In this episode you’ll hear an interview with Hansun Zhang Waring, Professor of Linguistics and Education at Teachers College, Columbia University and founder of their distinguished Language and Social Interaction Working Group (LANSI). The interview itself was conducted by Saul Albert, a lecturer at Loughborough University.
Professor Waring’s extensive and innovative conversation analytic work in applied linguistics has revealed how core conversational structures of reference, recipiency, accounts, assessments, and questioning are managed in, and constitutive of the classroom environment.
Some of her key research findings from this work are collected in her 2016 book Theorizing Pedagogical Interaction: Insights from Conversation Analysis, and her broader methodological contributions include her 2018 book, both published with Routledge, entitled Discourse Analysis: The Questions Discourse Analysts Ask and How they Answer them.
In this interview, we asked Hansun to talk to us about her route into CA, about how she came to set up LANSI, and heard about some of her current research including work exploring language socialisation from a conversation analytic perspective, and an edited collection of critical perspectives in CA that she is developing with Nadja Tadic.