Scratch project: Spring is in the air!

Post 3

Several takeaways from Butler and Wilkinson (2013). It is a good illustration of what “mundane” means by conversation analysts for a beginner like me. The rich videotaped data, though difficult to read due to the unfamiliar transcribing techniques, revived for me the countless living room conversations we had in which my daughter repeatedly claimed attention or recipiency from us adults but was disattended again and again because we were involved in “serious businesses.” Speaking of children’s limited right to talk or engage, my “secular” (not professional) response is that I am a little guilty of my ignorance of my child’s right and my justification of it. Without being equipped with the lens of a CA analyst, I failed to see the value of our mundane multi-party family interaction.

The paper also sheds great light on children’s development of communicative competence in gaining membership to the adult world as a result of socialization as is demonstrated by a five-year-old boy, Fredrick. I have accessed the membership discussion through other frameworks of a more macroscopic nature, such as discourse and cultural identity. But a CA’s perspective of the issue is more of a technical one. The practices of mobilizing recipiency employed by Fredrick are amazing. They include verbal skills, such as summons and pre-announcement, as well as non-verbal skills, such as the raise of his hand, banging the gift and bracketing off a separate interaction from the multi-party interaction by whispering to his mother. “The practices Fredrick use to mobilize recipience are not restricted to children; adults also use preliminaries such as ‘guess what’ or summonses prior to launching actions (p.49).” Therefore, children are developing their competencies in taking part in everyday interaction and the skills of social and cultural membership.

An even more salient line of Fredrick’s socialization into taking part in multi-party interactions is his persistence in the pursuit of his course of action (to open the gift boxes) oriented by the adults’ restriction to his right to engage. He navigates among the interactions by monitoring the engagement and attention of other people, positioning and repositioning an initiating action at the right time and seeking and pursuing the engagement of others. It is concluded that the adults’ constant suspension of their alignment is conducive to his socialization. “The adults’ lack of displayed recipiency and instruction to ‘wait’ are methods through which an understanding of how to launch new actions in the context of multiparty interaction will be developed (p.49).”

Kitzinger and Frith (1999) reveals the difficulties for young women to say “no” to sex because saying immediate clear and direct ‘no’s is not a normal conversational activity. However, women do have other indirect ways of refusal that agrees with the normatively appropriate patterns of refusal in other social interactions. The article therefore accuses men’s alleged failure to understand women’s refusals as intentional ignorance or playing of this “culturally understood ways”. The training programs that teach women to say a direct ‘no’ to sex is also under attack. I have no problem with the analysis of the general normative patterns to deliver a refusal. What I have problem with is the logic behind these analyses. What difference will it make whether it is a direct ‘no’ or a euphemistic ‘no’, if the man is an intentional date rapist?