Scollon book and CA

[Don Carroll]

Dear Linganth members,

Cynthia Dunn writes:

>I've been using Intercultural Communication: A Discourse Approach by the
>Scollons this fall and have found it quite good.

I also found this book to contain a few stimulating ideas.

>p...and a once-over-lightly on some discourse
>and CA type concepts,

Unfortunately, I'd say that the Scollons make a complete hash of what few
CA concepts they mention.  For example, they write:  "Many textbook for
language learners have been written which focus on just such adjacency
sequences, or as they have sometimes been called, "gambits."  They go on to
say that "The problem that adjacency sequences pose for us in our analysis
of discourse is that in several decades of study, analysts have now come to
agreement that there are virtually no such sequences of more than a few
turns.  Perhaps for or five turns are the outer limit of regular adjacency
sequences."

While parts of this book may be useful in a course for undergrads with no
prior understanding of what discourse is and that discourses can differ
(although one of Tannen's popular books, e.g. "That's not what I meant"
might be better for this crowd), I would be hesitant to use the Scollons'
book with any student that I would later have to teach CA too -- just too
much here that I would have to un-teach!

Don Carroll
Shikoku Gakuin University
dcarroll at sg-u.ac.jp