Whatever Happened to ‘Topic’?
| Author: | Seedhouse, Paul |
| Author 2: | Andrew Harris |
| Abstract: | |
| The interactional organisation ‘topic’ featured prominently in the early work of Harvey Sacks, but for the last twenty years has become increasingly peripheral to CA work. We briefly cover Sacks’s main findings on ‘topic’ and suggest reasons why it may have fallen out of fashion. We then report on a recently-completed funded research project on topic development in the IELTS speaking test, an international University entrance test of English. The study is based on a set of 60 audio recordings of tests in various countries. Adopting a CA institutional discourse perspective, we show how topic is foregrounded in this institutional setting and becomes one means of organising the talk. Examiners ask a series of topic-related questions written on cards to the candidates, who are assessed partly on their ability to develop a topic. This results in an interesting institutional ‘fingerprint’: all examiner questions contain two components a) an adjacency pair component, which requires the candidate to provide an answer b) a topic component, which requires the candidate to develop a specific topic. A candidate’s response may fulfil the adjacency pair requirement without fulfilling the topic requirement. So in the Speaking Test, topic is scripted and entwined with the organisations of turn-taking and sequence to further the institutional goal of standardisation of the interaction. Sacks (1992,1, 541) argues, in relation to ordinary conversation, that topical organisation is an “accessory” to turn-taking and sequence. By contrast, topic is, in the Speaking Test, to some extent an organising principle for the interaction. We conclude by suggesting that research in institutional discourse should consider more closely how topic becomes adapted to the institutional goal and related to the organisations of turn-taking and sequence in specific settings. |
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