An Informal Conversation With Three Hospitality Postgraduate Students

An Informal Conversation With Three Hospitality Postgraduate Students

Conversation Analysis (CA) examines spoken discourse through the use of a variety of tools. Some of these include: adjacency pairs, turn taking, conversational opening and closings and others. Its strength is with analysing recordings of spoken data (Paltridge, 2012). However, as an approach to the analysis of spoken discourse, CA's detail becomes 'less-accentuated' in the absence of implicature. This working paper, will briefly address the relevance of implicature-particularly the maxim of relation, and how other discourse considerations (channels) contribute to furthering the 'informal' representation of spoken words with meaning. The methodology and discourse considerations advocated in this working paper, contribute to research quality and acquisition of knowledge in meaning-making-being explored in a mixed methods study currently undertaken by the author2. As such, this working paper provides evidence towards validating this phenomenon of meaning-making. In providing insight to this argument, a CA analysis was undertaken with three postgraduate hospitality students. To acknowledge the sample size (n), a sample methodology using 'quality of information power' was used to gain insight into CA discourse and other discourse considerations as identified above. All three participants were aware of the study's intent, signed disclosure statements and remained anonymous in the reporting of this study. It should be noted, that attributes relating to inequality, power, social and cultural differences, whilst relevant, are beyond the scope of this working paper (Wooffitt, 2005). The findings of the study, through analysis of turn taking between participants, suggested a representation of meaning given to implicature (maxim of relation) and communication through adjacency of pairs. Whilst these are of interest, and further the capability of CA as a discourse tool, it is the 'opportunity' to incorporate other analysis tools that gives meaning to an 'informal conversation'.

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