This seminar will be conducted by 3-hour online Zoom sessions for four days: Saturday, October 18, Sunday, October 19, Saturday, October 25 and Sunday, October 26 from 10:00 to 13:00 (JST). Students taking this seminar for credit must attend all four days. Students can add/drop this seminar course by 14:00 on Saturday, October 18.

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, October 18 from 10:00 to 13:00. The sign-up process must be completed through the "Distinguished Lecturer Series Seminar Sign-Up Form" that is available on TUJ Grad Ed website. The sign-up deadline is Friday, October 17, 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, October 17.   

Research in the field of conversation analysis (CA) has amassed an astounding body of empirical observations about the fine-grained organization of real-world spoken interaction.  These observations range from daily conversation to talk-at-work to pedagogic interaction. Yet, what conversation analysis has revealed remains almost entirely unknown to the overwhelming majority of language teachers worldwide, not to mention textbook writers and publishers.

This series of lectures will introduce the fundamental orientations and working practices of ethnomethodological conversation analysis and then examine how the resulting observations on interaction are of immediate relevance to the teaching of an additional language, specifically English. The seminar will focus on several broad and particularly well-researched aspects of empirically observable interactional order, including the SSJ turn-taking system, sequence organization, preference organization, questions and their replies as social actions, and designing CA-inspired lessons.

The first session, which is open to the general public, will provide an overview of CA and an introduction to some of the most significant and often surprising observations. The following three sessions, for registered participants, will delve more deeply into these areas and provide guidance as to how CA-inspired teaching materials might be developed.