Discourse & Communication

This qualitative study investigated the motivations and factors college students consider when selecting a medium for interpersonal communication in an academic setting. A convenience sample of college students was interviewed, and transcripts underwent reflexive thematic analysis. Participants reported fulfilling several needs through one-to-one communication with a consultant at the university’s writing center: informative/cognitive (to receive guidance), social/emotional (to feel encouraged or to socialize), and flexibility/convenience (to avoid commuting or to save time). Perceptions of media’s effectiveness were based on the medium’s richness, as face-to-face and videoconferencing apps afford clearer communication for complex discussions. Factors of media selectivity were also uncovered.

This interactional-analytic study investigates the evolving use of self-disclosures by pre-service teachers, acting in their role as novice foreign language learning (FLL) counsellors across a seven-session cycle. Building on previous research on their interactive potential, the analysis of three case studies reveals that novices initially employ self-disclosures to bridge interactional gaps. Over time, their use becomes functionally diversified and increasingly aligned with specific FLL counselling goals, including preparing and legitimizing advisory actions, fostering reflection and transformative learning, and supporting solution-oriented strategies. Finally, self-disclosures assume an argumentative function, addressing internal resistance, harmonising conflicting perspectives and bridging between divergent positions. These developments illustrate the co-adaptive interplay between the novices’ growing professional interactional competence, accumulated interactional history, and adaptations that follow the transformative learning dynamics. The findings underscore that self-disclosures function not only as multifunctional resources but also as instruments of professional development, enabling novices to engage in reflective, goal-oriented, and transformative counselling practices.

This study analyzes recipient design in handover conversations involving customers, customer service chatbots, and human agents, and examines how repair strategies initiated by chatbots and human agents impact conversational progressivity. These text-based conversations were analyzed using Conversation Analysis. Findings show customers formulate their request and subsequent messages concisely when communicating with a chatbot (pre-handover), but use details, full sentences, and politeness markers when communicating with a human agent (post-handover). Moreover, both chatbots and human agents frequently initiate repairs to address troubles of understanding promptly, but their approaches differ: chatbots generalize inquiries broadly, often resulting in multiple sequences of repair, while human agents use follow-up questions to specify and guide responses, ensuring progressivity.

In this article, we explore the intersection between collective and hierarchical leadership in a software engineering company in Turkey. Drawing on 5 hours of video-recorded virtual team meeting interactions, we focus on decision-making processes as the team reports their progress. By employing Multimodal Conversation Analysis, we reveal the interactional dynamics among the project director, the official team leader and other participants in a software analysis team analyzed through deontic and epistemic lenses. We tease out the intricacies of leadership in the context of a professional hierarchy and by analyzing real time interactions, we demonstrate how leadership is collectively enacted in the sequential organization of talk. Our study provides further empirical evidence that fills the lacuna in understanding how collective and hierarchical leadership are intertwined in complex ways and thus responding to several calls in the leadership literature by analyzing these real-time interactions.

Arguments over the success or failure of the JCPOA (the Iran nuclear deal) have been frequently covered by mainstream media in the years following its signing and implementation. To understand how such arguments are constructed discursively, this article builds on existing studies on argumentation patterns and delves deeper into the ‘context-specific topoi’ in several news articles on the JCPOA. The selected news articles were published by the Iranian newspaper Kayhan in the post-JCPOA era (2015–2020). Drawing on a discourse-analytical approach to argumentation analysis within the framework of Critical Discourse Analysis, the study identifies various recurrent context-specific topoi that present context-abstract causal conclusions moving from causes to results. The topoi are used as justifications for and against the measures and actions taken related to the JCPOA, and more broadly, to the relations with the West. The ‘topos of failure’ is dominant in the corpus, which is structured in three domains: (a) ‘failure of the JCPOA’, (b) ‘US policy’s failure in dealing with Iran’ and (c) ‘failure of Iran’s reformist government’. The findings show that Kayhan’s discourse draws on shared ideological imaginaries, portraying perceived flaws in the JCPOA to support its stance against Iran’s diplomatic relations with the West. The article provides insights into how the media in an authoritarian context constructs political reasoning and influences public perceptions of international agreements in the conflict context.

Employing corpus-assisted discourse studies, this paper examines how COVID-19-related newspaper articles employ linguistic and discursive strategies to introduce and frame expert statements in ways that influence the epistemic authority of science and expertise. The findings indicate that the right-leaning tabloid New York Post referred to experts vaguely and represented scientific research as entertainment rather than as a crucial element of crisis management. By contrast, the left-leaning New York Times drew on experts in diverse ways, such as to present scientific evidence, contextualize events, and provide background information. However, expert statements in the Times were also mobilized to support political criticism, which may undermine perceptions of experts’ impartiality and contribute to declining trust. I argue that newspapers use expert voices to advance their own political attitudes, which can lead to declining trust in science. Overall, the study sheds light on the role of the press in shaping polarized attitudes toward expertise.

Owing to errors made by the author Frederick Attenborough, two footnotes from the following article have been removed.

Attenborough, F (2016) (De)constructing the sociological imagination? Media discourse, intellectuals and the challenge of public engagement. Discourse & Communication 10(5): 437–457. DOI: 10.1177/1750481316659395