Studying everyday conversation
News announcements and news receipts in telephone conversations
Conversation Analysis (CA) is interested in the orderliness of our everyday communication and the social practices we engage in when trying to achieve various interactional goals. This article provides a brief overview of CA as a method and some aspects of everyday conversation from the CA perspective. As an example, the paper discusses the social action of delivering news and informings and responses to those actions in Finnish telephone conversations. It will be shown that telling a piece of news is an interactional process where the positioning of the informing and the way it is received by the recipient play a significant role in the final outcome of a news delivery sequence (Maynard 2003). Furthermore, the telephone as a medium has an impact on when and how a piece of news is delivered and how it is received.