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Less Frequently Used Research Methodologies in Applied Linguistics
Edited by A. Mehdi Riazi
[Research Methods in Applied Linguistics 6] 2024
► pp. 111–126

Chapter 7
Doing conversation analysis

Investigating Avoidance Strategy

| University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Avoidance is one of the oldest strategies identified in cognitive second language acquisition. Since participants are hiding that they are avoiding using a particular item of language, behavioral methodologies that normally do not use introspection might seem ill-equipped to identify dissimulation. However (based on Markee, 2011), I show here how avoidance can be respecified and productively re-analyzed by using a longitudinal CA methodology (see Markee, 2008) to trace how: (1) ethnographic data that are “talked into relevance” by participants can be used to demonstrate how avoidance is verbally achieved in real time over time; and (2) based on feedback from an anonymous reviewer, how CA methods can also identify how different participants can simultaneously pursue conflicting agendas.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.An overview of the present study
    • 2.1Communication strategies
    • 2.2Learning behavior tracking
    • 2.3Participants
    • 2.4Data and analysis
      • 2.4.1Analysis
  • 3.Why was Conversation Analysis (CA) used? And how was it implemented?
  • 4.What challenges did the researchers face? How were the challenges addressed?
  • 5.Insights gained using the conversation analysis
  • 6.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
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