This article examines task-setting sequences in university tutorial sessions. Classes from three higher education institutions were audio- and video-recorded. The resulting data, which included both tutor-led and peer group discussions, were transcribed and analysed using conversation analysis. A number of themes emerged from our analysis. First, we found that the tutor's opening turns routinely followed a three-part sequence, the interpersonal and metadiscursive functions of which, we argue, are crucial components in the educative process. Second, we found that students displayed discursively (...) their reluctance to engage in discussion activities and a resistance towards academic or intellectual identities. In contrast to findings from previous studies of tutor—student interaction, we found that interactional power was negotiated in complex and contradictory ways. This, in turn, may embody a range of complex social functions including attention to the `face' concerns of the group, category membership and orientation to broader cultural trends. (shrink)

This article charts the ways in which students negotiate an academic identity whilst pursuing academic tasks that are publicly observable precisely as ‘academic tasks’ to their peers. Previous research into aspects of student interaction that take place within university tutorial sessions has suggested that different kinds of student identity come into conflict as students interact, face-to-face. Most notably, the imperative of ‘doing education’ — as a keen proto-academic seeking a good final degree classification — is often overridden by the imperative (...) of ‘doing being a student’ — as an average and/or indifferent student who does not stand out. In this article, however, it is not the university tutorial but a slightly different and hitherto unexplored site of interaction that is foregrounded: the university library textbook. As with tutorials, the margins of library textbooks are spaces within which individually accomplished research becomes publicly observable — in the former as group work, and in the latter as student marginalia. Drawing on discourse analytic concepts such as ‘footing’ and ‘stake’ this article seeks to understand what student marginalia can tell us about the ways in which the tension between ‘doing education’ and ‘doing being a student’ is managed and negotiated in sites other than the university tutorial. (shrink)

A great deal of research has examined computer-mediated communication discussions in educational environments for evidence of learning. These studies have often been disappointing, with analysts not finding the kinds of ‘quality’ talk that they had hoped for. In this study we draw upon elements of discursive psychology as we oriented to what was happening in the talk from the participants’ perspective in addition to what should be happening from the researcher/instructor perspective. We examine the talk of undergraduate nutrition science students (...) within web logs, exploring ways in which the students, when asked to make blog posts on their beliefs about and experiences with dietary supplements, display knowing in dynamic and fluid ways. We analyzed 152 blog posts students were asked to make prior to attending the lecture on the topic. Our findings point to how students negotiate and at times resist doing being a knowledgeable student, using disclaimers such as ‘I don’t know’ and script formulations to minimize accountability for their posts. Our findings highlight how students oriented to the blogs as a venue for institutional talk, responding to the required academic task while simultaneously managing their identities as students. (shrink)

This article reports on the findings of a study of so-called `forward-looking statements' in a corpus of corporate press releases, focusing in particular on the mechanisms of hedging involved. Forward-looking statements are an important characteristic of corporate press releases in which companies make predictions about the future in an attempt to demonstrate to stakeholders that the company is making progress and that its prospects are good. Such statements are explicitly mentioned in a disclaimer which often accompanies corporate press releases and (...) are noted to involve risks and uncertainties. This article aims to identify those lexicogrammatical forms which are typically used in forward-looking statements in press releases, including those used for the purpose of hedging, and also to try to identify the function of hedging in the selected data. The data analysis points to a range of forms which function as hedges in the data. These are discussed and exemplified and, drawing on Hyland's model in particular, an attempt is made to consider what function the hedges serve. (shrink)

Much significant work on the topic of privacy and identity on social network sites stems from the realms of media, information and cultural studies, and sociology eschewing language-based disciplines almost entirely. To redress the balance, this article draws on discourse-centred online ethnography, an approach which blends online ethnography with discourse analysis, to explore how self-presentation on Facebook is regulated by means of privacy. To this end, I analyse a dataset of statuses, comments, links, photographs and interviews from five Greek users. (...) The findings highlight users’ creativity and criticality in combining software affordances with linguistic signals and textual practices to manage their privacy and hence their identity. (shrink)

When people are asked “Do you have the time?” they can answer in a variety of ways, such as “It is almost 3”, “Yeah, it is quarter past two”, or more precisely as in “It is now 1:43”. We present the results of four experiments that examined people’s real-life answers to questions about the time. Our hypothesis, following previous research findings, was that people strive to make their answers optimally relevant for the addressee, which in many cases allows people to (...) give rounded, and not exact, time responses. Moreover, analyses of the non-numeral words, hesitations, and latencies of people’s verbal responses to time questions reveal important insights into the dynamics of speaking to achieve optimal relevance. People include discourse markers, hesitation marks, like “uh” and “um”, and pauses when answering time questions to maximize the cognitive effects (e.g., a rounded answer is adequate) listeners can infer while minimizing the cognitive effort required to infer these effects. This research provides new empirical evidence on how relevance considerations shape collaborative language use. (shrink)

The article presents an analysis of the ways in which knowledge is displayed, contested and renegotiated in the 2007 French presidential debate between Ségolène Royal and Nicolas Sarkozy. Knowledge displays can be achieved through a series of ‘neutral’ resources, such as informing, explanation or comment, or through face-damaging resources, such as questioning an unknowledgeable interlocutor to prove his inferior epistemic status and boost one’s own. The article focuses on this latter type of knowledge display where a knowledgeable participant engages in (...) question–answer sequences with an unknowledgeable respondent in front of a third party. The article also undertakes an analysis of the multimodal strategies employed by the participant to discredit the opponent. The article intends to contribute to the existent literature on epistemic stance by offering a prototypical example of incongruence between the epistemic status of the questioner and the epistemic stance he adopts. (shrink)