Teaching Patterns of Interaction in English for Specific Purposes

Abstract

Journalistic broadcast interviewing is talk produced for absent viewers or listeners, and should thus be seen as a form of institutional interaction whose primary, though unaddressed, recipient is the overhearing audience (Heritage 1985). A basic institutional demand of broadcast journalists, therefore, is that they manage interview interaction as talk for overhearers, an orientation that requires the deployment of an institutionalized ‘footing’ (Goffman 1981; Clayman 1992) attentive to the needs of this absent audience. The special interactional work the deployment of such a footing entails is the focus of this chapter, which considers the pedagogic applications of CA within my own work as a teacher of English to Portuguese students of Journalism. In taking a comparative perspective, interview data from both professional and learner contexts will be analysed in order to show how a routine sequential practice commonly found in professional broadcast interviewing might be seen as a means of raising learners’ awareness over a particular interactional problem evident in the learner data.¹ To approach data in such terms is, in itself, a reflection of CA’s distinctive methodological perspective:

CA is a structural methodology for the analysis of talk. The sequential regularities and patterns that it discovers, however, reveal how specific features of talk are used by participants to accomplish tasks that are central to the organization of talk, i.e. how they function to create solutions for recurrent problems of talk. (Schiffrin 1994: 341, emphasis added)