The Interactional Organization of Academic Talk

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. As such, this book will be of practical use to students and faculty members as well as scholars from different disciplines who work in the areas of institutional talk and talk-in-interaction.

Miriam A. Locher, University of Basel, Switzerland:
In the past the large part of literature on academic talk and discourse focused on the context of classroom interaction or the written product of our academic endeavors. Instead, in this book on the interactional organization of academic talk, Holger Limberg gives center stage to the important activity of ‘academic office hours’ – a practice that many academics engage in on a weekly or even daily basis, having formed practices of their own. Following a conversation analytic approach, Limberg conducts a thorough and exemplary bottom up analysis of a corpus of 47 video-taped office hours in English departments at two German universities. This careful study of talk-in-interaction demonstrates the complexity of a practice that forms a ‘formally organized and institutionally situated event.’ True to an ethnographic conversation analytical approach, Limberg focuses on the different phases of academic office hours to investigate how the participants interactionally organize talk and orient towards the event as a form of institutional practice. He studies these events in their entirety, looking at the opening and closing phases, the body of the interaction, advice episodes and the co-construction of the academic concerns. This book is a welcome addition to the studies on academic talk-in-interaction and an inspiring example of a large scale conversation analytic study, which will be of interest to the research community from an academic as well as an applied point of view.