Analyzing Vietnamese Data (for CA beginners)

Hạnh thị Nguyễn & Ngọc Thị Bích Nguyễn 

In this workshop on "Analyzing Vietnamese Data for CA Beginners," participants will learn the key principles and basic steps of Conversation Analysis, using Vietnamese data samples. The workshop will be conducted in English with occasional Vietnamese translations to build cross-linguistic connections. The workshop is intended for graduate students or beginning researchers interested in CA. 

Limited spaces. Registration (free) required. 

Presentation 1

Analyzing L2 data in an “exotic” language: Making Japanese interactional data accessible to a non-Japanese audience

Eric Hauser, University of Electro-Communications, Japan

Bilmes (1996) discusses issues involved in doing fine-grained analysis of interaction in an “exotic” language, in this case Thai, including how to make the data accessible to an audience which can, for the most part, be assumed not to understand Thai. In this presentation I do something similar, using video-recorded interaction between a relatively novice-level user of L2 Japanese and an L1 user of Japanese to 1) illustrate how to make the talk accessible to an audience that does not understand Japanese, 2) consider issues involved in making non-native features of the talk accessible to such an audience, and 3) demonstrate how to incorporate aspects of embodied conduct into the transcript while maintaining readability. This will be done by analyzing a particular practice found in the data, in which the L1 user orients to the possible difficulty of a Japanese vocabulary item by offering a (presumably) easier Japanese synonym, an English translation, or both. Through this practice, the L1 user displays his orientation to recipient design (i.e., he designs his talk for someone he assumes to be of limited proficiency in Japanese), to Japanese as the language that should be used in this interaction, and to lingua franca English as a resource that can be drawn on to solve potential problems of understanding. Through this presentation, audience members will hopefully gain insight into how to make Vietnamese data, including data that involve L2 users, accessible to an audience that does not understand Vietnamese.

Presentation 2

Placeholders, First Tries and Prospective Indexicals: Lexically Oriented Repair Sequences in Lingua Franca English 

Tim Greer, Kobe University, Japan

Drawing on multimodal Conversation Analysis, this study examines repair practices within mundane lingua franca English interaction. The analysis explores how L2 users cope with unknown words by employing the machinery of interactional repair to accommodate limitations within their lexical repertoires. Self-initiated repair on a lexical item can be used to indicate uncertainty, inviting others to hear the word choice as an approximation, and this can occasion candidate repair from recipients. The initial version represents a “first try” that can serve as a placeholder and allow the speaker to expand on its projected meaning in ongoing talk. It therefore acts as a prospective indexical that alerts recipients to monitor the talk for further explanation. Sometimes the participants adopt an “entirely English” approach by explaining unknown words through examples, definitions and depictive gestures. In other cases they incorporate lexical items from another language, particularly where a suitable English equivalent is not readily available: examples of this will be discussed in terms of mot juste codeswitching as recalibration repair (Greer, 2018). These practices for dealing with lexical limitations in L2 talk will be considered in relation to the greater interactional ecology, including how gesture-talk packages and environmentally available text are used within multimodal repair sequences. The data were recorded among a friendship group of three L2 English users at a Japanese university. Their first languages were Japanese, Chinese and Malay. 

Presentation 3

Preliminary reflections on Conversation Analysis and cultural knowledge: Working one’s way through transcripts to culture 

Younhee Kim and Huệ thị Xuân Nguyễn, University of Macau, China

There have been differing stances on how essential membership knowledge is in doing EMCA (ethnomethodological conversation analysis) work, ranging from strict requirement of members’ knowledge and competence (Garfinkel 1967) to the argument of adequacy (and possible advantage) of cultural knowledge gained through field work (Hauser 2023; Moerman, 1988). In considering the relationship between members’ knowledge and conversation analysis, I present and consider two analytical pathways. First is the case where the analyst works with a language for which she does not have any competence, but through the process of line-by-line analysis of interaction and with the help of the second author (a native speaker of that language), she works her way through to the level where she gains an understanding of the interactional practices that reflect the culture of the larger community. The target phenomenon is person reference practices in Vietnamese and how it affects the local administration of turn-taking, and possibly self-other relations in interaction (Sidnell 2023). The second case is when the analyst starts with her own membership knowledge but arrives at the structure of meaning constructed by the participants through combined sequential and categorial analysis. The latter shows the role of members’ knowledge as a starting point, while the former presents a case where cultural knowledge becomes the arrival point through close sequential analysis.  

Keynote 1

Conversation Analytic Explorations into Vietnamese Grammar in Interaction: The Case of Subject Choices

Hạnh thị Nguyễn, Hawaii Pacific University, USA

Conversation Analysis (CA) is a rigorous and robust methodological and conceptual approach to understand the organization of social interaction as it is from participants’ perspectives without any preconceived theoretical assumptions. CA is especially helpful for the analysis of linguistic resources at work in social interaction. So far, CA has shed light on the interactional functions of many grammatical constructions in English, yet little CA research has been done on Vietnamese grammar in interaction. In this presentation, I share my initial investigations into one aspect of Vietnamese grammar that is highly sensitive to the context of use: subject choices. While Vietnamese sentence subjects can be a noun phrase, a pronoun, or zero, little is understood about their use at a given moment in actual social interaction. In this talk, I present data from naturally occurring family conversations to examine participants’ subject choices in a range of social actions, such as accusing, advice giving, agreeing, assessing, complaining, pleading, requesting, refusing, teasing, and so on. Drawing on previous research on languages with flexible subject choices such as Japanese and Chinese, and building on my own preliminary analysis on subject choices in Vietnamese storytelling, I seek to describe the interactional work that subject choices can accomplish in natural Vietnamese conversations. 

Keynote 2

What does being an elder brother or sister mean in Vietnamese families? A membership categorisation analysis of parent-child conversations 

Minh thị Thủy Nguyễn, University of Otago, New Zealand

Becoming members of a culture involves understanding its membership categories and the social and moral order constructed within them (Sack, 1995). Using membership categorisation analysis and conversation analysis, I will explore how the culture-specific category of “being an elder brother and sister” are invoked, negotiated and contested in everyday activities within two Vietnamese families. The data used for this analysis were obtained from 48 hours of audio-recorded parent-child interaction involving children aged 3;9 and 4;5. The findings reveal that parents invoked this category in various activities but most frequently in requesting and assessing the children’s actions and behaviours, thereby socialising them into the moral order and cultural values. The study contributes to the fast growing body of ethnomethodological research on children’s membership categorisation practices (e.g., Forrester, 2001; 2008; Nguyen & Nguyen, 2017).

Session 1

Presentation 1A

Learning through use: A study of interaction and participant orientation in small group discussions in EAP context 

Hanbyul Jung (presenter) & Gabriele Kasper (non-attending co-author)

This study examines how students in an EAP classroom orient to their institutionally given roles in small group discussions. Small group discussions have been noted and used for various pedagogical use in language classrooms (Cheng, 2013; Stokoe, 2000; Gan, et al, 2009), yet study is limited on how students orient to their roles as active participants in such contexts (cf., Kaanta & Kasper, 2018; Ro, 2021). Drawing on data collected from Advanced Presentation classes in a university in Korea, this study aims to illuminate how participants in such classroom group work orient to their given roles in interaction. 

Using Conversation Analysis (CA) and Membership Categorization Analysis (MCA), we aim to describe and analyze how participants display high-level of interactional competence in orienting to their given roles as discussion leader and member. Data shows that students in these higher level EAP classes strictly adhere to their given roles, thus effecting the flow and direction of the interaction in each groups. As one example, we will show how the task of “note-taking” implemented by the small group leader (SGD) has an impact on the organizational shape of the discussion as oriented to by participants within interaction as well as in their post-discussion reflections. 

With the findings of this study, we hope to not only highlight the diverse interaction that shapes small group interaction in language classrooms, but also contribute to a better understanding of the pedagogical usage and implication of small group discussions in EAP settings. Along with the CA analysis, we will present selections from students’ post-discussion reflections to also highlight how students evaluate small group discussion as an arena for “language learning via language use,” providing further empirical support for implementing student-led small group discussions in language classrooms. 

Presentation 1B

Tag questions in Vietnamese mentoring conversations: an interactional practice by mentors for institutional goal achievements

Ngọc thị Bích Nguyễn; Hoa thị Mai Nguyễn; Thọ Xuân Phạm 

"Mentors’ practices to enhance preservice teachers’ reflection have attracted a substantial body of literature on mentoring conversations in the context of EFL teacher education. Contributing to this line of research, this paper examines the tag đúng không “right” used by mentors and its interactional functions using Conversation Analysis. The data consist of 18 audio recorded Vietnamese mentoring conversations between mentors and preservice teachers. We identified 69 cases of the tag đúng không “right” used by mentors across the corpus of data. The tag đúng không “right” does not receive any uptake from preservice teachers in 53 out of 69 cases accounting for 77% and receives responses in only 16 cases accounting for 23%.

Our initial findings show that tag questions with the tag đúng không “right” are used by mentors as an interactional practice in delivering their feedback and getting preservice teachers involved in the interactions. With the use of the tag đúng không “right”, mentors orient to preservice teachers’ primary epistemic access in the teaching practices they use in their observed lessons. Noticeably, in cases where the tag đúng không “right” is either preceded or followed by a gap, enabling a transfer of speakership, mentors provide preservice teachers an opportunity to reflect. 

Our study contributes to the existing knowledge of mentors’ practices in enhancing reflection in EFL teacher education. Based on such insights, implications on mentoring practice can be provided for all involved stakeholders, including mentors, pre-service students, mentor training programs for both mentors and pre-service teachers. 

Keywords: Vietnamese mentoring conversations, conversation analysis, tag questions, reflection.

Session 2

Presentation 2A

Referential practices in professional meeting in Vietnamese

Huệ thị Xuân Nguyễn 

Major reference practice in Vietnamese social interactions is specified by the kinship terms, mostly based on age, gender and relationship between the interlocutors. Those terms are also employed at work or depending on profession typical terms of address are used for different purposes. Based on fifteen hours of research project meeting, where members from different social and professional status discuss field trips to research sites, the analysis focuses on the use of a third party’s referential practices to address the addressee in professional interaction. Previous analysis on daily interaction suggests that the addressor shows respect to the addressee by using the perspective of a third party (Luong, 1984). Taking one step further, the current analysis argues that this practice also showcases the addressor’s consideration for her subordinate, the third party, whose spirit is aptly summarized in the oft-cited phrase “yield to those below”. I argue that this use maintains the addressor’s higher social status in terms of age and her managerial position in her full-time job even though the addressee’s professional rank was higher in the current project. Coincidentally, the addressor’s strategy of using a third party’s referential perspective in this professional interlocution revealed different professional identities of the interlocutors.

Presentation 2B

Vietnamese Language Development: Building a naturalistic corpus of children's daily experiences

Miranda Dickerman & Mai Thị Phương Bùi 

In this talk, I present current work on the construction of a longitudinal corpus of Vietnamese child language acquisition. Built in four villages nearby Hanoi, Vietnam, our research team collected data with around 50 families over the course of 1.5 years, following nearly 60 children between the ages of 0;2 and 5;0 in their day-to-day life at home. We recorded one 'normal' day for each child in our study every three months.

We have just finished the data collection phase of the corpus and are moving to a transcription and analysis phase. In this talk, I present the considerations behind the corpus design and data collection methodology. I also present the current state of the corpus, as well as our current transcription and annotation work and plans.

Session 3

Presentation 3A

Doing as being a victim in storytelling of peer conflict

Huimin Mia Chen

While conflict and conflict management are examined in early education settings, how conflict is reported and responded to in family contexts is poorly explored. This study documents how morality and socialization in relation to past conflict unfold in parent-child interaction at home. Based on a larger dataset consisting of approximately 50 hours of video-recorded data, it focuses on two episodes in which a mom and a child (4;5 years old) orient to a past peer conflict, and analyzes how the child depicts himself as a victim and the other party as a culprit. Drawing on Membership Categorization Analysis, the findings reveal that family members negotiate the “culprit or victim” status as central for socialization to conflict management. It also shows how family members orient to the severity of conflict and co-produce moral orders for conflict and conflict management. By exploring how family members engage in the storytelling of conflict, this study contributes to the understanding of children's agency and the socialization process in parent-child interaction. 

Presentation 3B

The Negotiated Boundaries between Interpersonal Relationships and Institutional Agenda

Hạnh Phạm 

Doctor-patient conversations, a kind of institutional talks, have long attracted considerable public interests for its serious discussions related to human health and human life. While there has been great amount of research into doctor-patient communication in western countries (Hudak & Maynard, 2011; Jin, 2022; Maynard & Hudak, 2008), little is available looking at western medicine practiced in this type of conversation in the Vietnam context. Drawing on naturally-occurring doctor-patient conversations in real-life medical consultations, this research adopts Conversation Analysis approach to explore the features of this institutional talk. The preliminary findings show that the conversations in Vietnamese contexts contain cultural values, the beliefs and conventions of the locals. Also, the line between interpersonal relationships and institutional agenda appear to be mediated between the patient and the doctor during the conversation. By exploring the communication behaviors between doctors and patients, this research contributes to the understanding of the doctor-patient interactions in Vietnam. It also introduces to medical educators certain important aspects in their doctor training program that need attention.

Session 4

Presentation 4A

Gender differences in other-initiated repair strategies: An analysis of Vietnamese casual conversations

Hương thị Thanh Vũ, An Thuỳ Trần 

In much of the literature on conversation analysis, an underlying assumption prevails, suggesting that participants share equal responsibilities in maintaining mutual understanding. While this presumption may hold true in contexts rooted in more egalitarian ideologies, we question its applicability within the  Vietnamese cultural landscape. In this study, we scrutinize 158 instances of other-initiated repair sequences, extracted from 10 video recordings encompassing approximately 655 minutes of conversation involving 34 participants of both gendered engaged in of casual same-sex and cross-sex conversations. Our objective is to discern potential disparities in  the strategies employed by male and female participants when initiating repairs. Subsequently, we will elucidate the findings within the framework of social theories and social structure  prevalent in Vietnam.

Presentation 4B

Directives in form-filling assistance service encounters

Thuỷ thị Thanh Phạm 

With Vietnamese government’s intentions in improving administrative service encounters, since 2021, a great number of trainings have been launched to standardize the procedures and to equip administrative staff with proper skills to serve residents, one key component of which is conversational skills with citizens. To examine and describe these encounters, the research used one descriptive research method, namely conversation analysis, to describe interactions that were audio recorded in a local government department. The focus of the research was the speech acts of directives performed by administrative staff when guiding citizens with form filling. The language of interactions is Vietnamese. The research results reveal that embedded imperatives (the inclusion of the agent of the action) tend to be employed by the administrative staff for directives with earlier turns and these tend to be absent in the expanded directives. Also, the staff did accompany directives with mitigating strategies, be the citizens of older or younger age.

Session 5

Presentation 5A

Questions by patients and their companions in doctor-patient-family consultations: A power claim?

Phương thị Thảo Trần

This study delves into the intricate questioning styles employed by patients and their companions during medical consultations, aiming to shed light on the dynamics of healthcare communication. The corpus analysis of these interactions unveils a rich tapestry of 138 questions directed towards healthcare professionals collected from 40 consultations in Vietnam. Patients contributed 77 questions, while companions posed 61 questions, each query serving a unique function in the patient-doctor dialogue.

These questions were used to seek the doctor’s information, confirmation, repetition, clarification, assurance, symptom management advice or agreement on a treatment proposal. In term of interactional styles, the closed analysis of these questions have suggested that when dealing with simple, less problematic topic such as administrative procedures, next step instructions, medical tests procedure explanation the patient and the companion tended to formulate their question in a clear and direct manner.  However, when the patient and the companion used questions as means to disclose their self-assessment, to express their concerns about the patient’s medical condition, to seek for the doctor’s symptom management advice, or to implicitly make suggestions or requests, their questions tended to be characterized by self-repairing, pausing, and frequent using of mitigating devices. 

Presentation 5B

How Can Conversation Analysis-Informed Lessons Help to Enhance Thai EFL Leaners’ Sequencing Practice?

Tantiwich Kornsak  & Sinwongsuwat Kemtong 

To reveal the effectiveness of conversation analysis-informed teaching (CA-T) lessons in developing Thai EFL learners’ sequencing practice, the study examined 30 Thai non-English major students with A2 English proficiency in unscripted roleplays in pre- and post-instructional phases. Their turn-constructing and sequencing practices were compared as they were engaged in common social activities such as an invitation, introducing themselves, and delivering bad news. Enrolled in an elective conversation course taught with 10 CA-T lessons, these students were required to watch video clips of model conversations, conduct action analyses of turn sequences, and learn relevant expressions to perform target actions before engaging in short conversations with their peers in each lesson. Their role-play conversations, obtained from pre- and post-instruction phases, were recorded, transcribed, and closely examined from a CA perspective. The students’ improved sequencing skills were seen in three key areas from the analysis of their turn and sequence organization. First, after the instruction, they were able to start a conversation appropriately with an opening sequence and end it properly through a closing sequence. Second, the students also participated in pre-sequences to hint to an impending base sequence, such as pre-invitation, pre-bad news announcement, and pre-closing. Finally, post-first insert sequences, which never occurred during pre-instruction, allowed them to successfully fix their problems. These findings supported the claim that explicit, action-driven instruction of sequential structuring of turns and pertinent expressions through CA-T lessons can significantly enhance the ability to interact by demonstrating how students can better organize turns to achieve their social goals.

Session 6

Presentation 6A 

Students’ Interactional Competence through Classroom Speaking Activities -A Case Study at Phan Thiet University 

Dung thị Nguyễn 

This research aimed to examine students’ interactional competence in a classroom speaking activity. Thus, 10 pairs of non –English majors studying English 4 course at Phan Thiet University in Binh Thuan Province were invited to participate in this study. They were asked to perform a conversation on a provided topic. Their interactions were audio-recorded. The data were gathered from 10 audio-recordings of 20 sophomores, and then were analysed based on Conversation Analysis principles. The conversation analysis of classroom student-student interaction revealed students’ interactional competence in such four main areas as sequential organization of acts, strategies for taking turns, strategies for repairing conversational troubles, and strategies for organizing topics. This study also suggested some implications for EFL teachers of how the teaching of thinking skills could be integrated successfully into EFL classroom activities.

Key words:  Conversation Analysis, interactional competence, thinking skills                          

Presentation 6B

Virtual Conversations: Analyzing English Teacher Discourse in Online Meetings

Đỗ Nguyễn Đăng Khoa

This research examines the dynamics of video-mediated conversations in a series of teacher professional development sessions termed Group Development (GD) (see Edge, 2002). In these sessions, teachers take on roles as Speakers and Understanders, using conversations as a means of reflection. The study analyzes data from GD session recordings, interviews, online lessons, and participant illustrations. It was found that the discourse in video-enabled GD meetings bears resemblance to their face-to-face counterparts. However, aspects like direct eye contact and conversation sequencing present challenges. While some found it difficult to be Understanders in this format, many appreciated the innovative and community-centric feel of the video GD sessions. The findings could inform potential refinements in subsequent video-based GD iterations and add to the wider understanding of the talk-in-interaction of online group meetings.