Laughter and smiling: sequential resources for managing delayed and disaligning responses

ABSTRACT

This paper investigates the use of laughter and smiling to manage (dis)affiliation during two types of disturbances in the interactional unfolding of classrooms: delayed and disaligning responses. The analysis reveals that the sequential position and embodied turn design are integral to understanding the (dis)affiliative work laughter and smiling do. Around delayed responses, a teacher and students smile and produce standalone laughter that orients to students not responding promptly in teacher-initiated sequences as well as to subsequent actions of the teacher. Following disaligning responses, students produce standalone laughter that orients affiliatively to the non-serious nature of disaligning turns. In contrast, the teacher’s interpolated particles of aspiration and smile voice, while recognising the playfulness of disaligning turns, is more disaffiliative and precedes turns in which the teacher redirects the nature of the interaction seriously. Thus, the work that laughter does is not necessarily purely affiliative or disaffiliative but falls on a spectrum of (dis)affiliation. The analysis suggests that laughter and smiling are key resources in the management of sensitive moments in classroom interaction involving uncertainty, the mitigation of sensitive actions, and (dis)affiliation.

KEYWORDS:

• Conversation analysis
• laughter
• alignment
• affiliation
• classroom interaction

Acknowledgement

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2018 meeting of the Language and Social Interaction Working Group (LANSI) at Teachers College, Columbia University in New York. We thank the audience for their helpful comments. Additionally, we are grateful to Olcay Sert and three anonymous reviewers for their feedback on this article.

Disclosure statement

The authors have no conflict of interest to report.

Notes

1. Hangman is a word game in which players are given the number of letters in a word and must guess which letters make up the word. If a player guesses incorrectly, one part of a stick figure being hanged is drawn. If someone guesses the word, they are the winner. Here is a link to play the game online: https://hangmanwordgame.com/?fca=1&success=0#/round-results.

2. ‘He who must not be named’ is a phrase used to refer to Voldemort, the villain in J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter book series.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Stephen Daniel Looney

Stephen Daniel Looney is a Teaching Professor of Applied Linguistics and the Director of the International Teaching Assistant (ITA) Program in the Department of Applied Linguistics at the Pennsylvania State University, USA. His research analyzes interaction in university STEM and ESL classrooms, specifically focusing on the management of epistemics and affiliation.

Yingliang He

Yingliang He is a doctoral student in the Department of Applied Linguistics at the Pennsylvania State University. His research uses conversation analysis to investigate academic discourse, including classrooms, tutoring, individual conferences, and undergraduate labs. He has also conducted work in cognitive linguistics on cross-cultural and cross-linguistic conceptual metaphors.