CLAN questions - new user

[Brenda Beverly]

To Whom It May Concern:

I am a new user of CHAT/CLAN (long time SALT user). My colleague in China 
and I are using CHAT/CLAN for transcription and analysis of mothers' 
engagement behaviors when booksharing with 4 year olds. We may be able to 
donate the videos and/or transcripts to CHILDES in the future, but in the 
short term, we are trying to maximize the CHAT/CLAN capabilities. 

I have a few questions: 
1. Are post codes the best CHAT method for our study purposes? After 
working to learn CHAT , it seems that our study-specific coding of 
engagement strategies is best accomplished through post codes. So, we have 
an utterance and then a post code - for example,  [+ CR] which is our 
abbreviation for Choral Reading, an engagement strategy of the mothers that 
we are tracking. 
 
2. How could we get separate tiers for when the mothers are reading the 
text from the children's book versus when the mothers are talking/speaking, 
not reading? We have ruled out @g. It seems @g is better for 2 different 
booksharing activities, not these separate types of talk with one 
booksharing/storybook. We are considering labeling the Participant tier to 
separate this - @MOT for Mother reading, but maybe @MET for Mother's 
extra-textual talk. This will likely give us the output we need but it's 
not truly 2 different participants. In that regard, it feels like we might 
be missing out on a tier option that would be a better representation of 
the transcripts. Should we have set this up with a dependent tier using 
%ETT (extra-textual talk) perhaps? Could we keep the post codes and add 
this following the MOT utterances that are extra textual? Or do we need to 
use the codes together, for example:
%ETT : AK (AK = our code for an acknowledgment)

3. Is the freq command the best CLAN program for our purposes? We have 
successfully run freq to obtain the counts for the postcodes and exported 
that to excel. 
The program my colleague ran was:
freq @ +[*MOT = s"<+ AK>" 
She ran separate analyses for each of the engagement behaviors - AK for 
acknowledgement as well as CR Choral Reading etc. 
This is working. I was simply curious if this was the best/right option, 
especially given my other questions about the use of post codes and tiers. 

4. Lastly, I believe we could run a command that would include all 10 
participant transcripts, but I haven't studied or determined how to set 
that up. Are you able to assist? 

My apologies for these basic questions. We are excited to access CHAT/CLAN 
for this project and future work. Your support is greatly appreciated!

Brenda Beverly
bbeverly at southalabama.edu
251.635.3999 mobile #

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