Johanna Rendle-Short

Australian National University | ANU · School of Language Studies

Children's agency in their own lives is increasingly recognised as important, including within paediatric health care. The issue of acknowledging child agency is complex in the context of paediatric palliative care, where children have serious and complex conditions that often impact their ability to verbally communicate with others. This study exp...

Objective: To consider whether and how family members and clinicians discuss end of life during paediatric palliative care consultations. Methods: Nine naturally occurring paediatric palliative care consultations were video recorded and analysed using conversation analytic methods. Analysis: Focusing on three consultations in which end of life...

Overwhelmingly, autism research is carried out within a medical deficit model, with emphasis on quantifiable results that can be applied to cohorts of affected people. This paper addresses some of the methodological issues surrounding quantification research. Using the coding and categorisation instructions from an earlier quantification study as a...

In this chapter, Rendle-Short demonstrates how conversation analysis advances our understanding of the interactional difficulties faced by children with diagnoses of Asperger’s syndrome (DSM-IV). The focus is on different contexts in which a child might pause or be silent and how such pauses are responded to. The first context is an intra-turn paus...

The activity under consideration in this paper consists of two boys (siblings aged 8 and 9 years old) jointly involved in the task of assembling a toy machine gun. The eldest boy has been diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome. The activity of assembling the toy gun will be complete once the boys have taken the pieces out of the box, read the instructi...

This paper focuses on supervision in the context of higher education. It highlights the interactional complexities inherent in regular supervisory meetings between supervisor and student as they negotiate the institutional goal of achieving a successful PhD outcome. Close analysis of supervisory meetings shows that students sometimes pause followin...

This paper examines how participants in psychotherapy reconnect at the beginning of psychotherapy sessions through ‘updates’, and the role of time references in managing this activity stage. Drawing on 18 sessions from a corpus of 123 audio-recorded sessions between one client and her therapist over the course of two years and utilizing principles...

This chapter investigates counselling interactions where young clients talk about their experiences of taking on family responsibilities normatively associated with parental roles. In research counselling literature, practices where relationships in families operate so that there is a reversal of roles, with children managing the households and car...

This chapter focuses on one aspect of social interaction that is directly relevant to maintaining friendship, mental health and well-being, and supportive peer relations. The single case study is of a 10-year-old child diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome and her use of derogatory address terms, part of a wider pattern of behaviour evident in this ch...

Socially, people find it difficult to say ‘no’ to requests or invitations. In spoken interaction (face-to-face), we orient to this difficulty through the design of our responses. An agreement response (preferred) is characteristically said straightaway with minimal gap between request and response. A disagreement response (dispreferred) is characte...

It is often claimed that parents’ talk to twins is less rich than talk to singletons and that this delays their language development. This case study suggests that talk to twins need not be impoverished. We identify highly sophisticated ways in which a mother responds to her 4-year-old twin children, both individually and jointly, as a way of ensur...

Spontaneous play, important for forming the basis of friendships and peer relations, is a complex activity involving the management and production of talk-in-interaction. This article focuses on the intricacies of social interaction, emphasizing the link between alignment and affiliation, and the range and importance of verbal and nonverbal interac...

One of the diagnostic criteria for children with Asperger's Syndrome (AS) is pragmatic impairment. Yet, minimal interactional research has been carried out on what exactly 'pragmatic impairment' might mean. What do children with AS do (or not do) when interacting? What do they find interactionally 'difficult'? What do the conversational partners do...

Evidence for the role of corrective input as a facilitator of language acquisition is inconclusive. Studies show links between corrective input and grammatical use of some, but not other, language structures. The present study examined relationships between corrective parental input and children’s errors in the acquisition of the Spanish copula ver...

This chapter demonstrates how conversation analysis or talk-in-interaction can be utilized in the language classroom in order to promote intercultural language learning. It shows how tertiary Mandarin language students can be given the techniques and opportunities to reflectively examine their own culture and its intersection with other cultures. I...

This chapter demonstrates how conversation analysis or talk-in-interaction can be utilized in the language classroom in order to promote intercultural language learning. It shows how tertiary Mandarin language students can be given the techniques and opportunities to reflectively examine their own culture and its intersection with other cultures. I...

Over 40 years of work on lying in psychology and communication has investigated numerous 'cues to deception'- the subtle signals people show when they are lying. One of these cues to deception is 'response latency' or the gap that occurs between questions and the lying response. The current investigation uses the methodology of conversation analysi...

Within the Australian political news interview, journalists and politicians frequently use address terms in order to achieve particular interactional outcomes. Using the methodology of conversation analysis, this paper focuses on one such interactional outcome, namely, the way in which politicians use address term prefaced responses to answer journ...

Understanding how children of different ages and different cultures design and organize their talk allows us to better understand how children demonstrate intersubjectivity, how they structure their social world, and how they orient to social and cultural practices. Although researchers are beginning to re-examine interactionally some of the previo...

This paper focuses on the sequential environment of the address term ‘mate’, contrasting the post-positioned ‘mate’ (e.g. ‘hello mate’) with the pre-positioned ‘mate’ (e.g. ‘mate how are ya’). Because ‘mate’ occurs in a wide variety of situations and carries with it a range of interpretations, it is an extremely popular term that can be used not on...

The concepts of mate and mateship have been held up as quintessentially Australian, encapsulating all that it might mean to be Australian, including such ideas as having a fair go, camaraderie, working together. Although the address term mate (as in How ya going mate?) is generally included in discussions of mate and mateship, very little analysis...

Conversation analysis (CA) focuses on the language, practices and competencies by which people accomplish social actions to create and understand ordinary social life. CA uses naturally occurring data, examining micro-detailed transcriptions from recordings of ordinary interactions. This paper highlights some principles, methods, and insights of CA...

This article aims to examine journalists' adversarial challenges within the Australian political news interview. Within the Australian context, journalists tend to challenge interviewees: (1) by challenging the content of the prior turn, (2) by `interrupting' the prior turn, and (3) by initially presenting their challenge as a freestanding assertio...

Recently, a different usage of the word gay has appeared in Australian English. In addition to the earlier meaning of gay being ‘happy’, ‘carefree’ and ‘frivolous’ (1st meaning), and to a later meaning of gay being synonymous with ‘homosexual’ (2nd meaning), it appears that gay is now being understood by young people to mean ‘stupid’, ‘lame’ or ‘bo...

Analysis of the political news interview in the lead-up to the Australian 2004 federal election shows that both journalists and politicians address their co-participant by name. However, there are differences both in choice of address term and in the positioning of address terms within the news interview. Journalists tend to use pre-positioned addr...

How is the task of giving a presentation accomplished? In this insightful book Johanna Rendle-Short unpacks this seemingly simple task to show the complexity that underlies it. Examining the academic presentation as a case in point, she details how seminar presenters interact with the audience and objects around them to produce a coherent whole. Th...

Indicating one’s sexuality is performed regularly and easily within everyday interaction, or more specifically, on talk-back radio to thousands of Radio National listeners across Australia. Such information is not simply gleaned indirectly via contextual references; rather it is referentially or directly indexed through other-person reference to wi...

Analysis of the academic monologue shows that presenters do not talk nonstop for the duration of the presentation-they talk for a bit, pause, and then talk for a bit more. In other words, they divide their monologue into smaller "chunks" or sections of talk. The move from the end of a section of talk to the pause between sections is evident not onl...

Style and Sociolinguistic Variation Penelope Eckert and John R. Rickford, eds. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001 xvi; 341 pp.

Abstract Um and uh are generally considered to be indicative of dysfluency and uncertainty in speech production. However, analysis of the academic seminar indicates that the distribution of um and uh is not random. In specific well-defined environments um is used to indicate the underlying structure of the talk. Although Swerts (1998) has already s...

Analysis of a series of computer science seminars indicates that use of the discourse marker "so" in dialogic talk is not random, rather it plays an important role in orienting the listener to the overall structure of the seminar. Analysis shows how the discourse marker occurs in specific environments, with specific prosodic features, and that its...

Analysis of a series of computer science seminars indicates that use of the discourse marker ‘so’ in monologic talk is not random, rather it plays an important role in orienting the listener to the overall structure of the seminar. Although the institutional nature of seminar talk is such that only one person speaks for an extended turn, detailed a...

Yes Yes

Analysis of a series of seminars given by CSIRO computer scientists indicates that the use of the discourse marker: okay, is not random; rather, it plays an important role in orienting the listener to the overall structure of the seminar. This paper shows how okay occurs in specific environments, with specific prosodic features, and how its role an...