, J. (2007). Answering my call: A look at telephone closings. Conversation analysis and language for specific purposes, 271-304.
Stivers, T., Enfield, N. J., Brown, P., Englert, C., Hayashi, M., Heinemann, T., … & Levinson, S. C. (2009). Universals and cultural variation in turn-taking in conversation. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 106(26), 10587-10592.

EMCA Transcription

Hepburn, A., & Bolden, G. B. (2013). The conversation analytic approach to transcription. The handbook of conversation analysis, 57, 76.
Mondada, L. (2016). Challenges of multimodality: Language and the body in social interaction. Journal of sociolinguistics, 20(3), 336-366.
Alexa Hepburn, Scott Varney, (2013), “Beyond ((laughter)): some notes on transcription”, In Studies of Laughter in Interaction (Phillip Glenn, Elizabeth Holt, eds.), London, UK, Bloomsbury Academic, pp. 25–38.

Sequence

Wu, R.J.R. (2009). Repetition in the initiation of repair. In J. Sidnell (Ed.), Conversation Analysis: Comparative Perspectives (Studies in Interactional Sociolinguistics, pp. 31-59). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511635670.003
Danby, S. J., Butler, C., & Emmison, M. (2009). When ‘listeners can’t talk’: Comparing active listening in opening sequences of telephone and online counselling. Australian Journal of Communication, 36(3).
Tsai, M. H., Lu, F. H., & Frankel, R. M. (2013). Learning to listen: Effects of using conversational transcripts to help medical students improve their use of open questions in soliciting patient problems. Patient education and counseling, 93(1), 48-55.

Action

Hayashi, M. (2003). Activity, participation and joint utterance construction. In Hayashi, M. (Ed.), Joint utterance construction in Japanese conversation (Vol. 12). John Benjamins Publishing.
Whitehead, K. A. (2015). Everyday antiracism in action: Preference organization in responses to racism. Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 34(4), 374-389.

TCU/practices

Kim, H. R. S., & Kuroshima, S. (2013). Turn beginnings in interaction: An introduction. Journal of Pragmatics, 57, 267-273
Tanaka, H. (2004). Prosody for marking transition-relevance places in Japanese conversation. Sound patterns in interaction: Cross-linguistic studies from conversation, 62, 63.
Barraja-Rohan, A. M. (1994). A very delayed acceptance to an invitation in a French conversation. Australian Review of Applied Linguistics. Supplement Series, 11(1), 153-172.

Reporting

Kim, M. S. (2014). Reported thought as a stance-taking device in Korean conversation. Discourse Processes, 51(3), 230-263.
Holt, E. (2000). Reporting and reacting: Concurrent responses to reported speech. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 33(4), 425-454.

Collections

Tanaka, H. (2004). Prosody for marking transition-relevance places in Japanese conversation. Sound patterns in interaction: Cross-linguistic studies from conversation, 62, 63.
Kimura, D., Malabarba, T., & Kelly Hall, J. (2018). Data collection considerations for classroom interaction research: A conversation analytic perspective. Classroom Discourse, 9(3), 185-204.
O’Keeffe, A., & Walsh, S. (2012). Applying corpus linguistics and conversation analysis in the investigation of small group teaching in higher education. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory, 8(1), 159-181.

Doing analysis

Hoey, E. M. (2018). Drinking for speaking: The multimodal organization of drinking in conversation. Social Interaction: Video-Based Studies of Human Sociality, 1(1).
Goodwin, M. H. (1995). Co-construction in girls’ hopscotch. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 28(3), 261-281.

Identity

Stivers, T., Enfield, N. J., Brown, P., Englert, C., Hayashi, M., Heinemann, T., … & Levinson, S. C. (2009). Universals and cultural variation in turn-taking in conversation. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 106(26), 10587-10592.
Huang, C. H., & Lu, Y. (2013). Interactions of cultural identity and turn-taking organisation: A case study of a senior Chinese immigrant in Australia. Chinese Language and Discourse, 4(2), 229-252.

Using evidence

Wong, J., & Olsher, D. (2000). Reflections on conversation analysis and nonnative speaker talk: An interview with Emanuel A. Schegloff. Issues in Applied Linguistics, 11(1).
Mesch, J. (1998). Tactile sign language: Turn taking and questions in signed conversations of deaf-blind people.
Clift, R. (2001). Meaning in interaction: The case of actually. Language, 245-291.
Rawfield Rawls, A., Whitehead, K., & Duck, W. (2020). Ethnomethodological and Conversation Analytic Studies of Race and Systemic Racism in Everyday Interaction. Routledge. Retrieved October 13, 2020, from https://www.routledge.com/rsc/downloads/Black_Lives_Matter__Ethnomethodological_and_Conversation_Analytic_Studies_of_Race_and_Systemic_Racism_in_Everyday_Interaction_(2).pdf

Comments:

Not all methodologies and findings from the articles listed below are without fault flaws and for educational purposes, a critical approach could be useful. However, this does not mean that these articles are ‘faulty’ or less valuable. If anything, they could be used to foster critical thinking and careful evaluation of scholarly materials amongst students.

As this is a work-in-progress, this document is very far from complete. We have tried to incorporate a variety of articles, both in terms of its contents, authors and to whom they may be useful. Some of these articles are specialised, whilst others are more accessible. Whilst the focus is on EMCA and CA, some of these papers may be ‘EMCA’-adjacent or interdisciplinary. It is up to individual users/practitioners/instructors/researchers/etc to decide what is and isn’t suitable for their purposes.

[IMPORTANT]: Unfortunately, I have not yet been able to access/read all works included in here. Of some I have only been able to access parts/extracts and made decisions based on that. If you believe something should not be included or something should be included, please leave a comment!

Additional reading:

Dr. Megan Figueroa (Linguist) compiled a list of marginalized scholars who study language (lot of fields) – https://ko-fi.com/post/A-labor-of-love-Q5Q11PY30

Examples of comments on the canonical texts:
Berard, T. J. (2010). Unpacking “institutional racism”: Insights from Wittgenstein, Garfinkel, Schutz, Goffman, and Sacks. Schutzian Research. A Yearbook of Lifeworldly Phenomenology and Qualitative Social Science, (Volume 2), 111-135.

Wong, J., & Olsher, D. (2000). Reflections on conversation analysis and nonnative speaker talk: An interview with Emanuel A. Schegloff. Issues in Applied Linguistics, 11(1).

Garfinkel, H. (2012). The «Red» as an ideal object. Etnografia e ricerca qualitativa, (1), 19-34.

I Turns, adjacency and preference

Turn-taking, adjacency pairs

Hoey, E. (2015). An economy of turns? Avoiding the turn space through self-deselection. In the conference titled” Revisiting Participation: Language and Bodies in Interaction”.

Kim, H. R. S., & Kuroshima, S. (2013). Turn beginnings in interaction: An introduction. Journal of Pragmatics, 57, 267-273.

Wong, J. (2007). Answering my call: A look at telephone closings. Conversation analysis and language for specific purposes, 271-304.

Garcia, A. C., & Baker Jacobs, J. (1999). The eyes of the beholder: Understanding the turn-taking system in quasi-synchronous computer-mediated communication. Research on language and social interaction, 32(4), 337-367.

Garcia, A., & Jacobs, J. B. (1998). The interactional organization of computer mediated communication in the college classroom. Qualitative Sociology, 21(3), 299-317.

Mesch, J. (1998). Tactile sign language: Turn taking and questions in signed conversations of deaf-blind people.

Stivers, T., Enfield, N. J., Brown, P., Englert, C., Hayashi, M., Heinemann, T., … & Levinson, S. C. (2009). Universals and cultural variation in turn-taking in conversation. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 106(26), 10587-10592.

Turn design and preference
Hayashi, M., & Kim, S. H. (2015). Turn formats for other-initiated repair and their relation to trouble sources: Some observations from Japanese and Korean conversations. Journal of Pragmatics, 87, 198-217.
van Dijk, T. (1992). Discourse and the denial of racism. In A. Jaworski & N. Coupland (Eds.), The discourse reader (pp. 506-520). London: Routledge.

Whitehead, K. A. (2015). Everyday antiracism in action: Preference organization in responses to racism. Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 34(4), 374-389.

Kim, H. R. (2011). Beginning an action in English and Korean: Turn design and action projection. University of California, Los Angeles.

Tanaka, H. (2004). Prosody for marking transition-relevance places in Japanese conversation. Sound patterns in interaction: Cross-linguistic studies from conversation, 62, 63.

Overlap and repair

Wu, R.J.R. (2009). Repair and beyond. In J. Sidnell (Ed.), Conversation Analysis: Comparative Perspectives (Studies in Interactional Sociolinguistics, pp. 29-30). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Wu, R.J.R. (2009). Repetition in the initiation of repair. In J. Sidnell (Ed.), Conversation Analysis: Comparative Perspectives (Studies in Interactional Sociolinguistics, pp. 31-59). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511635670.003
Robles, J. S. (2015). Extreme case (re) formulation as a practice for making hearably racist talk repairable. Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 34(4), 390-409.

Burford‐Rice, R., & Augoustinos, M. (2018). ‘I didn’t mean that: It was just a slip of the tongue’: Racial slips and gaffes in the public arena. British Journal of Social Psychology, 57(1), 21-42.

Wong, J. (2000). Delayed next turn repair initiation in native/non-native speaker English conversation. Applied linguistics, 21(2), 244-267.

II Sequences and actions

Sequence organisation

Rossano, F., Brown, P., & Levinson, S. (2009). Gaze, questioning, and culture. In J. Sidnell (Ed.), Conversation Analysis: Comparative Perspectives (Studies in Interactional Sociolinguistics, pp. 187-249). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511635670.008

Hayashi, M., & Yoon, K. (2009). Negotiating boundaries in talk. In J. Sidnell (Ed.), Conversation Analysis: Comparative Perspectives (Studies in Interactional Sociolinguistics, pp. 250-278). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511635670.009

Hoey, E. M., & Stokoe, E. (2018). Eligibility and bad news delivery: How call-takers reject applicants to university. Linguistics and Education, 46, 91-101.

Conversation as joint action/action formation

Sorjonen, M., & Hakulinen, A. (2009). Action formation and sequencing. In J. Sidnell (Ed.), Conversation Analysis: Comparative Perspectives (Studies in Interactional Sociolinguistics, pp. 279-280). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Hayashi, M. (2003). Activity, participation and joint utterance construction. In Hayashi, M. (Ed.), Joint utterance construction in Japanese conversation (Vol. 12). John Benjamins Publishing.

[FORTHCOMING] Hiramoto, T. and Hayashi, M. “‘How about eggs?’: Action ascription in the family decision-making process while grocery shopping at a supermarket.” In A. Deppermann and M. Haugh, (eds.), Action Ascription: Interaction in Context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

III ‘Big sequences’, alignment and affiliation
Reporting

Buttny, R. (1997). Reported speech in talking race on campus. Human communication research, 23(4), 477-506.

Kim, M. S. (2014). Reported thought as a stance-taking device in Korean conversation. Discourse Processes, 51(3), 230-263.

Park, I. (2018). Reported thought as (hypothetical) assessment. Journal of Pragmatics, 129, 1-12.

[‘Macro’ phenomena]

Stivers, T., & Majid, A. (2007). Questioning children: Interactional evidence of implicit bias in medical interviews. Social Psychology Quarterly, 70(4), 424-441.
McKenzie, K. (2016). Invoking the Specter of Racism: Category Membership as Speaker Topic and Resource. Qualitative Sociology Review, 12(3).

Goodwin, M. H. (1995). Co-construction in girls’ hopscotch. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 28(3), 261-281.

Clift, R. (2006). Indexing stance: Reported speech as an interactional evidential 1. Journal of sociolinguistics, 10(5), 569-595.

Hoey, E. M. (2015). Lapses: How people arrive at, and deal with, discontinuities in talk. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 48(4), 430-453.

Hoey, E. M. (2018). Drinking for speaking: The multimodal organization of drinking in conversation. Social Interaction: Video-Based Studies of Human Sociality, 1(1).

Mori, J. (2002). Task design, plan, and development of talk‐in‐interaction: An analysis of a small group activity in a Japanese language classroom. Applied linguistics, 23(3), 323-347.

Lee, S. H., & Tanaka, H. (2016). Affiliation and alignment in responding actions. Journal of Pragmatics, 100, 1-7.

Winston, E. A. (1999). Storytelling and conversation: discourse in deaf communities (Vol. 5). Gallaudet University Press.

Sierra, S., & Shrikant, N. (2020). 14 Fake Alignments. In J. McIntosh & N. Mendoza-Denton (Eds.) Language in the Trump Era: Scandals and Emergencies, pp. 203-214.

Stribling, P., Rae, J., & Dickerson, P. (2009). Using conversation analysis to explore the recurrence of a topic in the talk of a boy with an autism spectrum disorder. Clinical linguistics & phonetics, 23(8), 555-582.

Alfahad, A. A. (2013). A conversation analysis of aggressiveness and deference in Arabic news interviews (Doctoral dissertation, University of Leeds).

Speer, S. A. (2015). Responding to-isms. Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 34(4), 464-470.

Goodwin, M. H. (2008). The hidden life of girls: Games of stance, status, and exclusion. John Wiley & Sons.

IV Possible additional topics:

Rawfield Rawls, A., Whitehead, K., & Duck, W. (2020). Ethnomethodological and Conversation Analytic Studies of Race and Systemic Racism in Everyday Interaction. Routledge. Retrieved October 13, 2020, from https://www.routledge.com/rsc/downloads/Black_Lives_Matter__Ethnomethodological_and_Conversation_Analytic_Studies_of_Race_and_Systemic_Racism_in_Everyday_Interaction_(2).pdf

Institutional talk

Rawls, A. W., & Duck, W. (2017). “Fractured reflections” of high-status black male presentations of self: Nonrecognition of identity as a “tacit” form of institutional racism. Sociological Focus, 50(1), 36-51.

Waring, H. Z. (2015). Theorizing pedagogical interaction: Insights from conversation analysis. Routledge.

Stokoe, E., & Edwards, D. (2007). Black this, black that’: racial insults and reported speech in neighbour complaints and police interrogations. Discourse & Society, 18(3), 337-372.

Garcia, A. C. (2012). Medical problems where talk is the problem: Current trends in conversation analytic research on aphasia, autism spectrum disorder, intellectual disability, and Alzheimer’s. Sociology Compass, 6(4), 351-364.

de Almeida, F. F.. (2018). Police interviews with suspects in police stations in England. Loughborough University.

Lawless, J. J., Gale, J. E., & Bacigalupe, G. (2001). The discourse of race and culture in family therapy supervision: A conversation analysis. Contemporary Family Therapy, 23(2), 181-197.

Estrada, R. D., Reynolds, J. F., & Hilfinger Messias, D. K. (2015). A conversation analysis of verbal interactions and social processes in interpreter‐mediated primary care encounters. Research in nursing & health, 38(4), 278-288.

Burns, A., & Radford, J. (2008). Parent—child interaction in Nigerian families: conversation analysis, context and culture. Child Language Teaching and Therapy, 24(2), 193-209.

Laughter

Clift, R. (2016). Don’t make me laugh: Responsive laughter in (dis) affiliation. Journal of Pragmatics, 100, 73-88.

Clift, R. (2012). Identifying action: Laughter in non-humorous reported speech. Journal of Pragmatics, 44(10), 1303-1312.

Tanaka, H. (2018). Solo or shared laughter in coparticipant criticism in Japanese conversation. East Asian Pragmatics, 3(1), 125-149.

Kangasharju, H., & Nikko, T. (2009). Emotions in organizations: Joint laughter in workplace meetings. The Journal of Business Communication (1973), 46(1), 100-119.

Knowledge

Lynch, M., & Wong, J. (2016). Reverting to a hidden interactional order: Epistemics, informationism, and conversation analysis. Discourse Studies, 18(5), 526-549.

Waring, H. Z. (2012). “Any questions?”: Investigating the nature of understanding‐checks in the language classroom. Tesol Quarterly, 46(4), 722-752.

Membership and Identity

Huynh, K., & Woo, B. (2014). ‘Asian fail’: Chinese Canadian men talk about race, masculinity, and the nerd stereotype. Social Identities, 20(4-5), 363-378.

Van de Weerd, P. (2019). “Those foreigners ruin everything here”: Interactional functions of ethnic labelling among pupils in the Netherlands. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 23(3), 244-262.

Whitehead, K. A. (2019). Using ethnomethodology and conversation analysis to study social categories: The case of racial categories in South African radio talk. Research Methods in the Social Sciences, 251.

[FORTHCOMING] Sierra, S. (2021). Millennials Talking Media. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Shrikant, N. (2020). Cultural difference as a resource for arguments in institutional interactions. Communication Monographs, 1-18.

Shrikant, N. (2018). “There’s no such thing as Asian”: A membership categorization analysis of cross-cultural adaptation in an Asian American business community. Journal of International and Intercultural Communication, 11(4), 286-303.

Shrikant, N. (2015). ‘Yo, it’s IST yo’: The discursive construction of an Indian American youth identity in a South Asian student club. discourse & society, 26(4), 480-501.

Shrikant, N. (2014). “It’s like,‘I’ve never met a lesbian before!’”: Personal narratives and the construction of diverse female identities in a lesbian counterpublic. Pragmatics, 24(4), 799-818.

Shrikant, N., & Marshall, D. (2019). ‘I went to debutante school’: using Southern femininity as a resource to negotiate authority in a Texan workplace interaction. Gender & Language, 13(3).

Williamson, F. A. (2020). Using Applied Conversation Analysis and Membership Categorization Analysis to Study STEM Graduate Student Teaching Development (Doctoral dissertation, Indiana University).

Goodwin, M. H., & Alim, H. S. (2010). “Whatever (neck roll, eye roll, teeth suck)”: The situated coproduction of social categories and identities through stancetaking and transmodal stylization. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 20(1), 179-194.

Greco, L. (2020). Gender as a scientific and artistic experience: the display of metaperformative competence in walking practices. Whatever. A Transdisciplinary Journal of Queer Theories and Studies, 3, 5-28.

Advanced/Further reading and other possibly interesting readings:

Clift, R., & Helani, F. (2010). Inshallah: Religious invocations in Arabic topic transition. Language in Society, 357-382.

Bailey, B. (2000). Communicative behavior and conflict between African-American customers and Korean immigrant retailers in Los Angeles. Discourse & Society, 11(1), 86-108.

Whitehead, K. A. (2011). An ethnomethodological, conversation analytic approach to investigating race in South Africa. South African Review of Sociology, 42(3), 1-22.

Wu, R. J. R. (1997). Transforming participation frameworks in multi-party Mandarin conversation: The use of discourse particles and body behavior. Issues in Applied Linguistics, 8(2).

Kim, H. R. S. (2010). A high boundary tone as a resource for a social action: The Korean sentence-ender–ta. Journal of Pragmatics, 42(11), 3055-3077.

Wilkinson, R. (2019). Atypical interaction: Conversation analysis and communicative impairments. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 52(3), 281-299.

Nicodemus, B., & Taylor, M. (2014). Deaf and hearing interpreting team preparation: A study using conversation analysis. Deaf interpreters at work: International insights, 90-116.

Tetnowski, J. T., Tetnowski, J. A., & Damico, J. S. (2020). Patterns of Conversation Trouble Source and Repair as Indices of Improved Conversation in Aphasia: A Multiple-Case Study Using Conversation Analysis. American journal of speech-language pathology, 1-18.

Damico, J. S., Oelschlaeger, M., & Simmons-Mackie, N. (1999). Qualitative methods in aphasia research: Conversation analysis. Aphasiology, 13(9-11), 667-679.

Muskett, T., Perkins, M., Clegg, J., & Body, R. (2010). Inflexibility as an interactional phenomenon: Using conversation analysis to re-examine a symptom of autism. Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics, 24(1), 1-16.

Cukor-Avila, P., & Bailey, G. (1995). An approach to sociolinguistic fieldwork: A site study of rural AAVE in a Texas community. English World Wide, 16, 159-194.

Goodwin, M. H., & Cekaite, A. (2018). Embodied family choreography: Practices of control, care, and mundane creativity. Routledge.
Salon, H. F. Linguistic Uprisings: Toward a Grammar of Emancipation Luca Greco Université de Lorraine, Metz.