The Centre for Advanced Studies in Language and Communication (CASLC) at the University of York is a leading interdisciplinary research centre focused on language and communication in interaction. We are recognised internationally as a centre of excellence in the study of conversation analysis (CA) and interactional linguistics. 

Members of the Centre – from the Departments of Language and Linguistic Science, Sociology, Health Sciences, and Education – see language, interaction and communication as central to our disciplines. We conduct research into how interactions work in a wide variety of social settings and institutional contexts. These include not only everyday social interaction but also medical and health-related, educational, political, employment, industrial, legal and other settings in which outcomes depend on the effectiveness of communication between clients and professionals and between professional colleagues.

We bring together a range of methodological and theoretical approaches from our various disciplines. A distinguishing feature of our work is a commitment to investigating the dynamics of interaction and communication through examining how language is used in sequences of interaction (sequential analysis) and with various multimodal resources (incorporating, e.g., gesture, gaze and phonetics).

Our Centre offers training in CA at beginner and advanced levels, the phonetics of talk-in-interaction, and medical interaction. Our members have delivered training in these methods in the UK, China, Brazil, South Africa, Finland, The Netherlands, the USA, and Australia as well as York. We host a seminar series, with streamed talks open to an international audience several times a year.

Our postgraduates organise and host the annual York Conference on Conversation Analysis (YorCCA), a CA conference that provides a welcoming environment for postgraduate researchers to present their work to fellow postgraduates and established academics and receive feedback and advice as they develop their projects.

We are also home to the PhD in Language and Communication shared between the Departments of Sociology and Language and Linguistic Science, as well as offering a CA pathway as part of the MA in Applied Linguistics. Our former students and academic visitors move on to become leaders and innovators in the field; a recent example includes the central role of our alumni in establishing CA in Latin America.