Translator: Queenie Lee
Reviewer: Ellen Maloney One of the questions I often
get asked as an academic, especially one who studies
things like pauses in talk is: “What is it you actually do,
with that face and that intonation?" Obviously one of the things
I'm going to try and do is explain to you, "What is it I actually do?" But I thought, just for a minute,
I would linger on the question. The question is one of those things
which I would call a 'first move,' produced by someone who is a first-mover. You probably all know people
like this in your lives, those people who ask the question
which has got some bite in it, some kind of complaint,
or some kind of agenda in it. "What is it you actually do?" It implies things about
what you do with your life. It puts you in a quite
difficult interactional position in terms of what to do next. Because if you go next and make explicit, the challenge that seems to be
in the question, and say something like, "What you mean what do I actually do?
I wouldn't you ask that question." Then the person who went first
might say something back like, "I was just asking.
It's just an innocent kind of question. God, you're so touchy!
I can't say anything right." All of a sudden, you find yourself as the person who made
a victim of the first-mover rather than that first-mover
being the person who produced an overbearing
first turn in the first place. I'm going to come back to first-movers
throughout this talk, and at the end,
I'm going to try to teach you how to at least have a couple
of ways of handling them, and also figure out
if you are one yourself. But to answer the question,
or to start answering the question, "What is it you actually do?" I thought I'd share the moment
in which my mom suddenly started to understand at least something
about what it is that I actually do. We were driving to see
my late grandmother - who was very old - my mom started to tell me
a story about something that happened to herself
the previous week. She said: "I had a fall." And I said: "No, Mummy,
you didn't have a fall, you fell over. You need to own that fall. You're not Nan, you don't have falls,
you're not old enough to have falls. There's no point in spending money
on anti-ageing face creams, if you age yourself in your language
and talk yourself decades older. You need to anti-age your language, and be someone who falls over
and doesn't have falls." (Laughter) All of a sudden she started
to get that the way you describe yourself, and the way we describe other people, has consequences for who we are,
and how we live in the world. Of course, the verbs we use,
the language, the grammar we use, sometimes have really
important consequences, so I've done quite a lot of work
on police interrogations of suspects. I've got a case in which the suspects
been arrested for assault. The police officer is asking the suspect about various things he may
or may not have done to the victim. He asks the suspect,
"Did you push her to the ground?" The suspect comes back with,
"She fell to the lawn." What you can see is a sort of push-pull
in terms of versions of things, and the suspect
is replacing the verb 'push.' How was it that the alleged victim
went from vertical to horizontal. "Did he push her?"
We see the agent of that movement. Or did she fall without him
being the cause of that movement? And of course, the other
nice detail changed that the police officer asks
about a push to the ground, whereas the suspect says
"A fall to the lawn," Lawn providing for a relatively
softer landing than the ground, therefore, any injuries
the victim might have had probably weren't so bad after all. These are the kinds of things
that I get interested in as a conversation analyst. What I'm going to do in this talk
is chop it into two halves. In the first half, I'm going to try and show you
in a little bit of detail what it is that I actually do. Studying talk in a systemic
and scientific kind of way, and then hopefully show you how this kind of scientific
and detailed approach to studying interaction
can have big payoffs when it comes to understanding
professional or workplace encounters. To start off with then,
I'm going to show you the opening few seconds
of two ordinary domestic telephone calls. We're going to start with Hyla and Nancy. Hyla and Nancy are American friends,
and they're on the phone. We're going to see their conversation
roll out line by line, in time with the transcript to allow you
to live through the interaction as it actually happens,
which is how we experience interaction. What you're going to see
is that their turns as they start this conversation
is going to bounce back and forth. It's going to be quickly moving along
with their interaction. Here comes Hyla and Nancy
having a familiar kind of conversation, you might have had yourself
many times today already. [1 ((ring))] Nancy: Hello?
Hyla: Hi. Nancy: Hi. Hyla: How are you.
Nancy: Fine. How are you? OK, that's it, so far. You can see there are also dots
and dashes and stuff on the transcript, which is to do with intonation
and phonetic information, which I will point out
when it becomes relevant, but for now, you can just see that they bounced along
through the interaction. It turns out when we study hundreds
of types of these kind of encounters, openings of ordinary telephone calls, there have a really systematic structure
to them, which you can recognise. First of all, we have a summons:
the phone rings and an answer; then we have greetings and identification- you could all hear
Nancy's "Hi!" at line four, was a recognition as well as a greeting, and quite in contrast
to her "Hello?" at line two, which was an answering 'hello.' And then we have initial inquiries,
the 'how are you's': "How are you?" "Fine," before you get into
the main business of the call. The fact that these openings
of calls roll out in a systematic way, is going to allow us to see what happens when we get some kind
of divergence in the pattern. Next, we're going to scoot
over the Atlantic to the UK, and we're going to see Dana and Gordon. Dana and Gordon, boyfriend and girlfriend,
maybe not for much longer as you'll see. Before Dana has even started to speak, we're going to see that
there's trouble ahead in this call. They are students,
they're home for the holidays, and here's Dana trying to talk to Gordon. (Ring) Gordon: Hello. ES: OK! (Laughter) I know, as a conversation analyst,
that there's trouble ahead. (Laughter) The reason I know this
is because of line three: something doesn't happen. What doesn't happen at line three
is a return greeting. Instead, there are seven tenths
of a seconds of silence, and that's enough to know: troubles ahead. Let's see what is going to unfold.
Here is line four. Here is Dana. Dana: Hello. ES: She's returning the greeting
but we can see it's delayed. What she's not going to do next is move in
to the sort of, "How are you's?" Instead, she's going
to become a first-mover. Here comes Dana's inserted question. Dana: Where have you been all morning?
ES: Where have you been all morning? (Laughter) We can all recognize that as not
an innocent information-seeking question, (Laughter) but a question
that has got some bite in it. Where have you been all morning,
I've been trying to get you all morning, I'm your girlfriend, I ought to know
where you've been all morning. What can you do when confronted
with a first-mover? Gordon could say next,
"But what you mean? You don't own me" What do you mean,
'where have I been all morning?'" He could start that, and you're into
some kind of conflict. Instead, another way
to handle a first-mover is to do this: Gordon: Hello. (Laughter) I'm delighted to hear from you! Gordon is going to just do
what Nancy did: "Hi!" I'm just going to do
what comes next in the interaction. Then he's going to add a little detail. Gordon: Uhm... (Laughter) ES: "Uhms" like this tend to crop up
at places in interaction to mark the prior is inapposite
or unexpected in some kind of way. So here, Gordon is pushing back,
first of all, on the first-move with the "Hello!" – I'm just doing
what normally happens here – and then "Uhm" – I wasn't really
expecting you to ask that question next – before he answers the question,
and here comes the answer to the question. Gordon: I've been at a music workshop. He's going to try and move
the conversation along into initial inquires. Gordon: How are you? If Dana was now happy and satisfied that she now knows
where Gordon was all morning, and was just going to go:
"Fine, How are you?" and bounce back into the kind
of normal structure we might see, we would see that at eight,
but instead, we see silence. This time half a second, so we know
there's still trouble in the call. Here comes Dana with her reply,
which probably isn't going to be, "Fine, How are you?" Instead, she's going to say: "I'm OK,"
which is quite hearably not fine, and she's not doing the reciprocal
"How are you?" back to him either. Gordon really is very hearable
that Dana is not fine, there are trouble ahead and problems,
and she wants to have a conversation and he could ask her at ten,
but instead, he says, Gordon: Good. (Laughter) Gordon is really pushing back
on Dana's project. Dana's got a project, which is to have a conversation
with Gordon about some trouble, and Gordon has got a project
which is to not go there with Dana. I want you to try
and think of our encounters that we have as being like a racetrack, with a landscape
and a distinct kind of architecture. We start at the beginning of the race
with our recipient or recipients, and along the way,
we proceed along the racetrack, completing projects of various kinds, as we've just seen Hyla and Nancy
and Dana and Gordon do. If you just think
about your everyday encounters, there are lots of different
types of racetracks: they might be the telephone calls
you have with the service, doctor-patient conversations,
they might be first dates, the conversations we have
at the checkout at the supermarket. But all of these things
will have a distinct landscape to them, and projects along the way; greetings and questions,
answers and requests and offers, flirts and assessments,
and stories and partings. What we've seen so far
is that Hyla and Nancy are kinds of moving smoothly,
progressing around their racetrack, whereas Dana and Gordon
are kind of on the rumble strip at the side of the racetrack,
bumping along. They may or may not get smoothly progressing
around the racetrack ever again. (Laughter) Conversation analysis then: what do we do? What we do is record hundreds of examples
of the same type of encounter, and then what we do
is take those recordings and transcribe them in a lot of forensic,
and linguistic phonetic kind of detail, then look at the entire landscape
of the encounter to establish the component
activities that comprise it. If we can see from Dana and Gordon's call
that before Dana's even spoken after that seven tenths
seconds of silence, there is going to be a problem
in that encounter. We can start to see that there might
be a really big payoff to looking at professional encounters,
workplace encounters to try and identify what is working and not working
in those encounters. I've done lots of work on things
like police interrogations of suspects, commercial sales calls, a whole bunch of other kinds
of workplace encounters, but I'm going to show you just one example
of the power of conversation analysis to identify things that may work
or may not work in encounters. The setting is one that's probably
going to be unfamiliar to you, which is good because it puts you in the position of the person
who's being talked at in this call. The call is from
a big collection of recordings that I've got of initial inquiries
into community mediation services, and these are services that exist
to try and help people who've got a neighbour dispute. This is a really hard sell
for a mediation service, who first of all is not the go-to service
for someone with a dispute. It's an unknown service. They're basically talking to somebody who has already phoned
another organisation, that organisation got some kind of bite
that mediation services don't have. Zooming back and thinking
about the sort of racetrack and the landscape
of these initial inquiries, one of the projects
that we're going to zoom in on is the point at which the mediator starts to explain what it is
that mediation is and can offer. It turns out, when you look
at hundreds of instances of these explanations, that there's basically two main ways
in which the explanation happens: one way nudges the client,
the caller towards being a client, nudges them towards being a "yes"; and the other way leads you
almost immediately to the end of the race. I'm going to show you
an example of a mediator explaining the service
to a prospective client. M: What we do as a mediation service, we help people sort
out their own differences, so we wouldn't take sides, we wouldn't try and decide who's right
or wrong, but would... would try to help you both sort out
the differences between you. ES: Here we have the explanation. These conversational materials provides us with a naturally
occurring experiment. How do you know whether or not
your explanation of a service is working? This and many other mediators have a very similar kind of way
of explaining mediation which I would call a sort of philosophical
or ideological explanation about the ethos of mediation. "We help people sort their own
differences out, we don't take sides. It's voluntary, we don't judge."
This kind of explanation." That's one way to do it. Another way to do it is a sort of
process-oriented explanation, so we do this, we do that, then we do this
and this is how we go forward. A procedural explanation of mediation. The outcome of the success or failure, the effectiveness or otherwise
of this encounter is going to be right in the interaction. You don't need anything else,
you've got the experiment right here. Because if the caller is going
to go with this explanation, we should be able to see
that happening at line seven. So at line seven,
if the caller is enthusiastic, then we might get something like, "Great,
that sounds just like what I need," or, "Thank you very much,"
"Book me in," or, "Tell me more." This is what happens at line seven. [7 (2.5) ] (Laughter) A really sort of tumbleweed dust bunny
kind of silence at line seven. If zero point seven seconds
of silence was enough to know that things between Dana and Gordon
were probably rather doomed; then 2.5 seconds of silence tells us
that this is highly unlikely to be a positive response
forthcoming from the caller. This is what the caller says in response. C: Well, to be honest,
I don't think she'd cooperate. ES: Here we can see that the mediator
does not know their racetrack. They don't know first of all,
that this explanation of mediation to somebody who wants someone
to be on their side, as an advocate for them constraining the behavior
of the vile neighbor next door, this isn't going to work. Yet so many mediators explain
the service in this way. Not only in their initial calls, but also on their websites
and leaflets and so on Presumably the mediator thinks
they're doing their good job, because they wouldn't presumably try
to sell their service in a negative way, but they don't know their racetrack; also, they don't know
that the most likely way from the caller is the other person won't. There is a magic bullet
that deals with this: It's a one-word magic bullet
which I'm not going to tell you now but you can ask me about
later if you want to. One word will kind of fix this, but this mediator doesn't know
the end of the race is nigh, and the caller is not
going to become a client. These are the kinds of things
that we can really get interested in
as conversation analysts. We can zoom in on particular
projects on racetracks, whether that be mediators and clients,
or doctors and patients look at a particular question design
or a way a request is done, try and figure out what is effective
and what is less effective. What I've been doing
for the past two or three years is evolving an approach
to communication training. You can see how this work
can underpin the basis of a really research-grounded
training approach for practitioners. I call it the conversation analytic
role-play method or CARM, because the method works
on the basis of presenting materials in the way that you've kind of
been seeing already. What you can do is do the research,
find out how the interaction works on the particular racetrack
you're interested in. Then find extracts of where we see
one or another outcome, present to practitioners
in real time line by line people doing the job they do, stopping it, getting them to think
about what they might do next, seeing that what the practitioner
really did next and evaluating it. This is how the method works. Let's go back to the racetrack. Conversation analysts
can identify, in slow motion, scientifically and systematically
how conversation works. We can often upend what we think
we know about, say, how to build rapport
or how body language works. One of the projects that we can
zoom in on is the moment where people want to find
out each other's relationship histories. I've got this gorgeous example of a woman
who is trying to figure out what relationship history
the person sitting opposite her has had. She starts to ask, "Haven't you ever been...?
Haven't you ever been...?" She stops and then she says,
"Have you been married?" She starts off asking a negative question-
"Haven't you ever been married?" That's definitely
a first-mover kind of question. What do you mean? Should I have been?
You're feeling defensive. But she stops herself and repairs,
we often do this in interaction. We'll start something, stop it,
and do something else. She stops herself being a first-mover, and deletes the "ever"
and the negative grammar: "Haven't you ever been married?"
to, "Have you been married?" That's a much more positive question, so that's one thing you can do
if you're a first-mover, try to stop yourself by asking positive
rather than negative questions. If you are confronted
regularly by first-movers. "What is it you actually do?"
What can you do to that? I think you take a leaf
out of Gordon's book. Be nice in response, push back, and then hopefully
you will teach the first-mover something about what they're doing. And if you do both of those things- stop yourself from being a first-mover
and push back against the first-mover- then hopefully your future
racetracks will be smooth. Thank you. (Applause)
