By adopting conversation analysis, this study examines how action formation and understanding displays construct a socially inept and humorous character in the TV sitcom, The Office. The analysis revealed two recurrent patterns in the main character’s interactions—improper action formation and insufficient understanding displays. Specifically, the findings showed that the main character, Michael, was construed as one that is unaware of his uncanny actions and unable to understand the interlocuter’s inferential and sarcastic remarks. The inserted interview scenes also highlighted that a conversational norm has been violated and contribute to the characterization of Michael as a quirky, socially incompetent worker. As a result, the collective sender is not only able to establish common ground with the audience but also dramatize the humorous potential of the episode. These analytic findings demonstrate that CA can be a rigorous tool for revealing the specific interactional devices that are exploited by scriptwriters to configure characters and infuse comical elements into TV sitcoms.

This study examined teachers’ claims of entitlement in collaborative teaching sequences where the non-leading teacher enters into the domain of another teacher’s ongoing instructional business. The data involves video recordings of second-grade elementary Korean and American teachers co-teaching math and science lessons. The analysis reveals that directives were prevalent in teacher-teacher communication, and unilaterally involved the Korean teacher making corrective remarks of American teacher’s instructions or entering to take control of classroom management. The directives were also formulated as declarative interrogatives, proposals, and imperatives, which implied the Korean teacher’s high entitlement. Also when the Korean teacher’s directive was not met with immediate compliance, it escalated into a more demanding imperative. These findings reveal the differential institutional status and power balance between the two teachers and demonstrate the analytical gains of applying conversation analysis to co-teaching interactional data. Potential implications for teacher training are discussed in light of collegiality and complementary collaborative teaching.

Much attention has been devoted to Extensive Reading (ER) to better understand its pedagogical effects on language learners. In this study, we focus on the teaching principles of ER and call for a re-visitation of the Freedom principle (“Learners choose what they want to read”) that has been frequently used by practitioners and researchers of ER. Based on the focus group data collected from enthusiastic readers who participated in ER as a classroom activity and read beyond the designated class goal, we examined how these students chose what they wanted to read in an English-for-Academic-Purposes (EAP) context. The findings suggest that the Freedom principle, while allowing student autonomy, incurs complications in the implementation of ER. Students may experience frustration if given a limited choice of books, providing support for the Freedom principle. However, as students freely choose their books, the activities they engage in may become incompatible with other ER principles. Drawing on the focus group data, we will discuss the details of such complexities and conclude with pedagogical implications.

Lee, Mijin Josephine Mijin. 2014. Metaphor use in TED Talks: Implications for EFL. The Sociolinguistic Journal of Korea 22(2), 65-90. This study examines the use of metaphor in TED talks with respect to its density, distribution, and functions. Adopting a cognitively-informed discourse framework of metaphor studies, the present paper quantifies and explicates the extent to which metaphors are mapped across the different disciplines of Art/Humanities, Natural Sciences, Social Sciences, and Technology. Also analyzed is the distribution of metaphor across word classes as well as the discursive functions that they work to achieve. The findings indicate that TED Talks are dense with metaphoric lexical units regardless of the type of scholarly discipline. When considering the distribution across word classes, however, diverging patterns in the metaphoric use of nouns, verbs, adjectives, prepositions, and determiners create a dividing line among certain disciplines as in Humanities/Art and Technology. The functions of these metaphors are also described in terms of representational, interpersonal, and textual use. Potential implications for EFL teaching as derived from the analysis are discussed at the end. (155)