Data and setting

The data on which this thesis is based are taken from the environment of a special school for hearing impaired children (see section 2) and hence it represents classroom interaction. The data consist of approximately 30 hours of video recorded school interaction and were collected in the time frame between December 2008 and December 2009. In the further stage of deciding which school activity and which interactional phenomena I would be interested in, I focused on a particular activity, which is a daily practiced activity in the classes of elementary school in the institution concerned. This activity is the storytelling activity, which is a part of the Morgenkreis activity (see section 2).

The class I have selected for my study is the first class of the elementary school.

In a previous stage, these children have been in the pre-school or kindergarten of the same institution, where they were prepared to move to the first class of elementary school. The decision whether a child may go to elementary school is based on the language skills that particular child has acquired in the pre-school. If the nursery teacher in the pre-school does not consider a child to be ready, then this child might remain in the pre-school for a longer time. The children are supposed to have acquired a certain level of language skills in order to become an elementary school pupil.

As I visited both schools (pre-school and elementary school), and as I became familiar with the methods of teaching these children, I became very interested in seeing the results of the efforts of the nursery teachers, once the children were moved to the elementary schools. It should be noted though, that this study does not provide a comparison between the two schools, but focuses only on the first class of elementary school. During my visits to the institution, and as I had the opportunity to talk and discuss with the teachers, I became aware that the teachers in the pre-school and in the elementary school have to deal with different goals and problems and therefore I focused only on the elementary school.

At the time the recordings took place, eight children were in the class. Two of them were transferred to a different class at a later point, as they developed some serious health issues. Hence, the thesis is concerned with the storytelling of six different

children at different days in the time frame named above. For my thesis, I directed my attention to the storytelling of three children out of the six, as the phenomena I investigate appeared frequently in those storytellings. Overall, my investigation is based on 60 video-recorded storytellings.

Depending on how many children are present (some might be in ci-therapy), each storytelling takes approx. 2-7 minutes. With the aim to work more intensively with the children, each class is usually divided and taught by two teachers. Thus, the storytelling in this paper is also concerned with storytellings of the same children, supervised by two different teachers.

In the course of analyzing my data I was confronted with some particular issues or problems that need some further attention. A CA conducted study is, to some extent, based on the intersubjectivity of the parties involved in the interaction, hence on how these parties make sense of their actions during the interaction. In the current study, hearing teachers interact with children, who have a disturbed hearing. Due to this fact, we cannot be sure that the children always acoustically perceive the interpretation of their verbal contributions by the teacher during the interaction, as their acoustic perception is not analytically available. Furthermore, some of the verbal contributions of the children were provided in an unintelligible way in terms of pronunciation and it became difficult to determine the children’s understanding of the teacher’s interpretation of their contribution. Therefore, I have directed my attention to a large extent towards the teacher’s actions and practices to see how she as a professional interprets the children’s actions and as a result how the children react to the teacher’s interpretation of their actions.

A further issue that is worth mentioning is the difficulty in transcribing and noting the pronunciation of the children. As it became evident in the discussion of the ci in children, the investigated children are still in the process of their language development. In practice, that means that due to their limited control of their own speech, it might happen that they pronounce a word differently in the course of their telling, even if they are aware that it is the same word. Thus, we can interpret their verbal contribution largely based on the teacher’s reaction to the same.

For the process of transcribing it became necessary to add some symbols for the representation of the children’s pronunciation and in addition to become more explicit in describing these issues in the analysis. As the data are in German, they needed to be translated into English, and hence it was difficult to provide a one-to-one interpretation of the unintelligible words of the children into English. Even if the children’s contributions were understandable in their content for a native speaker of German, it was sometimes a challenge to represent the pronunciation errors in such a way as to make them accessible to the English speaking reader. Therefore, the transcription of the children’s contributions also varies in the papers this thesis consists of, as in the course of writing my thesis, I tried different ways to make these issues obtainable for the reader.

During the analysis of my data, I became aware that despite the great tool that CA offers us to investigate interactions, we might have to develop transcription notions, if we are to investigate data of atypical populations and present them to readers of different languages. For data with hearing impaired individuals who might have speech problems this means, that we as CA analysts might be called to broaden our analysis, in the sense that we might for example include insights from other fields as e.g. phonetics or speech science. This we would have to do, if we want to pay tribute to the specific needs of these people and if we want to provide findings that might find their way into the hands of professionals working with these people.

In my opinion as a researcher, the moment we are involved with data of atypical populations, we become responsible for treating them with due respect and for finding a way to present them to a broader public. Opening oneself as a researcher to other fields should not be considered as a risk, but as a possibility to grow and blossom.

In the next section I will discuss my findings in the form of a summary of my papers.