Social Interaction
During my post-doc appointment at the University of Portsmouth I worked, together with Jörg Zinken, on an ESRC-funded project which introduced me to the methods of Conversation Analysis (CA). Unlike most CA studies, which focus on the sequential properties of interactions without taking external context into account, this research involved data collection in two countries, allowing for comparisons of culture-specific language practices. We investigated how English, Polish and English/Polish families share responsibilities, which also contributed to my research on requests by broadening the perspective to the more general concept of collaboration (2011, 2013, 2015).
The method of conversation analysis has also allowed me to study the communicative patterns that I had identified with structured elicitation in my contrastive research in naturally occurring, video-recorded interactions. This resulted in sequential analyses of requests (2013, 2015a, 2015b, 2015c) and disagreements (2019) in family contexts and of directives in academic advising sessions (2019).
Working with interactional data has also made me painfully aware of how difficult it is to locate politeness in people's conversations (no wonder CA people don't want to have anything to do with politeness).
The recordings of English/Polish families have taken me into yet another research area, albeit only briefly. They have inspired me to produce one of the first interactional studies of domestic bilingualism in the context of Polish immigration in the UK (2013). The paper is part of a special issue of Multilingua (2013) on 'Multilingual Communication in Binational Families' (2013), which I edited, and which also contains analyses of Moroccan/British, Russian/French-speaking Swiss, Anglophone/ German-speaking Swiss, and Zambian/Danish families.
This special issue was reviewed in the Czech journal Slovo a Slovesnost, where its interactional approach was compared with the language planning perspective taken in another special issue devoted to the study of multilingual families, entitled 'Family Language Policy' and published in Language Policy (2013).
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