In the UK, viva voce examinations (vivas) play a key role in the assessment of research degrees. Postgraduate research students can prepare for vivas by accessing a range of educational training materials in which contributors recount their own (perhaps selective and contextual) experiences of the kinds of questions that viva examiners may ask. Despite the availability of these resources, students’ knowledge of how vivas actually take place is severely limited by the absence of real-life examples. Using conversation analysis, we investigated recorded vivas in a British university. A single-case analysis focused on how viva questions and answers were interactionally designed, treated, and managed through their sequential unfolding. We found that the opening sequence in the viva was interactionally problematic; a) the external examiner’s opening turn comprised several proposals, making a range of candidate responses relevant; b) the student treated this proposal(s) as requiring a turn-initial formulation, before outlining their thesis; c) in third position, the examiner’s response treated the student’s answer as in some way inapposite, unsatisfactory, or insufficient, hearably undermining the student’s opening account of their thesis. This finding demonstrates the incongruence between viva questions found in preparation materials and how they can unfold in practice, highlighting the importance of analysing real-world examples. The development of training resources based on the examination of actual vivas can ensure that students are better prepared, and may encourage examiners to reflect on practice that contributes to their organisation and administration.

In Norwegian classrooms, students are assessed with grades and by participating in “subject talks.” The term subject talk is used across schools and subjects, but it lacks a formal definition. Nevertheless, it appears in curricula, policy documents, and research to describe an assessment situation where one or more students engage in a topic-specific conversation, with or without a teacher present (Author). Since interactional competence (Pekarek Doehler, 2019) is part of the competence aims on which student assessment is based, it is important to explore whether and how subject talks create opportunities for students to demonstrate this competence.
As subject talk is a relatively new assessment format, we know very little about how teachers organize these talks and what implications the overall organization may have for students’ ability to display their interactional competence. Using conversation analysis, we transcribed and analyzed a collection of subject talks in Norwegian secondary school classrooms, addressing the following research questions:
• What is the overall organization of subject talks?
• How do subject talks allow students to express their interactional competence?
We found that the organization of subject talks varies both within and across schools, and that these organizational differences lead to varying opportunities for students to demonstrate their interactional competence. A detailed analysis of the subject talks revealed that they allowed for conversational turn-taking but lacked features such as overlap. We discuss the pedagogical implications of these findings for the assessment of interactional competence.

Building on EM/CA work on closings, this paper addresses the issue of how shared mealtimes in institutional settings are brought to an end. Taken from the specific context of preschool lunches, our concern is to delineate the multimodal practices through which participants progressively bring the mealtime to a close. This focus is grounded in research interests which seek to explicate the social organisation of children's eating practices within, and the implications of these organisational structures for, the eventual production of food waste (specifically, plate waste).
Data is taken from a large corpus of video-recorded preschool lunches in Sweden and multimodal conversation analysis is used to examine the closing sequences of the mealtime. As children's pace of eating and consumption quantities vary substantially, the data show that meal closings are accomplished over an extended period of time and involve the teachers’ embodied and verbal monitoring of eating progress and completion. Meal endings are moreover also about institutional concerns including nutrition, satiety, and food waste. The analysis will demonstrate how these concerns surface in the interaction around the table and how individual psychological states (e.g., satiety or food “likes/dislikes”) are negotiated alongside more general environmental concerns (e.g., wasting excessive amounts of food).
The results show that the mundane practice of progressing from eating to meal endings holds important clues into how young children are routinely socialised into everyday practices that promote healthy as well as sustainable eating habits.

Peer interaction is a crucial part of children's school life that demands a nuanced understanding of how to access and participate in it (see Corsaro 1979). Getting others’ attention requires appropriate timing, understanding of the recipient’s ongoing activity, as well as concrete ways to approach others. This presentation draws on a video ethnographic approach and uses the methods of multimodal conversation analysis to examine ways interactions are initiated and responded to in a primary school classroom setting. The data for this study come from a corpus of video-recorded data collected in Finnish primary classrooms featuring open and flexible learning spaces. These spaces operate as adaptable working areas with movable furniture and a variety of seating types typically involving multiple classes and collaborating teachers.

We show how the children’s embodied means to gain the attention of their peers range from verbal greetings to gaze, shifts in embodied posture and touch using objects. In this context, children’s initiations appear to connect to social rather than task-oriented needs, and they often interrupt or intervene in their recipient’s ongoing course of action. Children’s interaction with their peers builds and maintains social relationships with others as well as within the broader social group. Interactions taking place during class are typically short and temporary and vulnerable to interruptions. We also discuss the possible constraints and the affordances created by the setting (e.g., spatial organisation).

Reference:

Corsaro, W. A. (1979). ‘We're friends, right?’: Children's use of access rituals in a nursery school. Language in society, 8(2-3),315-336.

This study examines intonation as one modality of voice usage, particularly as a mediator of cues in forming and maintaining an alliance in guidance interaction. The goal is to analyze variation in intonation as an empathy-displaying resource.

In this study, the theoretical and methodological framework is founded on conversation analysis. This research is multidisciplinary, combining methods from guidance interaction research with those used in psychotherapy and speech research. This research is guided by the perspectives of conversation analysis on prosody and intonation, as well as the formation and maintenance of alliance in guidance interaction. The data consists of career counselling interactions analyzed qualitatively utilizing conversation analysis and the Interpersonal Process Recall method. Data collection is ongoing, and pilot study is based on a single session.

The pilot study reveals differences in intonation usage depending on the chosen method for guidance interaction, i.e. orientation. We examined three orientation types: supportive, inquiry, and problem-solving. Supportive orientation utilizes a lower and more even intonation, transmitting cues on respect, trust, excitement and interest toward the topic discussed. In inquiry orientation, rising intonation helps emphasize new perspectives stimulating clients´ cognitive processes. In problem solving orientation intonation mediates cues of approval in receiving guidance enhancing cognitive activity. These findings indicate that, in alliance formation modalities in voice usage and intonation mediate empathy and cues of understanding reciprocally. Such modalities notably increase the sense of authenticity as well as strengthen alliance formation and maintenance.

Intelligibility and comprehensibility are important for successful communication in interactions between native (L1) and non-native (L2) speakers of a language. Dialects of Norwegian can vary greatly in pronunciation, grammar, and vocabulary and, unlike many languages, there is no official spoken standard (Heide, 2017). Previous research has explored the complexity of dialect use in Norwegian society (e.g. Røyneland & Lanza, 2023) and the impact of teachers’ use of dialect on comprehensibility for L2 Norwegian-speaking students in a school context (Andreassen & Kjelaas, 2025). In this study, we look at challenges for communication between colleagues in interactions between L1 and L2 speakers of Norwegian, with a focus on how language variation impacts intelligibility and comprehensibility for L2 users of Norwegian in a university setting.
This presentation explores data from a survey of 313 L2 Norwegian-speaking university staff about their experiences of challenges related to language variation in interactions with L1 Norwegian-speaking colleagues in a workplace context. When asked to rate challenges to successful communication in workplace interactions on a 5-point scale, 83% of participants reported that unfamiliar dialects presented a major challenge. Informal spoken language, pronunciation, and fast speech were also reported to present significant challenges. In responses to open-ended questions, many participants reported experiencing frustration that L1 Norwegian speakers seem unwilling or unable to accommodate to a more standard variety of Norwegian to assist communication with L2 users. We also discuss different perspectives on what constitutes politeness in these interactions and how language practices could have different intentions and interpretations.

This article explores how young bilingual children exercise agency in a Chinese heritage language (HL) preschool classroom by drawing on the multilingual varieties (Swedish and Chinese) and multimodal resources at their disposal for asserting own stances, creating alignments and securing speakership to advance their own agenda (cf. Kyratzis & deLeon, 2019; Cekaite & Evaldsson, 2017), while they enhance their linguistic fluidity in a heritage language. Drawing on 50 hours of video-ethnographic data from a community-based Chinese weekend school in Sweden, the study focuses on a group of 7 children aged 3–5 with Swedish-Chinese family backgrounds.

The analysis is situated within a language socialization framework (Ochs & Schieffelin, 2014) and multimodal conversation analysis (cf. Goodwin, 2018; Sacks, 1992), combining Goffman’s (1981) concepts of footing (cf. Godwin, 2009) and participation (Goodwin & Goodwin, 2004) with Bakhtin’s (1981) notion of polyphony. While the teacher-child classroom interaction promotes a monolingual Chinese language ideology, the analysis shows how children create “translanguaging spaces” (Li, 2018) to agentively draw on their full semiotic repertoires—including Swedish and Chinese linguistic forms and embodied actions (gaze, gestures, prosody), to assert own stances and negotiate alignments, in ways that reconfigure the participation framework into a child-centered heritage language learning.

Particular attention is paid to the ways in which children display agency through shifts in footing and voicing using reported speech displayed through embodied actions as a key resource to animate authoritative voices and explore adult registers of absent family members. These multivocal practices (Bakhtin, 1981; Agha, 2005) reveal how young heritage speakers draw upon adult roles and registers (Paugh, 2018), indexing personal experiences from outside school (home) to appropriate normative expectations around monolingual language use while they position themselves as active, knowing, and morally accountable participants within a heritage language classroom. By tracing how young learner engage in shifts in footing and voicing, exploiting adult roles and registers from outside, this study contributes to understandings of young children’s creative and agentive participation in heritage language learning as a dialogically constructed, socially situated process.

Reference
Agha, 2005
Bakhtin,1981
Cekaite & Evaldsson, 2017
Godwin, 2009
Godwin, 2018
Goodwin & Goodwin, 2004
Kyratzis & deLeon, 2019
Li, 2018
Ochs & Schieffelin, 2014
Paugh 2018
Sacks, 1992