Australian Review of Applied Linguistics - Volume 30, Issue 3, 2007

A significant number of calls made to Kids Help Line are seen by the organisation as not requiring counselling support, but are rather young people testing or ‘checking out’ the service. Although the status of many of these ‘testing calls’ is self-evident, determining the authenticity of others presents the helpline counsellors with a dilemma: confronting the caller if they have doubts about the caller’s reason for calling while, at the same time, avoiding a premature challenge when the call is genuine. We examine the various interactional strategies that the counsellors artfully deploy in their determination of the status of a call. Outright challenges are rare, and counsellors typically will employ devices that announce their suspicions indirectly and which, at the same time, seamlessly accomplish the mundane business of responding to a call in ways which treat the callers with respect.

In the context of low fertility and Australia’s ageing population, a national longitudinal telephone survey, Negotiating the Life Course (NLC), asks women about their childbearing intentions. This paper uses conversation analysis (CA) to examine interaction between an interviewer and respondents on one NLC question about the likelihood of having children, Question 165. The analysis focuses on excerpts from troubled interviews, making transparent the task of negotiating responses acceptable to the interviewer and shedding light on problems inherent in the question for older women and women for whom prediction is difficult. Analysis shows the trouble to result from lack of congruence in the purposes of the researcher and the respondent: the researcher asks about likelihood, whereas the respondent tells her own story.

The study to be reported in this paper examined the work accomplished by mm and mm hm in the interactions of a parent and his daughter aged 0;10–2;0. Using the findings of Gardner (2001) for adults, the analysis shows that mm accomplished a range of functions based on its sequential placement and prosodic features, whereas mm hm was much more restricted to its use as a continuer. The principal concern of the study, however, was to investigate how the child treated these tokens in next turn position. It was found that she was able to display her acceptance or rejection of the response and that she had acquired a stock of conversational resources to do so. Included in the stock were the ability to initiate self and other repair, to correct, and to initiate a new topic to mark completion of a sequence. It is argued that through these actions the child was offering a display of her understanding of sequential connections and appropriateness of fit, and importantly what she deemed to be a sufficient response. The paper ends with a discussion of the child’s emerging knowledge as it is revealed in the minutiae of interaction.

When a problem of understanding arises for a hearing-impaired recipient in the course of a conversation, and is detected, repairing that problem is only one of several possible courses of action for participants. Another possibility is the collaborative closing of the part of the conversation which has proved problematic for understanding, to allow the initiation of a new, and potentially less problematic, topic. This paper examines one practice utilised by hearing-impaired interactants and their partners in achieving such closings. The action of withdrawal of engagement (via withdrawal of gaze at partner) by hearing impaired interactants, accompanied by their production of multi-unit turns at talk, brings about the closing of problematic sequences. It is proposed that these multi-unit turns address the interactional delicacy of recipients’ withdrawal of engagement at points where the speaker’s action is demonstrably incomplete. By initiating and cooperating with ‘strategic’ topic change in this way, participants act both to conceal the understanding problem and to avoid its potential consequences for the unfolding conversation. In doing so, they also act to keep issues of conversational competence, and the threats to face and identity which may arise from these issues, off the surface of the conversation.

Overlap in conversation is a well-established area of conversation analysis research (e.g. Jefferson 1983; Schegloff 2000) which can reveal how participants orient to transition relevance places. This paper presents an analysis of overlap in the mixed (Garrwa, Kriol and English) language conversations of two indigenous Australian women as part of a larger study of turn-taking practices in indigenous conversations. Walsh (Walsh 1995) made some observations about Aboriginal conversational style, for example that they may enter a conversation without attending to the talk of others. His observational claims are empirically examined here in the context of our data.

We find that the overlapping talk in our data follows many patterns similar to English speakers’ talk, including transition space overlap (cf. Jefferson 1983) and simultaneous starts. The most important difference we found was overlap onset occurring shortly after the closure of the transition space, reflecting disattendance by speakers to the content, but not the timing, of each other’s talk. Overall, however, we find that the turn-taking of these two women is overwhelmingly orderly, and deviations from orderliness can mostly be accounted for by their orientation to points of possible completion and rules of turn-taking as described by Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson (1974).

In this paper we use membership category analysis to examine the way an interviewee utilises category work in order to resist the possible accusation of being a bad mother and instead posit her mothering as ordinary. Through our analysis we explore the interactional work of ascribing and resisting categorisation organised through claims and counter-claims making procedures routinely grounded in descriptions and accounts, and embedded in shifts between individual and categorial actions.