Applying conversation analysis to interactions with atypically developing children

This special collection of five papers is a proportion of those presented during a series of six seminars funded by the ESRC in 2005–2007 (ESRC grant number RES‐451‐26‐0138), entitled ‘Analysing Interactions in Childhood: Methods and Applications’. Contributors to the seminar series mainly employ ‘conversation analysis’ (CA) as their research tool. This qualitative method forms ‘a naturalistic observation‐based science of actual verbal behaviour’ (Drew and Heritage 1992). The thrust of interactional theories is that linguistic domains such as syntax, semantics, and the design of ‘turns at talk’ are actually shaped by interactional considerations, rather than being isolated from their context as is assumed in more idealized structural views of language. Participants, as speakers and listeners, are shown to display an orientation to the routine procedures used within talk. These might include the ways in which turns at talk are transferred from one participant to the next, and how listeners display their understanding of the interaction in their own talk in next turn. An example very pertinent to interactions with people who have disabilities is the organization of ‘repair’ which operates in conversation, ‘addressed to recurrent problems in speaking, hearing, and understanding’ (Schegloff, Jefferson, and Sacks 1977: 361) in any form of talk. A number of social actions may be accomplished simultaneously when participants tackle these various difficulties; the organization of repair, as a whole, functioning to achieve and maintain joint understanding (Schegloff, 1992). Repair is routinely perceived as a vehicle of language learning and, thus, the study of repair has pervaded research in the area of language development and communication disability in both naturalistic and institutional talk.

The seminar series, and the papers arising from it, explored the analytic study of both ‘typical’ and ‘atypical’ forms of language development and, in particular, the use of language (function) and the contribution of both adult and child participants to the process. Language, cognition, and cultural morès are shaped by the routine interactions that take place between members of a society, and the expression of any innate capacity relies on exposure to these interactions, either as observer or participant. Where the child is coming into society with special language and communication needs then these encounters may be differently constructed. How interaction develops with children with atypical cognitive or linguistic attributes can add to our knowledge about the fundamental nature and ecology of communication (Goodwin and Goodwin, 1999).

CA researchers in the spheres of disability and ‘atypical’ communication have created a body of work that seeks to reconfigure negatively viewed ‘symptoms’ more positively, as adaptations and compensatory strategies (Damico and Nelson, 2005). This research can be seen in the same light as work with typical children that questions widely held beliefs that ‘development’ towards a more mature competence is the pervasive explanation for any change in a child's social practices (Sacks, 1974; Sidnell, in press). Whereas terminology such as ‘impairment’ sees the lack of certain behaviours as a within‐child deficit, terms such as ‘disability’ view difficulties as socially constructed due to the surrounding context. The latter term indeed implies individual competence, and protagonists in this arena advocate greater understanding of the context in which disability is apparent (Burke, 2008). This is an arena of understanding to which CA and indeed particular papers in this collection can contribute significantly. Researchers explore questions about the possible orientation (or lack of it) of co‐participants to aspects of interaction that may reflect aspects of ‘impairment’ as the source of troubles in talk.

Some contributors to this special edition are in the field of interactional linguistics (IL), which adopts a similar methodological stance to that of CA, particularly the focus on interaction and sequence, but give greater attention to the linguistic and phonetic construction of turns. Attention paid to lexico‐prosodic and other micro level detail in task‐oriented and mundane conversations highlight the adaptations to environment and context which occur in communicating with a person with a disability. The findings have clear and direct relevance to speech and language therapy and educational practice.

Institutional talk, very much part of children's experience in the fields of education, health, and other spheres, is of special interest in the selection of papers presented here. In recent years, CA has been increasingly applied to these more stylized forms of ‘talk at work’, a term applied to a wide range of professional contexts, which have proven to have interactional qualities that make them recognizably special. Peräkylä, Ruusuvuori, and Vehviläinen (2005) have described the ‘stocks of interactional professional knowledge’ developed in each profession. Professional practice has benefited from the small but growing body of analytical research that has added substantially to the evidence base in ways quite different from evidence gained by experimental methodologies. Specific examples such as that of Gardner (1997), in the world of speech and language intervention, have shown that certain institutional beliefs and practices can become evident in the interaction, but may also work in ways that are at odds with generally held professional beliefs.

The five papers in this edition will address a range of the issues outlined above pertaining to the nature of atypicality and interaction and, importantly, the construction of institutional talk of various kinds. The papers also consider the power and potential of the methodology of CA itself. Specifically, in the first paper by Stribling, Rae, and Dickerson, the analysis of autistic children's everyday interaction contributes to the debate into ‘symptomatology’ and what constitutes the underlying mechanism of the autistic mind, an area already discussed in CA terms by Tarplee and Barrow (1999) and Wootton (1999). To this end, Stribling et al. have looked at topic perseveration, often described as a form of pragmatic disorder in autism, drawing upon data involving a boy with an ASD interacting with a researcher and a mobile robot platform. The authors suggest that perseverative re‐topicalizations can be shown to have interactional salience within the participation framework in which the topic is revisited.

There is growing emphasis in studies of disability to seek to understand children's experiences of impairment in their day‐to‐day lives from their own perspectives. However, studies of interaction in children with physical disabilities and complex communication needs have tended to rely on third party observer inference in the analyses of children's interactions. Such work has commonly highlighted non‐speaking children's seeming passivity in interaction. Clarke and Wilkinson present findings from a study of interaction between children with cerebral palsy, who have little or no functional speech, and their ‘naturally’ speaking peers. The analysis considers ways in which the children collaborate in the construction of non‐serious episodes of interaction, and how non‐speaking children and their peers are active in utilizing a range of communicative resources to this end.

In the third paper, word finding difficulties in children with specific language difficulties are explored by Radford. Again, what might be described as negative behaviours, in the shape of empty words, hesitations and other behaviours, are considered through a CA lens and are seen to be interactionally salient. Radford, thus, describes the joint construction and resolution of word searches between a teacher and a child of 8 years. Both verbal and non‐verbal resources are shown to be deployed in self‐cueing and self‐repair, but also may be used to proffer a direct invitation for the teacher, as conversational partner, to participate in the word search.

Mahon's paper also addresses issues in didactic talk between teachers and deaf children from families where English is an additional language. Here it is the teachers using the natural oral method who take prime responsibility for the children's learning of spoken English. Mahon details adult–child interactions over four successive time periods during a nursery year, particularly the variety of ways in which the teacher's turns support the deaf child's emerging grammar, and highlights the role of gesture in this process. The findings suggest similarities to the support of adults interacting with typically‐developing, hearing children at a much younger age, and this bring to attention one key debate of the seminars, that of delay and difference in mechanisms in atypical children's communicative experience.

In the final paper, Merrills turns her attention to the nature and construction of speech and language therapy talk with school age children who have language disorders. The children are engaged in tasks that require them to address metalinguistic issues regarding the construction of the language they are using, embedded in communicative tasks. The analysis utilizes the method and techniques of CA, and, in combination with Clark's (1996) theory of language use, proposes an explanatory model of how therapists and children manage their talk about talking. Thus, the paper represents an example of bringing new insights to other theoretical perspectives through the close analytic method of CA.

Shegloff, Koshik, Jacoby, and Olsher (2002) caution on applying CA too broadly in applied linguistic research, although welcoming its contribution to the design of language teaching tasks, assessment, and other educational and professional practices. The papers in this collection provide evidence of the positive contribution that conversation analysis can bring to our understanding of both typical and atypical child development across spheres of language, cognition, and socialization.

*Editor's note and Abstract:

Due to an unfortunate oversight, one of the papers intended for this special issue was published in an earlier issue of the journal (‘Staying on the same wavelength: Talking about talking in paediatric speech and language therapy sessions' Dariel Merrills, Vol 23 (1), 70 – 91). We apologize for this occurrence and, in order that readers can see how this article fits in with the special issue, we reproduce the Abstract below:

Staying on the same wavelength: Talking about talking in

paediatric speech and language therapy sessions

Dariel Merrills

University of Sheffield, UK

(Received 2 June 2007; accepted 1 March 2008)

Abstract

Participants in speech and language therapy sessions engage in talk about talking to accomplish different social actions: identifying and explaining linguistic concepts; correcting language use; and repairing misunderstanding. Different traditions in interaction research have examined the practices of topic management, correction, and repair in instructional and mundane conversation, but the need to disentangle the common thread of ‘language’ that runs through these practices in speech and language therapy interaction has not been recognized. This paper examines three short extracts from transcripts of clinical interaction involving school‐aged children with language disorders in order to see how they manage communication about metalinguistic topics, in face of the significant difficulties that can arise in the interaction. The analysis builds on the method, techniques, and discoveries made by research in conversation analysis, and, using Clark’s theory of language use, proposes an explanatory model of how therapists and children manage their talk about talking.

Notes

*. Editor's note and Abstract.