Abstract
Conversation analysis (CA), the study of talk-in-interaction, is an interdisciplinary field drawing on sociology, psychology, linguistics and communication studies. CA is a theoretically and methodologically distinctive approach to gaining an understanding of social life. The development of CA and other related research approaches has enabled researchers in the field to examine how people communicate through talk. Garcia’s book is an invaluable step-by-step guide to addressing the aforementioned issues through the concepts and methods of CA within a wide range of informal everyday and formal institutional interaction settings. The book focuses on understanding the procedures utilized-to-organize talk in interaction and aims to teach students how talk is organized and what types of issues in interaction seem to occur. It consists of 27 chapters, which are organized into seven parts. Each chapter ends with practical exercises that are designed to be of help to the reader who wishes to learn by doing CA and a summary of the chapter along with a useful overview of recommended readings.
Part I comprises an introductory chapter, and then Chapters 2, 3 and 4 on the sociological roots of conversation studies. These chapters introduce a toolkit of resources, concepts and constructs utilized throughout the book, focusing on ethnomethodology, understanding and doing CA, and transcription practices, respectively. They explain classic work by some of the most important theorists in the field, including Garfinkel, Sacks and Schegloff. Chapter 4 includes examples of transcriptions of actual conversations. This chapter is likely to be of great interest to readers as they will broaden their understanding of the challenges they face in transcription.
Part II, Chapters 5–13, provides in-depth discussions of some core CA tenets in chapters on, respectively, the turn constructional component, adjacency pairs, the sequential organization of turns, openings, closings, error avoidance and repair, creating topical coherence, storytelling and referring to persons. These concepts are supported with engaging examples of previous studies to show how participants engage in talk. This structure is likely to prove useful as a reference guide for students looking for explication of a particular feature of interaction studied by conversation analysts.
Parts III to VII cover a wide range of talk in institutional settings. Each chapter allows the reader a concentrated look at interactions that exemplify the intricacies of institutional settings so as to understand how people make sense of each other and the world around them.
Part III, Chapters 14–17, discusses the types of talk that can be done over the telephone. In Chapter 14, for instance, the author examines ‘service calls’, made by clients or customers of an organization or business to gain information or a specific service, to highlight similarities with and differences from ordinary telephone calls.
Part IV, Chapters 18 and 19, presents some applications of research into medical settings, where CA offers information about the doctor–patient consultation, which may be beneficial to the patient. However, although Chapter 19 reviews differentiated interactional roles of participants, it does not provide the reader with Goffman’s participation framework, which creates a tool for exploring how multiple parties build action in the presence of one another while at the same time both helping to build and attending to relevant context and action. Developing an understanding of participation roles would seem to be necessary in helping the reader understand the interactional roles discussed earlier in this chapter.
Part V, Chapters 20–22, aims to explore how witnesses and attorneys use a range of techniques to prove accusations or to avoid implications for blame in legal settings.
Part VI, Chapters 23 and 24, draws upon the speech exchange system of television news interviews and explores how the work of interviewing is conducted. What makes this part appropriately understandable for the reader is the use of case studies that illustrate the principles described in the chapters.
Part VII, Chapters 25 and 26, illustrates how the work of business and other organizations is done through talk. It would have been more engaging and perhaps more tangible for the reader if the author had included some more examples, drawn from the domain of service encounters. Service encounters are a pervasive and fundamental activity in everyday life whereby products, information or commodities are exchanged between a service provider and a customer.
A ‘Conclusions’ chapter provides the reader with two excerpts and encourages them to compare them with the more simplified transcriptions in Chapter 1. Here, the author highlights the need for detailed transcripts as this enriches one’s understanding of the intricacies of talk-in-interaction.
The book would have benefitted from more careful editing to remove typographical errors, some of which have consequences for readers. For example, on page 241, the author refers to Chapter ‘20’, which in fact should be ‘21’.
In conclusion, this is an important textbook that engages closely with theoretical and practical aspects of CA. The book is very ‘user-friendly’ and approaches its subject matter from a straightforward and common sense point of view. No doubt, this book will be of interest to students of sociology, linguistics and communication studies.