The symposium brings together researchers who investigate and describe social interaction in everyday and institutional contexts with a background in, or an orientation towards, Conversation Analysis (CA) and Interactional Linguistics (IL). IL was developed by Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen and Margret Selting at Potsdam University in the 1990s, drawing on both CA and linguistics. Since then, it has gained international visibility with its work on the basic mechanisms of the organization of human social interaction, comprehensively summarized in a recent monograph (Couper-Kuhlen/Selting (2018) 'Interactional Linguistics. Studying Language in Social Interaction') published by Cambridge University Press.
In recent years in particular, work in and around CA/IL has progressed in the further investigation of basic general principles of talk and other modes/modalities of interaction in everyday social contexts, increasingly focusing on the multimodal organization of the interaction. Here, many actions, practices and genres still await closer description, including developmental aspects in first and second language acquisition. One desideratum in this regard is, for instance, the integration of research on all the modalities of interaction – verbal, vocal, and visible – in order to gain a more comprehensive picture of the principles of action formation on the one hand, and the systematic usage of verbal, vocal, and visible resources on the other.
At the same time, progress has been made in the investigation of particular kinds of social institutional interactions, such as in education and medical institutions. With respect to this (more) applied research, CA/IL have been used as the theoretical and methodological background for re-search on, e.g., doctor-patient, business, and classroom interaction. Currently, in the social and political situation in Europe and elsewhere, societies are striving to improve their "social capital" by improving their institutionalized educational processes on almost all age levels from early day care, pre-schooling, primary and secondary school education, etc. This has, among other things, brought about a new research focus on interaction in the classroom and other educational and learning settings.
The symposium invites researchers with an interest in these areas to present their recent work. It will provide an event in which more experienced scholars who helped develop IL in one way or other, and younger colleagues and researchers in the field who are engaging in the further and future development of the approach, come together in order to exchange ideas and plan new research initiatives, in order to pursue and enhance our common line of research.
- Kursleiter:in: Marit Aldrup