Toward the tail end of last year on an open invitation to all Education PG students, I went to a seminar on Identity. Numerous PhD students presented their research projects including related themes as varied as Turkish dating shows, the Armed Forces and TEFL teacher training. Though not obviously related to my areas of investigation, Dr Alan Firth who organised the gathering showed a distinct interest in my project and suggested we had a meeting. Having described the scope and identified the paradigm conflict associated with comparative education, Alan acknowledged the problem and suggested that I ignore the positivist approach and focus completely on the SOLE. Furthermore, I should use Conversational Analysis (CA) as a means of investigating student interaction, emergent meaning, learning mechanisms and outcomes and identity and so on. In view of its eminent potential as a research method, I have undertaken a quick review of descriptive material including The Interactional Architecture of the Language Classroom (Seedhouse).
CA is positioned within the interpretative paradigm and is aligned with the research principles that underpin ethnomethodology namely:
– Indexicality. Participants display through their utterances which aspects of the context they are oriented towards at any given time i.e. CA is context free
– The Documentary Method of Interpretation. The treatment of any actual real-world as a document/reference of previously known pattern
– The Reciprocity of Perspectives.
– Normative Accountability
– Reflexivity
According to Seedhouse, the principal aims of CA include: to characterise the organisation (emic logic) of interaction and to trace the development of intersubjectivity in an action sequence (though not in terms of psychological states). The essential question asked at all stages of CA of data is – Why that, in that way, right now.

The organisations are part of a context-free structure used to orientate ourselves in indexical interaction i.e. to interpret the context sensitive social actions of others. The principal organisational components of the CA interaction are listed as follows:
– Adjacent Pairs: The basic building blocks of intersubjectivity (common understanding). Consists of paired utterances where the response of the second becomes conditionally relevant in relation to the first i.e. the first interaction is a template which creates a normative expectation for a subsequent action and a template for interpreting it.
– Preference Organisation: That the interaction is organised and managed by the partcipants (social actors) towards social goals. Similar in concept to Grice co-operative principle (which can contain a dispreferred action)
– Turn Taking: A intrinsic part of standard conversation, turn-taking is organised in terms of norms which the participants can select.
– Repair: The treatment of trouble occuring in interactive language use. Trouble in this context is anything which the participants judge is impeding communication.

It is important to note however that CA does not see findings of interactional organisation as fixed sets of prescriptive rules. Rather they are constitutive norms or interpretive resources which interactants make use of in order to orientate themselves within and to make sense of an ongoing interaction.