This conversation analytic study contrasts the German particles ach and achso. and discusses their form, function and interactional trajectory. It extends Golato and Betz’s work on ach and achso. in third positions of repair sequences to other positions and actions, and compares it to work on English oh. Based on the analysis of over 200 instances, I argue that ach so. is used to explicitly mark understanding of a prior action or of the import of the speaker’s own actions while (...) ach functions as a change-of-state token marking the receipt of information without explicitly marking understanding. I discuss the implications of the findings with regard to conversation and cognition and issues of translatability. (shrink)

Examining a fragment of interaction that occurred during a surgery at a teaching hospital, we explore how particular instructed experiences are produced for two trainees, a surgeon in the residency program and a medical student in a surgical clerkship. We are concerned with what is produced as learnable in each case. Stated slightly differently, we are interested in the ways in which the attending surgeon uses demonstrations as instruction and the ways in which recipients of that instruction, in this case (...) the resident and the clerk, respond with enactments of those demonstrated actions. The recipients of this kind of instruction participate in a form of experiential learning in which they enact their own versions of the instructor’s demonstrated actions to be observed and assessed by the instructor. These enactments provide learners with experiential access to the instructor’s demonstrated actions. They are designed to be experiences that learners may draw upon to make experientially warranted claims at some later time. (shrink)