Conversation Analysis and the Study of Bilingual Interaction

Abstract

This paper is written by a linguist who is working with language in interaction within the paradigm of Conversation Analysis. The topic of the paper was inspired by a seminar where the socalled Køge Project researchers, who investigate Turkish-Danish bilingual students in Denmark, invited researchers with different backgrounds and approaches to work on data from the Køge Project corpus (see Holmen & Jørgensen (eds.) 2000). The paper contains deliberations about how Conversation Analysis can contribute to the study of bilingual interaction, and focuses on methodological problems and advantages of doing Conversation Analysis on bilingual data.

The first part of the article briefly outlines the fields of “Conversation Analysis” and “the study of bilingual interaction” and sums up the methodological lessons from my earlier analyses of the data from the Køge Project. Then the author proceeds to showing some aspects of conversation-analytical methodology through concrete analyses of extracts from the Køge Project data.