ABSTRACT
I ended the previous chapter by outlining what I believe a CA-oriented methodology for a social interactionist approach to SLA studies should look like. In this short chapter, I backtrack a bit to provide readers who are not trained conversation analysts with a basic, rather practical review of current CA methodological practices. In so doing, I am of course not claiming that anybody who reads this chapter will thereby become instantly qualified to undertake CA research. Learning to become a skilled CA researcher minimally entails completing at least one year of course work in CA (Hopper, 1988), ideally followed up by a continuing apprenticeship with an established CA practitioner. Nonetheless, this chapter provides readers who are not familiar with how CA research is done with a more informed sense of how conversation analysts record, transcribe, and analyze conversational data.
