Conversation and Conversational Analysis

CONVERSATION AND CONVERSATION ANALYSIS

The conversation is one of the most important uses of human language, since through this one people can develop their own identities and culture, also conversation allows people to socialize and develop their relationships with each other, it is called linguistic code or communication, but the conversation is not only the use of words also, exist the non-linguistic code, it means that conversation can also be represented through body movements (body language).

Conversation presents groups of social rules where it provides what topics are appropriate or how language has to be used in order to get a maximum effect which it makes an appropriate conversation but it also depends on the culture, the context and the polite society, also it is important to understand the conversation as a linguistic activity.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF CONVERSATION ANALYSIS

In this part, the conversation analysis is related to the ethnomethodology as a field of sociology that studies the practices and procedures in which members of a specific society produce and recognize intelligible objects, events, and courses of action where talk is developed. It interprets the situations and messages that is presented in the social world. The social world also is related with the psychological process in which it receives the name of “documentary method”. This method selects certain facts from a social situation, it means that documentary method is associated with the context social where the talk has a natural development in order to use it in their daily lives to create a taken-for-granted, in other words, the talkers already know or they are experts in the topic that they are developing at the moment and at the same time they feel like they are “at home”.

This taken -for -granted -nature implies that social knowledge is implicit and at the same time it implies a social knowledge where produce a social interaction and the members need to make available to others their understanding of the activities. The relationship that exists between social interaction and ethnomethodology is in how the interaction was performed, because the meaning of the conversation is subjective.

On the other hand, talk can be strategically employed to achieve communicative goals, so the conversation is realized through groups of practices which speakers can deploy in order to undertake particular actions. The conversation analysis has assumptions where the conversation has an order and it depends on the participants but at the same time depends on the context taking into account that conversation occurs naturally, so it does not have in mind if the conversation is formal or informal, the conversational discourse see the talk in interaction as a social process.

CONVERSATION ANALYSIS AS AN APPROACH TO STUDYING INTERACTION

Conversational analysis studies the organization and orderliness of social interaction which means that the conversation is produced as sensible and meaningful talk, as we know, human a talk is a form of action, therefore, talk is presented and understood as meaningful because participants share the same procedures for designing and interpreting talk and at the same time talk always has to respond to the context where the conversation gets the function. The context has various functions like: it allows participants to create the conversation, give the meaning of the conversation allows the feedback in the conversation and get new ideas into the conversation.

Conversation analysis works with recordings of spontaneously occurring talk. Recordings help to analyze and to detail in multiple occasions the talk but video recordings have better sources of conversational data since it offers a better detail of the conversation, it means that the analyzer can capture the interaction between the talkers or speakers and can give a better interpretation of the conversation, taking into account to analyze the data the researcher has to do a transcription that is for this reason that researcher prefers to use as data the recording or video recordings.

To carry out this, the researcher has to keep in mind the three methodologies elements which they help to get a better analysis of the conversation like getting a formulation of the action demonstrating that the observation is not a construct of the analysis alone, but is understood and oriented to by the participants themselves and finally, the explanation of how the practice observed yields the action being accomplished. In other words, the lecture shows that the analysis of the conversation is not only trying to get the meaning of the conversation, but it also has to get an order like the transcription and how the participants follow the organization of the meaning.   

Lorena Fuya