CONVERSATION AND CONVERSATION ANALYSIS

CONVERSATION AND CONVERSATION ANALYSIS

By Yenny Patricia Bautista Pinzón

Always that I used to talk about conversation analysis a lot of thoughts came to my mind about what was the real importance of analysing conversation, so what it for? Based on my believes I said it was a waste of time. Who can cares about conversation and even more conversation in the classroom, but reading about discourse, discourse analysis and now conversation, I can say that conversation is one of the most relevant uses of human language, so it deserves our complete attention and more if we are language teachers, in other words linguists.

According to the text it can be said that conversation is part of our daily life, every day we are enrolled in conversational interaction, language is part of us as human beings, and conversation gives human society some kind of order.

Conversation is present in every relationship, when people socialize and interact with each other. Every time there is a conversation, people are involved in a form of linguistic communication. It does not mean that it is only related to codes, it is more than that. When people talk to others it is also included eye gaze, body posture, silences, and the real context in which each conversation is set.

When writers talk about conversation, relate this topic to the conception about what a good conversationalist is. They say that what establish an appropriate conversation can vary according to the culture and change over time, although some approaches claim that conversation is an elite activity, however it is really an everyday one, and conversation must be understood as a social event in which people are always engaged.

As a subject of study, by some linguists as Chomsky, this study is accused of being influenced by non-linguistic factors. It is of paramount importance to see conversation as a linguistic activity. Since 1960, it has increased as a field of study.

Conversation, as a field of study, has to go to the concept of sociology and ethnomethodology. In ethnomethodology, the social order is not a pre-existing structure; instead, it is constructed in the mind of the social actors, as they get in contact with society. As people get involved in a social act, somehow members have to organize in a coherently way, their ideas, experiences and talk.

Garfinkel ( 1967) said that individuals bring order or make sense of their world through a psychological process, which he calls the documentary method. In this method, some patterns are selected, taken from their social situations. People perceive world through a series of patterns they make sense of, during interaction.

According to Duranti (1997) to understand social organization is indispensable, examines actual instances of social interaction, in this process members need to adjust, monitor, confirm, and share understanding; paying attention on how interaction is performed.

There are three assumptions in conversation analysis: order is produced orderliness, order is produced, situated and occasioned, and order is repeatable and recurrent. Participants themselves construct conversations in orderly way. One of the principles in conversation is that participants in talk design their talk in order to be understood in terms of the knowledge they share. So all this process is called recipient design.

Moreover, the central goal of conversation analytic research is the description of all the competences that speakers use in participating in a socially organized interaction. When doing conversational analysis context is significant, so everything that happens in a conversation occurs in a specific context, it can be internal or external.

Even though conversation analysis has been a new approach, it has become essential at the moment of understanding human beings, interaction is a key issue in society. Now putting all this information into my educative context it has even more sense that if I take is in isolation. We are teacher and students are the most important thing for us, why not take conversation analysis as a way to understand the learners.

Conversation analysis can give teacher a lot of significant insights about what is happening around us, describing the interaction produced and organized in the classrooms could led teacher to better and meaningful practices. The question is why we do not implement it in our real life. Having such a powerful tool we remain naïvely lost about what is really happening while interaction is occurring. Thus, for me the first step is the literature, know about the topic, having the base we can continue on practising and get deeper inside interaction in the classroom.