Recent studies on handover communication highlight the role of the incoming physician in preventing misunderstandings that contribute to medical errors. However, existing research often only provides abstract recommendations for increasing their participation, without specifying where and how this should occur. This paper applies discourse theory and methods to identify where the incoming physician's active involvement is interactionally appropriate and can be integrated naturally and effectively. Twelve handovers between six pairs of resident physicians were recorded in a simulated ICU setting at a teaching hospital and analyzed using a combination of genre theory and conversation analysis. By first identifying the "moves" that constitute the handover genre, we pinpointed places where active participation by the incoming physician is expected and facilitates effective communication. While the tasks and focus points and the questions and consultation moves clearly invite such participation, the clinical situation move requires more negotiation, as the outgoing physician maintains control over the conversational floor, making it less immediately accessible for the incoming physician to contribute. The four remaining moves exhibit a more monologic pattern, where both participants display interactional behavior signaling that active input from the incoming physician is not anticipated. Our findings suggest that medical professionals share an implicit understanding of when participation is appropriate, shaped by conventions of the handover genre itself. By reconstructing these tacit rules through genre theory and conversation analysis, we provide insights that can inform training methods, ensuring that recommendations for active participation by the incoming physician align with the structured expectations of clinical practice.

The study of how discourse, learning and classroom activity are shaped in interaction, can be approached through various theoretical and methodological lenses. Different families of approaches have their unique affordances and limitations, and they shed light on distinct dimensions of educational interactions. However, since these methods are rooted in different epistemological traditions, they are often not discussed together, limiting opportunities for cross-disciplinary collaboration and understanding. This special issue brings together a diverse - yet far from exhaustive - set of methodological approaches, illustrating their affordances in elucidating classroom interactional processes as they take place on a moment-to-moment basis. With this special issue, we invite the readers of Classroom Discourse to explore beyond disciplinary boundaries and discover new methodological perspectives, as a way to expand our shared understanding of classroom interactions.

We observed stretches of peer-to-peer-talk during teacher-guided whole-classroom discussions aimed at sharing perspectives in Dutch Language and Literature lessons. This conversation-analytic study zooms in on how these stretches of peer-to-peer-talk emerge. Students are mainly found to respond to each other with challenges and assertions. A challenge is formulated as a wh-question - imperative, interrogative, declarative or phrasal - and is used for questioning the given response rather than obtaining information. An assertion is used to express a point of view and is formulated in two ways: as personal opinion, formulated in I-perspective, and as statement, formulated in second person singular or by the use of ‘generic you’. Both a challenge and an assertion subsequently elicit a student contribution. A challenge mostly provokes a contribution in which a student expresses to stick to his/her point of view. An assertion mostly provokes a subsequent assertion in which agreement or disagreement is expressed. This study reveals that students work on one another's contributions from moment to moment in interaction. The insights from this study can support teachers in encouraging dialogue during whole-classroom discussions.

This paper is concerned with the organization of responses to informings. Using Conversation Analysis, it will show that different receipting practices, including both embodied and vocal ones, display differences in scope in response to informings. With these differences in scope, recipients of informings can signal to the informing party that they receipted either the just preceding part of the informing or the entire informing. The positions of these practices follow a typology of four dimensions: embodied vs. vocal, token vs. phrasal, semantically empty vs. semantically filled and rising vs. falling intonation. When an informing is receipted by different practices of these pairs, the first type will be used for small-scope recipiency while the second type will be used for large scope. This organization of receipting practices illustrates how participants in informing sequences can negotiate the completeness of the informing and the state of informedness of the recipient.

Respondents in standardized survey interviews do not always answer closed-ended questions with just a type-conforming answer, such as “yes” or “three.” Instead, they sometimes expand the type-conforming answer or provide a response that does not contain a type-conforming answer. Standardized survey methodology aims to avoid such answers because they are found to cause interviewers to deviate from their script. However, we found that many expanded and non-conforming responses do not lead to intervention by the interviewer and are treated as unproblematic. A Conversation Analytic study of survey interviews, incorporating three different surveys, with recordings available for interviews varying in number between four and 430 interviews, shows that answer attempts can be divided into five types: four turn expansions (serial extras, uncertainty markers, prefaced answers, answers followed by elaborations), and non-conforming answers. Each of these targets a specific aspect of the interview situation. A follow-up quantitative analysis of 610 Computer-Assisted Telephone Interviews (CATI) shows that expanded answers are overwhelmingly accepted by interviewers, while non-conforming answers are in most cases followed by interviewer probing.

In this study, we observed classroom discussions in which teachers aimed to work on subjectification. Teachers were found to ask ‘Experience Questions’, which we define as questions that prompt the recipient to disclose how he/she would act or feel in a given situation. By applying Conversation Analysis, we show that post-expansion is provoked by either 1) inviting other students to respond to the initial response; 2) inviting the same student to elaborate on his/her response. When teachers invite other students, discussions are elicited that mostly involve cumulative lists of different responses to the initial Experience Question. When teachers invite the same student, discussions follow in which students take learner-initiatives to address the given response.

This study shows how learner initiatives are taken during classroom discussions where the teacher seeks to make room for subjectification. Using Conversation Analysis, subjectification can be observed when students take the freedom to express themselves as subjects through learner initiatives. Drawing on data from classroom discussions in language and literature lessons in the mother tongue, the authors find that learner initiatives can be observed in three different ways: agreement, request for information, counter-response. A learner initiative in the form of an agreement appears to function mostly as a continuer and prompts the previous speaker to reclaim the turn, while the I-R-F structure remains visible. In contrast, making a request for information or giving a counter-response ensures mostly a breakthrough of the I-R-F-structure and leads to a dialogical participation framework in which multiple students participate. Findings illustrate that by making a request for information or giving a counter-response, students not only act as an independent individual, but also encourage his peers to do so.

In classroom interaction, participants are not only oriented to interactional principles for mundane talk, but also to pedagogical principles. In this paper, the interplay between these principles is revealed by means of a conversation analytic study into student-initiated student-teacher interactions during desk work in Dutch secondary schools. It is investigated from a participants' perspective how teachers depart from the mundane interactional constraints imposed by students' requests for assistance. The analysis shows that there are several ways teachers depart from these constraints and that teacher and students do not necessarily show an orientation to this departure as being problematic. Rather, the departure can be related to considerations concerning the pedagogical nature of these interactions. By studying the interactional departures from mundane principles, more insight is provided in the organization of classroom interactions that are started by students' requests for assistance.& COPY; 2023 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Inc.This is an open access article under the CC BY license ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ )

Abstract This epilogue to the Special Issue on Interactional Semantics discusses the contributions to the Special Issue in relation to other research to support three arguments. (i) The choice of Interactional Semantics to take the referential function of language (Jakobson) as its object of research is a welcome choice. (ii) The use of the term ‘meaning’ for this research object is potentially confusing and could be replaced by ‘referential work’. (iii) A research topic which could be included in Interactional Semantics and has not been articulated as such, is the way in which the choice of a referential expression establishes the referent as a particular social reality and is a tacit proposal to the interlocutors to talk about this referent in these terms.

Credible expertise is no longer a given in our contemporary democracy: for knowledge to be authoritative, experts must take into account a wider audience than just scientific colleagues. This study uses conversation analysis and discursive psychology to investigate how experts deal with this role in practice. We show that experts in a Dutch public hearing on GM food orient to ‘speaking on behalf of the public’ without undermining their status as experts. They do this by (1) animating but not overlapping the voices of the public (2) speaking on behalf of ‘the consumer’ and (3) presenting hypothetical public opinions. In this way, experts reconcile what they treat as the dual requirement of distance to support an expert opinion and the proximity to the public required for good democracy. We further discuss what implications this research has for the role of experts in a modern democracy.

In the study of language-and-social-interaction we can distinguish 3 approaches to multilingualism. The first and most basic version is to make the language explicit in which the studied interaction phenomenon was found. The second is to do a comparative study of an interaction phenomenon in different languages. The third is to study data in which different languages are spoken. At this moment the third approach is the least frequent, with the exception of conversation analysis for second language acquisition (CA-for-SLA).

This paper examines how primary school students discuss deeper comprehension and evaluation of text, while involved in dialogic reading in the context of inquiry learning. It takes a conversation analytic perspective on reading for understanding and critical reading. Analysis of the conversational details of peer talk, revealed how students collaboratively construct deeper meaning of text and take a more critical stance toward the text by means of integrating and evaluating actions. We found that how students understand and interpret the text, is reflected in different types of integrating practices they use: comparing text components with previous knowledge, giving additional information, applying information from the text to the present interactional situation. Evaluating practices, on the other hand, are also based on integrating actions, but they display an explicit critical stance to the text as well (c) 2022 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Objectives: Physician gaze towards patients is fundamental for medical consultations. Physicians' use of Electronic Health Records (EHR) affects their gaze towards patients, and may negatively influence this interaction. We aimed to study conversation patterns during gaze shifts of physicians from the patient towards the EHR. Methods: Outpatient consultations (N = 8) were eye-tracked. Interactions around physician gaze shifts towards the computer were transcribed. Results: We found that physician gaze shifts have different interactional functions, e.g., introducing a topic switch or entering data into the EHR. Furthermore, physicians differ in how they account for their gaze shifts, i.e., both implicitly and explicitly. Third, patients vary in treating the gaze shift as an indication to continue their turn or not. Conclusions: Our results suggest that physician gaze shifts vary in function, in how physicians account for them, and in how they influence the conversation. Future research should take into account distinctions when relating gaze to patient outcomes.Practice implications: Physicians may be aware of the interactional context of their gaze behaviour. Patients respond differently to various types of gaze shifts. How physicians handle gaze shifts can therefore have different consequences for the interaction.

This study investigates how classroom interaction unfolds following an opinion-seeking question asked by teachers or students. By using conversation analysis as a research method, the authors found that to an opinion-seeking question the preferred response of a student is to express an opinion as if it origi-nated from their own thoughts. These responses are often followed by a non-minimal follow-up by both teachers and peers. We illustrate that the non-minimal follow-ups are formulated in two different ways: generic or specific, whereby a specific non-minimal follow-up appears to offer the best opportunity for subjectification. Subjectification is about the existence of the student as subject of his own life. If a stu-dent provides a specific non-minimal follow-up, the student expresses himself as a subject, with his own thoughts and a unique voice, which appears to prompt a dialogue in which fellow participants are also invited to express themselves. (c) 2022 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Inc. This is an open access article under the CC BY license ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ )

In this conversation analytic study, we investigate requests for assistance in the third-age (65+) language classroom. Seven Dutch seniors participated in a one-month course of English as a foreign language. We found that these seniors asked many language-related questions which fell into one of three categories: (1) production-oriented questions, (2) comprehension-oriented questions and (3) wonderment questions. These questions differ in the ways the sequences are shaped: (a) what precedes the request for assistance, (b) the person who is recruited to provide the assistance, (c) the person who offers the assistance, and (d) the response to the provided assistance and the subsequent interaction. We found wonderment questions to be the most prevalent category. Our findings suggest that the senior learners in our data show clear ownership and agency over their own learning process, demonstrated by their active participation and frequent (wonderment) questions in the classroom.

The articles selected for this Special Issue are based on presentations at the panel on Knowledge and Expertise in Interaction in IIEMCA, Mannheim, 2–5 July 2019, and in the Expertise workshop, Helsinki, 12–13 December 2019. The special issue is also a part of a long standing interest of Discourse Studies on Epistemic issues, started with a theme issue on Epistemic Discourse Analysis (van Dijk, 2013), followed by Evidential and Epistemic Strategies (González, 2015), Epistemics of Epistemics (Lynch and Macbeth, 2016), and Epistemics – the Rebuttal (Drew, 2018). This theme issue deals with expertise in interaction, how parties orient to expertise, and also how expertise is procedurally relevant and consequential for interactants. Interest in expertise in interaction is not novel; orientations to skills, organizations and knowing-how have been a continuous topic of ethnomethodological (EM) and conversation analysis (CA) studies since their beginning. However, mostly expertise has not been topicalized as such: it has remained a briefly mentioned undercurrent in studies of expert interactional practices, or more recently, a transient side topic of epistemics. In this theme issue the contributors try to tease out the role of expertise for interaction. We propose that we are seeing the first wobbly steps in the systematic study of expertise in interaction. At times, the contributions utilize purposefully the existing framework of epistemics to explore the ways in which parties in interaction adjust and reshape their actions and understandings according to their sense of what their expertise is and their orientations to other participants’ expertise. Sometimes they connect the studies to other existing fields, such as deontics; sometimes they just enter into new territories. To question the Cartesian body mind split Ryle (2009/1949) emphasized the interlinkage of body and mind and toward that end he launched his most famous concept “know-how”. Unlike the propositional knowledge, knowing something, procedural knowledge concerns how something is done, which has an inbuilt linkage between action and knowledge. For Ryle (1945) eventually all knowledge has a procedural basis, but know-how and know-that are distinguishable forms of knowledge. Arminen and Simonen (this issue) have taken the Rylean distinction between know-how and know-that as a starting point to explore, whether know-how, or its conventionalized form, expertise, is oriented to, relevant and consequential for the parties in interaction, and to what degree expertise and its distribution may have a distinctive implications for parties in interaction. In some environments, propositional and procedural knowledge are clearly 1015745 DIS0010.1177/14614456211015745Discourse StudiesEditorial research-article2021

Well begun is half done. Deontic and epistemic authority in the opening phase of medical consultations Context: An effective consultation opening with attention to patient participation not only increases patient satisfaction, but is also a prerequisite for shared decision making, which may improve health outcomes and reduce healthcare costs. Methods: Using conversation analysis, we examined linguistic and structural characteristics of 41 video recorded consultation openings of medical specialists at a large Dutch teaching hospital. The main purpose was to give an overview of how doctors and patients interactionally shape deontic and epistemic authority. Results: Conversation analysis showed different ways in which doctors open their consultations and patients’ reactions to this. Agenda setting occurred in 6 cases, this was always the doctor’s agenda. Most of the doctors’ utterances during this phase displayed a high deontic stance and none of the patients were invited to discuss their expectations or goals for the consultation. 30 doctors started with their opening question, which in itself also reflects a high deontic stance. During the opening questions, the doctors’ epistemic stances differed. Conclusion: During the consultation openings, the doctor was clearly in charge of the conversation and often did not explore the knowledge domain of the patient. This can limit patient participation and can hinder shared decision making in the consultation.

In dialogic reading during inquiry learning settings in primary school, pupils read, think and talk together about text fragments for answering their research questions. In this process, pupils may encounter reading problems, regarding word identification or meaning. Conversation analysis is used to demonstrate how these reading problems are collaboratively addressed. Word identification problems are mostly signalled implicitly during the genuine reading activity and are in most cases immediately corrected by the co-participant, to continue the reading activity as smooth as possible. Meaning problems are displayed more explicitly, by use of requests for information, that are explicit about the purpose, but not always explicitly addressed to the other participant. Therefore all participants, including the text in a principal role, can assist.