Conversation Analysis

Conversation Analysis (CA) is a method for studying talk-in-interaction, focusing on the sequential organisation of naturally occurring conversation. It was developed by Harvey Sacks, Emanuel Schegloff, and Gail Jefferson in the 1960s–70s, emerging from ethnomethodology (Harold Garfinkel) and the microsociology of Erving Goffman.

Core Principles

• Naturally occurring data: CA works only with recordings of real interaction, never with invented examples or intuition-based data
• Sequential organisation: meaning is understood through its position in a sequence; what an utterance does depends on what came before and what comes after
• Emic perspective: the analyst examines how participants themselves orient to the organisation of talk, not how an external theory categorises it
• Order at all points: no detail of talk is random. Pauses, overlaps, word choice, and intonation are all potentially meaningful
• Unmotivated looking: the analyst begins without a hypothesis, letting patterns emerge from the data

Core Structures

CA has identified several fundamental organisations of conversation:

Structure	Key reference	Description
Turn-taking	Sacks, Schegloff & Jefferson (1974)	The system governing who speaks when; locally managed through transition-relevance places
Adjacency Pairs	Schegloff & Sacks (1973)	Two-part sequences where the first turn constrains the second
Preference organisation	Pomerantz (1984)	Preferred responses are structurally unmarked; dispreferred responses are marked with delay, hedging, accounts
Repair	Schegloff, Jefferson & Sacks (1977)	Mechanisms for dealing with problems of hearing, speaking, and understanding
Sequence organisation	Schegloff (2007)	How sequences are opened, expanded, and closed
Topic Management	Button & Casey (1984)	How topics are introduced, developed, shifted, and closed

CA vs Discourse Analysis

CA and Discourse Analysis both study language beyond the sentence, but differ fundamentally:

	Conversation Analysis	Discourse Analysis
Data	Naturally occurring talk only	Spoken and written texts
Approach	Bottom-up, data-driven	May be top-down, theory-driven
Categories	Emerge from participant orientation	May be analyst-imposed
Focus	Sequential organisation	Broader textual/social patterns
Transcription	Detailed (Jeffersonian system)	Varies

CA and Language Teaching

CA has contributed to ELT in several ways:

• Interaction analysis: studying classroom talk reveals how teachers manage turns, repair, and sequence organisation differently from everyday conversation
• Materials design: CA research shows that textbook dialogues rarely reflect how real conversation is organised; authentic patterns of Turn-taking, Repair, and topic shift can inform more naturalistic materials
• Speaking assessment: CA-informed analysis of paired speaking tests examines how candidates co-construct interaction, not just individual performance
• Interactional competence: the concept that L2 speakers need to manage the machinery of conversation, not just produce accurate sentences
• Teacher talk analysis: CA tools reveal patterns in teacher questioning, feedback, and turn allocation that can inform professional development