ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an overview of conversation analysis’s (CA) analytical principles and procedures and introduce its key concepts. CA’s primary aim is to discover and describe the mechanisms through which participants in social interaction understand and respond to one another. Pragmatics and CA are both concerned with participants’ choices of semiotic resources for meaning-making and interpretation in communication, and in so doing, they both place great importance on the role of context. Institutional CA uses basic CA as a resource to investigate how social institutions are talked and acted into being. CA has also made striking contributions to the identification and analysis of interactional practices that have not previously attracted researchers’ attention. The application of CA to second language (L2) data has also yielded the discovery of other types of interactional practices that reflect important practical concerns for L2 learners.
