Intersubjectivity or Preference: Interpreting Student Pauses in Supervisory Meetings

Abstract

This paper focuses on supervision in the context of higher education. It highlights the interactional complexities inherent in regular supervisory meetings between supervisor and student as they negotiate the institutional goal of achieving a successful PhD outcome. Close analysis of supervisory meetings shows that students sometimes pause following their supervisor's talk, when a response or an uptake is due. The question for supervisors, especially of international students, is how to treat student pauses, given that such pauses could either foreshadow a dispreferred response or a problem of intersubjectivity. Drawing on the methodology of conversation analysis and using data from supervision meetings of international engineering PhD students, this paper examines how supervisors are often able to appropriately identify the nature of a potentially ambiguous pause through an understanding of epistemics or knowledge of who knows what. Resources that supervisors use to correctly interpret a student pause also include a student's non-verbal actions, such as gaze direction, and changes in facial expression.

Keywords:

• Conversation Analysis
• Supervision Meetings
• Intersubjectivity
• Preference
• Pause
• Institutional Talk

Notes

1 It should be noted that the concept of intersubjectivity is used widely, but with varying meanings (see Gillespie and Cornish (2010) for six different definitions of intersubjectivity).

2 Preference in CA is a technical concept, not to be confused with psychological notions of what the participants may be thought to personally prefer (Atkinson & Drew 1979).

3 The international students were all from Persian backgrounds, speaking Persian as their L1.

4 International English Language Testing System.

5 For example, Li and Seale (2007), Svinhufvud and Vehviläinen (2013) and Vehviläinen (2009a, 2009b) have used CA to analyse supervision encounters.

6 This paper has focused on student recipient pauses. Supervisor recipient pauses do occur in the dataset, however, they do not occur as frequently.

7 Schegloff (1998: 542) defines the ‘home position' as ‘the position from which some limb or physical movement departed, and the return to which marks a possible ending to a spate or unit of activity'.

8 No research that we know of has considered whether holding gaze may be one of the features of a dispreferred turn.

9 Kendon (1967: 60) has shown that ‘at points in the interaction where the speaker and auditor exchange roles, the speaker characteristically ends his utterance by looking at the auditor with a sustained gaze'.