Conversation and conversation analysis

 

Conversation is one of the most relevant aspects in communication. At the time to have conversations people engage with communicating, not only in the linguistic way but also including different codes like body language, movements, attitudes among others. This potential to study and understand communication trough conversation has been understood by the scholars, who have been studying this process during the last few years.

One vital aspect to take into consideration at the time to study conversation is the culture. As it was mentioned before conversation has been broadly studied and in this way, new codes, rules and steps for keeping good conversations have emerged. However this set of rules vary according to the different culture and context where the conversation takes place. The different cultures differ in a huge way and it needs to be taken into consideration in order to analyze for example what could be considered appropriate or not in a very specific conversation.

Conversation analysis is the particular area that has emerged as an answer of the requirements from the context in order to understand what conversations can reveal about communication. This area is feed and supported by ethnomethodology, which is in charge of analyzing for instance the ways in which people reacts to specific messages and how these reactions vary a lot according to the context where they happen and their particularities.

Ethnomethodology understands that the social order where conversations take place is not something standardized, and that it cannot be understood as a repetitive thing. For this reason, strategies as “the documentary method” are used in order to find common patterns that could become useful at the time to understand better conversations. At the time to analyze communication through conversations, it is absolutely to understand that first of all, sometimes the most important thing is not what is said but how it is said and second that it is a dynamic process and for this reason it cannot be analyzed as a static way, but as the living thing it is.

Analyzing conversations or talk in use is based in an order but this order comes from the disorder. Finding the order that could emerge according to the conversation is what this analysis is about. Additionally theoreticians have also mentioned that all the conversations are liable to be analyzed. It does not matter if we are talking about a formal or informal conversation, or an institutional or non-institutional one, all of them have different features to offer and to analyze.

As it was mentioned before, context is vital in order to analyze talk in use. Context has two different sides. The first one, is related to the external aspects. The external context is about the general things about the culture or the situation that is around the people who are having the conversation. On the other hand, the internal context refers to the very particular things that each one of the participants in the interaction can offer and how these specific things mark and determine the horizon of the communication process.

Conversations’ analysts know that the process of studying this kind of communication requires a lot of detail. This is why, even when initially they worked with voice recordings. Now, they prefer to analyze video recordings, taking into account that these kind of sources provide much more features of the communication scene that can mean a lot at the time to analyze. Additionally, when analyzing only voice recordings, the transcription processes can let a lot of very relevant information to be lost, because aspects as body language, facial expressions or movements in general are not taken into account.

Order is a word which has been mentioned several times in this summary. Analyzing conversations actually do look for an order, but not in a general and standardized way. This analysis understands that each scene of communication is absolutely different and, as it is an empiric study, the order and the commonalities start to appear and to be able to be analyzed during the conversation itself. Additionally, it is important to understand that even when numbers, percentages and quantitative methods in general would be useful in this study, they are not so easy to apply, taking into account the diversity if things each conversation offer.

Analyzing conversations is a young science, it started in the 60’s and it still has a lot to offer and to share in order to understand better what communication is and what it can shows. In this way, this field grows every day, and let the researchers discover new and interesting things, understanding the complexity and dynamism that communication represents.