Epistemic struggles in addiction therapeutic community meetings

In this study I analyse Therapeutic Community (TC) group meetings for persons with drug addiction problems. Using the method of Conversation Analysis, I specifically focus on practices of knowledge management and sharing between the educators and clients of a TC in Italy. As part of their institutional remit, the educators encourage the clients to report information on their activities and to disclose aspects of their inner experience. This can lead to epistemic struggles, in which the clients resist providing information and the educators seek to overcome such resistance by making claims of pre-existing knowledge about the clients’ experience. After describing the design and sequential positioning of such claims, I argue that their use is functional to manage one of the dilemmas that characterise the educators’ professional practice

Directing and requesting: two interactive uses of the mental state terms want and need

This article is focused on the uses of the terms want and need to build directives and requests in family interaction. The study is located within the theoretical framework of discursive psychology, using the methods of conversation analysis. Within social cognitive research, mental state terms are analyzed as references to inner mental experiences. In contrast, this article analyzes the selection of want and need as sequential phenomena. The use of I want to deliver directives increases the likelihood of compliance when one cannot monitor or control whether a projected action will be carried out. Requests built using I need are recurrently delivered following a request from an interlocutor and delay the granting of the request while maintaining alignment. Thus rather than simply expressing an internal mental experience, the verbs want and need have specific practical uses in their normative sequential environments

Police interviews with vulnerable people alleging sexual assault: Probing inconsistency and questioning conduct.

Reporting sexual assault to the authorities is fraught with difficulties, and these are compounded when the complainant is hindered by an intellectual disability (ID). In a study of 19 U.K. police interviews with complainants with ID alleging sexual assault and rape, we found that most interviewing officers on occasion pursued lines of questioning which not only probed inconsistencies (which is mandated by their guidelines), but implicitly questioned complainants’ conduct (which is not). We detail two main conversational practices which imply disbelief and disapproval of the complainants’ accounts and behaviour, and whose pragmatic entailments may pose problems for complainants with ID. Such practices probably emerge from interviewers’ foreshadowing of the challenges likely to be made in court by defence counsel. As a policy recommendation, we suggest providing early explanation for the motivation for such questioning, and avoiding certain question formats (especially how come you did X? and why didn't you do Y?)

Teacher mediation in L2 classroom task-based interaction

Guided by the holistic view of the sociocultural theory towards learning and focusing on teacher assistance to learners' process of working through tasks, the current study investigated teacher task-related assistance and language mediation, and how language mediation is adjusted according to learner's responsivity in classroom interaction. Sixteen Chinese learners of English residing in Canada carried out meaning-focused tasks in an intact classroom, taught by an experienced teacher over a four-week period. Approximately 12 h of audio-recorded classroom interactions were transcribed and analysed qualitatively using microanalysis method to examine characteristics of teacher task-related and language mediation. The results indicate that the teacher provided both task-related assistance, which addressed different task issues (e.g., task clarification, modeling, eliciting, and direction), and language mediation that featured diverse characteristics and varying degree of collaboration, which led us to identify two levels of mediation: low and highly collaborative. These results are discussed in terms of the role of teacher task-related assistance and language mediation on assisting and mediating learner's appropriation of language form and process of working through tasks

Academic language socialisation in high school writing conferences

This study examines multilingual high school writers’ individual talk with their teachers in two advanced English language development classes to observe how such talk shapes linguistically diverse adolescents’ writing. Addressing adolescent writers’ language socialization through microethnographic discourse analysis, the author argues that teachers’ oral responses during writing conferences can either scaffold or deter students’ socialization into valued ways of using academic language for school writing. She suggests what forms of oral response provide scaffolding and what forms might limit multilingual adolescent learners’ academic literacy. Constructive interactions engaged students in dialogue about their writing, and students included content or phrasing from the interaction in their texts. Unhelpful interactions failed to foster students’ language development in observable ways. Although teachers attempted to scaffold ideas and language, they often did not guide students’ discovery of appropriate forms or points. These interactions represent restrictive academic language socialization: while some students did create academic texts, they learned little about academic language use

A Preliminary Investigation into the Effect of Grammatical Cohesive Devices - their Absence and their Misuse - on Native Speaker Speech and Writing

This paper investigates NS perceptions of the coherence and comprehensibility of NNS writing and talk which lacks or misuses grammatical cohesive devices. NS readers of NNS texts with missing cohesive devices assumed coherence and actually imposed coherence on the text by adding grammatical cohesive devices which were missing in the original making implicit semantic relationships explicit. Knowledge of narrative structure and of the world assisted the readers to recover these implicit semantic relationships. NSs also ass tuned coherence and worked to find relationships in the text even where there was potential miscommunication caused by using the wrong cohesive device or by failure to establish a referent. Communication was not usually impaired when the underlying semantic relationship was clear from the discourse context orfrom background knowledge, although NSs had to work hard to understand some texts. Miscomprehension resulted when underlying semantic relationships were not retrievable from other sources