Essay On Conversational Analysis

Talk is a complex activity and can be understood when people act out their sociality, when they speak. That is why conversation analysts emphasize on the study of talk rather than language. Conversational analysis is an approach which studies talk-in-interaction. It grew out of ethnomethodological tradition in sociology developed by Harold Garfinkle (Garfinkel).The main ideas for the approach are established in Studies in Ethnomethodology. Garfinkle studies the social structure of everyday lived experience. He also studies how the structure of our everyday activities is ordinarily and routinely produced and maintained. In Ethnomethodologists’ views social order is not a pre-existing framework, but it is constructed in the minds of individuals who engage in social event i.e. talk-in-interaction. Each and

Order is produced orderliness. That is, order does not occur of its own accord nor does it pre-exist the interaction, but is rather the result of coordinate practices of the participants who achieve orderliness and the interact.
2. Order is produced, situated and occasioned. That is, order is produced by the participants themselves for the conversation in which it occurs. The participants themselves orient to the order being produced and their behavior reflects and indexes that order. This means that in analyzing conversation as an academic activity, orderliness being documented is not externally imposed by the analyst but internally accomplished by the participant. This observed order is not the result of pre-formed conceptions of what should happen, nor is it a probabilistic generalization about frequencies.
3. Order is repeated and recurrent. The patterns of orderliness found in conversation are repeated not only in the talk of an individual speaker but across group of speakers. The achieved order is therefore the result of a shared understanding of the methods by which the order is