Publications
Publication details [#54284]
Limberg, Holger. 2010. The Interactional Organization of Academic Talk. Office hour consultations. (Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 198). John Benjamins. XIV+397 pp.
Publication type
Book – monograph
Publication language
English
Keywords
Language as a subject
Annotation
This book provides interesting and critical insights into a common university practice, the academic office hour. Office hours are a discursive site for a variety of different issues, ranging from administrative matters to course-related and study-related concerns. The study offers both an ethnographic account of this speech event within the socio-cultural context of a German university as well as a more detailed analysis of the interactional organization of academic consultations. It draws on natural recordings of entire office hour interactions in order to show how participants’ actions at different stages of the talk organize and accomplish the consultation. The analytical focus is set on the sequential activities teachers and students engage in as they conduct a consultation. This includes, for instance, how participants open an office hour talk, how they establish an agenda, how they manage advice-giving, and how they close the consultation.