Watson1992
| Watson1992 | |
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| BibType | ARTICLE |
| Key | Watson1992 |
| Author(s) | D. Rodney Watson |
| Title | Ethnomethodology, conversation analysis and education: An overview |
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| Tag(s) | EMCA |
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| Year | 1992 |
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| Journal | International Review of Education |
| Volume | 38 |
| Number | 3 |
| Pages | 257–274 |
| URL | Link |
| DOI | 10.1007/BF01101432 |
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Abstract
Formal education is saturated with language, but language is usually seen as a separate and often subsidiary topic of research, secondary to social class, ethnicity, etc., which are regarded as independent variables. Ethnomethodology (EM) and Conversation Analysis (CA) are recent approaches devised in North America which propose to make language and the social organization of linguistic interchange a generic topic of investigation. They see mastery of language as central to the ability to make culturally recognizable sense of social interaction. Social class, for example, is thus seen as a worded entity. While EM and CA are sufficiently comprehensive to be applied to any topic, formal education is not stable and constant. It is apprehended differently by the various players of “language games”. CA therefore uses “real-world” transcriptions of recordings for analysis of speech exchange. Early CA was concerned with commonsense membership categorizations such as “adult”, “child”, “adolescent”, “mother”, “son”, “tennis player”, which serve as reference points for the imputation of rights and obligations. Stress is now laid on children's techniques of communication, whereas conventional sociology sees the socialization of children as “one-way”, from adults to children and frequently ignores children's language. In school tests, for example, it is not certain that children will only use the interpretive resources given them by the teacher, or that they will understand test items in terms of the test design devised by adults. The wider classroom agenda is also set by an adult teacher, who is conventionally the next speaker after each student in formal trum-taking.
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