ENG523 Glossary by Asfand Yarr

1. Adjacency pairs: An adjacency pair is a unit of conversation that contains an exchange of one turn each by two speakers. The turns are functionally related to each other in such a fashion that the first turn requires a certain type or range of types of second turn.
2. Big “C” Conversations (Tools of Inquiry): “Conversations” (with a capital “C”) are debates in society or within specific social groups (over focused issues like smoking, abortion, or school reform) that large numbers of people recognize, both in terms of what “sides” there are to take in such debates and what sorts of people tend to be on each side.
3. Collocational Patterns: Any pattern of words or grammatical structures (types of words and phrases and clauses) that “hang together” to betoken a particular social language (and the identity associated with it) in the way in which sun hat, swimsuit, sunscreen, a towel, and flip-flops “hang together” to betoken a “sunbather.”
4. Conversational Analysis: A detailed form of discourse analysis that sees conversation as the basic human communicational form and seeks to explicate how people produce and reproduce social order through talk and orientation to talk and each other in social interaction. The approach is almost always just spelled as “CA” and is a branch of sociology (one that gives up building grand sociological theories in favor of describing the order people actually create and how they create and sustain that order). Manny Schegloff at the University of California at Los Angeles is the best living practitioner of CA.
5. Critical Discourse Analysis: Any form of discourse analysis that seeks to engage with politics (see the Glossary entry for “politics”). Critical discourse analysis deals with whose “interests” are represented, helped, or harmed as people speak and write. When “critical discourse analysis” is spelled as “CDA” it often refers to the work of Norman Fairclough and his associates.
6. Eliciting Exchange: The most common exchange in the classroom is an eliciting exchange (Willis, 1992, pg.113). These exchanges begin with the teacher asking a question (usually one they already know the answer to).
7. Identity: A word used for lots of different things. What I mean by it in this book is this: Different ways of being in the world at different times and places for different purposes; for example, ways of being a “good student,” an “avid bird watcher,” a “mainstream politician,” a “tough cop,” a video-game “gamer,” a “Native American,” and so on and so forth through a nearly endless list. I do not mean your core sense of self, who you take yourself “essentially” to be, though that is an important notion as well. I often use the term “socially situated identity” or “social identity” instead of just the word “identity” to make clear I am talking about how we recognize and act out different social roles or different social positions in society.
8. language Function: A language function refers to what students do with language as they engage with content and interact with others.
9. Minimal Responses: Responses such as mmmm and yeah are known as minimal responses.

10. Semiotics: A term for the study of sign systems. 11. Sign: Any word or symbol (which could be an image or object) that has meaning (stands for something else thanks to a given concept, interpretation, and convention which relates to the sign and the thing it stands for). 12. Textual Pattern: A level of interpretation which we are involved in as we process texts is that of recognizing textual pattern. 13. Utterance-Token Meaning: It refers to “situated meaning”.