This seminar will be conducted by 3-hour online Zoom sessions for four days: Saturday, March 2, Sunday, March 3, Saturday, March 9 and Sunday, March 10 from 9:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. (JST).  Students taking this seminar for credit must attend all four days. Students can add/drop this seminar course by 13:00 on Saturday, March 2.

The pre sign-up (or course registration for those who are taking this seminar for credit) is required for anybody attending the public session on Saturday, March 2 from 9:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. (JST). The sign-up process must be completed through "Distinguished Lecturer Series Seminar Sign-Up Form" that is available on TUJ Grad Ed website. The sign-up deadline is Friday, March 1 at 12:00 p.m. The public session Zoom link will be provided to those people who completed the online sign-up (or course registration) process by 18:00 on Friday, March 1.

Conversation Analysis (CA) is a distinctive, data-driven, micro-analytical approach to studying talk. It is designed to describe and explicate the tacit methods of social interaction, that is, how talk is produced and made sense of by the interlocutors themselves. Analysis involves the careful examination of transcripts of naturally-occurring data transcribed from audio or video recordings, with close attention paid to how each turn is produced and heard, and to the details of interaction such as pauses, word choices (e.g., “oh”, “okay”, “mhmm”), prosody, etc. Given CA’s aim of understanding how interaction works, it is a powerful tool for L2 teachers and researchers. CA contributes to a more detailed specification of interactional competence by delineating the concrete interactional practices that interlocutors deploy. And, because much of language teaching is conducted through talk, CA contributes to our knowledge of L2 teaching and learning by uncovering what teachers and students actually do in their interactions in the classroom (and in other educational spaces).

The seminar provides an introduction to the CA analytic framework, its application to L2 pedagogy, and how it has been employed in L2 research. The objectives of the seminar are for participants to (a) cultivate an awareness of the organization and practices of spoken language that will contribute to a more evidence-based pedagogical approach to teaching L2 interaction skills; and (b) develop an appreciation of the CA analytic mentality that will help them recognize and apply basic CA concepts and techniques in understanding L2 classroom interaction.