Om språkets förhållande till kroppen

En litteraturstudie av betydelsen av måltidssamtal.

Analys av vilka funktioner som virtuella deltagare har i samtal.

The present collection of articles, presented at the 8th IADA Conference in Göteborg, focuses on understanding and misunderstanding as dialogic phenomena. The notion of a dialogic grammar and dialogic principles as a framework for understanding human communication and cognition is explored in several contributions. Misunderstanding in dialogue is dealt with in institutional and non-institutional settings, in fiction and film dialogue, from several different theoretical perspectives

The article presents a case study of one teacher-parent-pupil (TPP) conference. Cindy, the pupil, has Down syndrome. A study of how people with verbal communication problems manage discursive practices that largely rely on the ability to verbally negotiate identity is clearly motivated, both from a theoretical and a more practice-oriented perspective. We found that Cindy's identity is described and talked about in terms of predefined aspects, codified in a written agenda. All participants oriented themselves towards some sort of cultural model of the ideal identity that does not have to be discursively justified. Cindy's identity is not only talked about, but also demonstrated and enacted in interaction. Her self-presentation is mediated by her mother, and this mediation is linked to the sequential organization of the turn-taking system and the way the participation framework becomes organized. Cindy's talked-about and demonstrated identity work does not only concern her as an individual. It is also a relationship presentation. The identity of Cindy as a pupil and a daughter implies a certain identity for a teacher and a mother. To help one's daughter present her identity in a favorable way is to simultaneously display the identity of a good mother. ⌐ Walter de Gruyter.

Hur kommer mitt liv att gestalta sig? Kommer jag att vara frisk och stark? Kan jag göra något för att påverka ödet? Den moderna läkekonsten försöker på olika sätt att besvara sådana frågor. Ständigt utvecklas nya metoder för att tidigt avslöja hälsorisker.

Att konfronteras med hot om framtida sjukdom kan vara dramatiskt och omtumlande. Så är det för den kvinna som får reda på att den bröstcancer hennes mamma dog av kan vara ärftlig och därmed hota henne själv eller hennes barn. Så är det också för den man som ser livet förkortat när blodprovet avslöjar ett alarmerande värde.

Men hur påverkas vi av genetisk kartläggning eller upplysning om konsekvenserna av en viss livsstil? Kan kunskap om möjliga sjukdomsförlopp rent av vara skadlig? Hur förstår människor den information som uttrycks i: "Du har 50 procents risk att utveckla cancer"? Den här boken visar hur vanliga människor reagerar i sådana situationer.

The research reported in this study takes both a general descriptive approach - investigating the characteristics of 48 job interviews - and a comparative one - analyzing ways in which those who got a job offer differed from those who did not. Data used in this study are tape recordings of job interviews with applicants for trainee-positions with a large Swedish business corporation. Additional data are tape-recordings of post-interviews made by the researcher with the applicants as well as questionnaires from the interviewers.

The theoretical nations of self presentation and impression management (Goffman) have been the main points of departure for this study. All communication invalves impression,management. but job interviews focus explicidy on this aspect of interaction. Job interviews can be seen as argumentations where the applicants are actively trying to support their claim that they are perfect for the job. Their argumentations are enacted in a dialogue, however, and the applicants' ways of arguing are thus dependent on the interviewers' contributions to the dialogue. Communication is a constant handling of conflicting demands. The particular solution to these conversational dilemmas manifests itself as a personal style.

Three main empirical analyses of the data were performed. The first concemed itself with the structure of the job interview. What does it look like and how is it managed? The analyses show that the responsibility for maintaining the global structure lies almost completely with the interviewer, hut that the applicant has the responsibility for managingthe local structure, for feeding interesting detalls in to the interview.

The second set of analyses was concerned with the ways in which the applicants actively argued for themselves. The results show that the successful applicants qualify their claims more forcefully, by modifications, explicit analysis or humour, for instance. The successfulapplicants also receive more interactive assistance from the interviewers.

The third set of analyses aimed at investigating some aspects of the interactive elimate in relation to the interviewers' different interviewing styles. The ways in which the interviewers paused and used simultaneous talk had a decisive influence on the length of the applicants' answers. The interactive element of interviewing was once more demonstrated in the analysis of laughter; in the interviews with the successful applicants there was more mutual laughter than in the interviews with the nonsuccessful applicants. The different interviewers' styles were recognized and described accurately by the applicants hut were valued differently.

The main significance of the study is the demonstration of the interactive element in dialogue. The interviewers are in a certain sense actively creating the grounds on which they are to base their decision to hire the applicants or not.

Det offentliga samtalets dynamik och förändring står i blickpunkten för projektet Samtal i samhället. På vems villkor? Forfattarnas intresse är att med dialogteoretiska och samtalsanalytiska begrepp och metoder studera dynamiken inom och mellan olika offentliga arenor. Delprojekten inriktar sig på diskurser där frågor om ansvar, säkerhet och risk, moral och politik står i fokus. Artikeln avslutas med en jämförelse mellan retorik och kommunikationsforskning.

Här ger arton forskare som alla varit doktorander till professor Karin Aronsson sin beskrivning av olika former av vardagliga fenomen. Det handlar om hur människor i olika sammanhang samspelar och skapar mening. Gemensamt för de författare som bidrar i boken är att de är eller har varit doktorander vid Institutionen Barn och tema Kommunikation, vid Linköpings universitet. Sedan mitten av 1980-talet har institutionen erbjudit en dynamisk forskningsmiljö för personer med intresse för samtal, kulturella uttryck och socialt liv i och utanför institutionella sammanhang.

This is a narrative study of the hiphop culture as a youth culture. The aim has been to understand how and why young people in middle-sized Swedish towns become hiphopers and also how they look at themselves as members of the hiphop culture.

The research methods applied are three focus group interviews and one single person interview. The participants are between 20 and 26 years. The hiphoper makes a kind of a career in the culture. To be able to make the career, the hiphoper is dependent of other people with better skills as well as of the society. The thoughts of the hiphopers in question can be summarized in four main themes: gender, attribute, genuine and battle.

Researchers in that aspect of social psychology [studying communicated explanations], ordinarily referred to as attribution theory, have, historically, studied the process of explanation strictly as an intrapsychic phenomenon. . . . Similarly, researchers who have devoted themselves to the study of "accounts," a tradition found largely within the confines of sociology, organizational behavior, and communication studies, have, for the most part, examined only the discourse manifestations of explanation, without a concomitant interest in the fundamental processes of event comprehension. This volume is devoted to bridging the gap between the two traditions. The chapters in the first section, "The Nature of Social Explanation," examine general issues of social explanation, in particular, the cognitive processes and knowledge involved in the construction of accounts. In fact, several of the chapters present general models of the cognitive processes underlying account-giving. Many of these chapters also deal with general aspects of the social context that affect the kind of explanation people offer. However, they do not focus on the impact of concrete social contexts or on specific kinds of accounts (despite the use of concrete examples to illustrate their general concerns). In contrast, chapters in the second section of the book deal more concretely with accounts. They examine the role of accounts in specific kinds of settings, such as organizations, or the courts; or they deal with specific kinds of accounts, such as accounts of racism or accounts of relationship breakdowns.

In this experiment we explore the effects of using a graphical and textual database for sharing information within a team that are to control a dynamic system. The task involves fighting a simulated fire. Four people are to cooperate in a layered organisation, with one layer being the operative and the second layer the supervisory. The operative layer involves two fire chiefswho are commanding two fire units each. The supervisory unit consists of two persons that are to co-ordinate the fire chiefs. The supervisory unit receives all information from the fire chiefs but has to construct an overall picture, a so-called situation awareness, of the development of the whole area. The supervisory unit constructs this situation awareness which is meant to be supported by the graphical and textual databases respectively. We hypothesised that the graphical condition would be more successful than the textual database in registering the current situation, since the graphical database allows direct mapping. On the other hand, we hypothesised that the textual condition might be better in supporting the future planning and prediction of system dynamics. We analyse 18 quartets, 72 subjects by both performance measures and a questionnaire. There were no significant performance differences between conditions, but there is a major learning effect, especially for the textual condition. In accordance with our hypothesis we found that participants in the graphical condition did better mapping the map with the "real" world, at least in the first session. More successful groups worked more ahead of the fire than did less successful groups. From the questionnaire it seems that the subjects learn more about co-ordination and trusting their fellow team members than about the internal dynamics of the simulated fire. In fact, the teams learn things about system dynamics that are wrong. We therefore suggest that team SA might be more of a co-ordination problem than a problem of acquiring knowledge about system dynamics.

The major objective of this thesis is to study the processes of traditionalisation that are being enacted in relation to both the external and internal production of the play "The Power and the Glory" that has been performed in Alvastra Abbey ruin since 1988. During three weeks in July the ruins and their environs are transformed into a rehearsal area, and a live stage, with lay actors performing different roles, a supporting staff and an audience. The thesis asks questions about how the staging of the play is impacted by a politics of culture, why this particular site or topography can be read as a story about a nation, what mediating connections there are between the yearly productions and, finally, how the rehearsals activate and reproduce the accumulated memory of the play and the place.

The thesis connects with discussions on how "space" is charged with symbolic and cultural meanings, the use of history and cultural heritage, and story-telling. These approaches are combined with analysis of how participants in interaction use multiple resources (talk, spatial organisation, gestures, gazes, movements and postures) to invokethe spatial aspects of the play as well as to put the story of the play in place. The methodological approach of the thesis combines fieldwork (personal observations, videotaping and audio-recordings) with analysis of written material, press cuttings, archival material, and books and illustrations about the area and its history.

In conclusion, this dissertation makes visible how Alvastra Abbey is associated with imagined cultural, political and social entities such as a nation, a province, and a local community. "The Power and the Glory", it appears, constitutes one agent among others in a long term meaning making process. One point made in this book is that although the story of the play is legitimised through references to a past that already has become meaningful in earlier processes of traditionalisation, the work of the Association of Alvastra Chronicle Play and the rehearsal process also creates a traditionalisation process of its own.

This study presents an analysis of the everyday activities of an Indian Nongovernmental Organization (NGO), the Mobile Creches (MC). NGO' s - societal institutions which have grown in prominence in the post-World War II era - are primarily involved in providing services for marginalized sections of different southern nations. As an activity system, MC is a product of the social changes which accompany internal migration andthe growth of urban nuclei, phenomena which are characteristic of economic restructuring. MC was primarily instituted in 1969 to cater to the needs of large numbers of migrant construction labourers children in three Indian cities - Bombay, Delhi and Pune.

The field work for this research was conducted in the early 1990's, a period when social change was accelerated in India due to rapid economic restructuring. Using ethnographic methodological approaches such as participant observation and interviewing people in their different everyday working arenas, MC has been analyzed primarily from two different, but complementary, perspectives. Firstly, it is accounted for as an organization for child care specifically aimed at providing services for underprivileged children in urban areas. And secondly, it is analyzed as an activity system in which women. are significantly involved. A dual thrust exists within the second perspective: the first of these is related to women's participation in public and private spheres of child care work; and the second pertains to issues related to literacies as a dimension of the distribution of knowledge in society. Thus, the work reported here is based upon an exploration of the social patterning of discursive practices within MC. In other words, its second main thrust lies in the study of the activities of MC as a community based development centre where women, who often have low qualifications for the labour market, gain access to arenas, where they can assume responsibilities for complex tasks that go into the running of the organization and its creche centres.

In everyday life human beings do not read and write without a purpose. This study of situated learning and literacies has documented why, when, where and how, the women staff at MC read, write and use texts. The role of reading and writing in the lives of the un-schooled construction labourers is also explored. In the course of their MC work, the staff are required to function as decision makers, teachers, extension workers, fund raisers, health workers, etc. And it is by making available special contexts, in terms of administrative duties and instructional duties, that MC provides concrete possibilities for training and practise on tasks which require advanced literate competencies. It is in this sense that MC functions as an institutional arena which sustains different literacies in theeveryday lives of its workforce.

Swedish child health care for children 0-7 years has a participation rate ofnearly one hundred per cent. Its work is preventive, and its ambition is toprevent health problems in preschool children and to promote good health in them and their families. The nurse is the key person and communication with parents and children is one of the important tools she uses in performing her tasks.

The overall purpose of this thesis is to describe and analyse the communication that takes place in encounters between the child health care nurse and families with children, during both visits to the child health care centre and visits in homes. The empirical material consisted of audio- and videotape recordings of five first visits to families with newborn children, of fortyfour visits of families to nurses at child health care centres, and of interviews with home visit participants. Data was primarily analysed qualitatively.

Most of what the families and the nurses discussed during the encountershad reference to the Swedish child health promotion programme, whetherthe encounters took place at the child health care centre or in participants' homes. This fact steered the interaction to a great extent. The nurses introduced the majority of topics in the conversations, but parents and children also brought up new topics. Advice, based to a great extent on the nurse's expertise, was given during almost every visit at the child health care centre. The nurse seldom encouraged parents to find their own solutions to various problems. Instead she offered standard solutions and answers to their questions. Non-verbal communication was a significant feature in the interaction. Video analysis contributes to a deeper understanding of the nurse's tasks, and also shows that the children were very active in the interaction.

The aim of the thesis is to study how gene technology appears as a topic in certain arenas of the public discourse. What are the premises, visions and ideas that are continuously formulated and circulated in the public discourse, and through what communicative practices are they formulated? In order to limit the vast research field, this study focuses on gene technology in relation to pre-natal diagnostics.

The empirical material is derived from five different groups of publications, namely; daily newspapers (Dagens Nyheter and Svenska Dagbladet), popular science magazines (Forskning & Framsteg and Illustrerad Vetenskap), a journal for professionals, i.e. physicians (Läkartidningen), a journal for members in a nationwide organizationfor the visually impaired (SFR-perspektiv), and parliamentary motions. The empirical material consists of texts published between 1989 and 1994.

The analyses have focused on themes, genre, actorship and narratives appearing in the empirical material. Conclusions reached by the study are that the themes occupy different positions in genres. In the debating genres, the dominant themes are ethics and regulation, and gene technology is defined as a problem that concerns the whole of society. In the news article genre, the dominant themes are scientific discoveries andtechnology and practices in use in scientific and clinical work. Two major perspectives, or narratives, could be discerned in the material, characterized by optimism and trust, and by pessimism and suspicion. Furhermore, the analysis has shown that gene technology clearly appears as a moral discourse. Several domains of expertise and power are drawn into discourse to legitimate or to reject claims of truth and value, concerning both basic human values and the presumed consequences of gene technology.

Archbishop KG Hammar has attracted attention for his liberal position in theology. His view on the role of language and communication is central in several books and articles he has published as leader of the Church of Sweden. One of his main theses is the fact that meaning is created in the encounter between text and reader. He often reiterates: God is relation. This non-traditional dynamic stance has a broad impact not only on theology. It also affects the view of church formation and leadership as well as bible interpretation and the concept of sacramentality. The paper traces the pervasive consequence in this thinking.

Mental health problems among asylum seekers and refugees are becoming a public issue, but awareness of this problem among the mental health community is relatively low. Although advances have been made in the provision of innovative mental health services for asylum seekers and refuges with PTSD, they are not systemized, and not widely known to professionals in the field. A publication offering practical guidelines for the treatment of torture victims and political refugees does not exist. Broken Spirits aims to bring together the works of the most respected mental health professionals - from the U.S. and abroad - and make available the most current knowledge on complex PTSD, forced migration and cultural sensitivity in diagnosis and treatment.

När möter människan medicinen? Det sker varje gång en individ söker sig till hälso- och sjukvården för att få hjälp med sina besvär. Denna antologi fokuserar på kommunikationer mellan människor och mellan olika kunskapstraditioner i vården, patientens förståelse av diagnosen, och på den nya medicinska teknologins konsekvenser för människor i deras dagliga liv .                            

The primary aim of this thesis is to study how people suffering from chronic fatigue (usually Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, CFS) make sense of their medically unexplained and invisible illness. Due to the vagueness and indefinable character of this illness, it becomes disputed and doubted in many contexts. Thus, I call it a contested illness. Drawing on data from a patient school as well as from recurring interviews with former participants of this school, the meaning-making processes are examined from a communicative and interactive perspective using a primarily narrative approach.

The analysis shows two principle ways of making sense of a contested illness like chronic fatigue, in narrative reconstructions and as interactional processes. Aspects of the narrative reconstructions that can be distinguished as particularly essential to this sense-making are morality and time. Both aspects become closely linked to issues aboutidentity in chronic illness since they concern biography and the personal story of life. In interview narratives, people described the changes in the moral frameworks they use in order to orientate themselves in their quest for what it is to lead a good life. By temporalising their illness, people seemed to deal with issues like responsibility, freedom of liability, blame and guilt, probably prompted by the contestedness of this illness.

Through what is described as the discursive management and the sharing of experience, making sense of chronic fatigue in the patient school turned out to be primarily an interactional process. In interaction with the professionals in the school, the ill persons examined their experiences of suffering in relation to the professionals' views of the illness in a way that seemed to lead to a greater ability to manage illness discursively. Sharing experience of illness by telling each other one's personal story, and by co-narrating the story of suffering from chronic fatigue, meant that a joint image of the illness was created and that personal experiences were transformed into shared collectivised experiences. By this process, also the individual suffering was confirmed.

Based on audiotaped conversations from a patient school for adults suffering from chronic fatigue syndrome, this article examines sharing experiences of illness as a mutual activity. The analysis shows that sharing experiences in this context is primarily of the narrative kind. Three main types of narratives were found: self-contained personal stories, orchestrated chained personal stories, and co-narrated collectivized stories. Through sharing three things seem to happen: (1) the participants jointly created experiential knowledge and a mutual image of the illness, (2) the individual sufferers could compare themselves to the jointly constructed image, (3) the active sharing of experience bestows a mutual confirmation of suffering irrespective of whether the individual’s experiences correspond or deviate from the common picture. Two parallel transitions seemed to occur: the transformation of personal experience into shared collectivized experiences and the transition when the individual sufferer perceives his/her private suffering through sharing experiences with co-sufferers.

One of the main interests behind this study has been to examine how institutions, such as the social services, deal with people 's troubles and difficulties, how a private problem is transferred to the language used within a public institution. The study deals with the processing of applications for financial assistance, and is based on a documentation of talk and text - from the initial telephone mediated contact to the final written decision - which are produced in the handling of the clients' applications. Even though previous studies of institutional discourse have shown interest in the daily routines of formal organizations, working with the processing of cases, they have often neglected the role that different kinds of texts play in these processes. The present study concems the roJe of text and talk as parts of such routines.

DATA

The study contains a detailed documentation of the processing of appJications for financial assistance involving 25 individual cases. This corpus was compiled <luring 1988 and 1989 in three social welfare offices in two middle-sized Swedish cities. It comprises mainly the following data:

a) telephone conversations between social workers and clients (20 calls are documented by means of participant observations and written notes)

b) face-to-face conversations between social workers and clients (25 audio-taped conversations)

c) application forms and other written documents which form the basis for decisions (copies of the relevant papers from 20 cases)

d) the social workers' written decisions (copies from 20 cases)

e) meetings with the social welfare committee (discuss ions and decisions conceming 3 applications documented by means of participant observation and written notes: copies of the minutes and other kinds of written decisions)

f) interviews with the clients and social workers, who participatedin the study (23 clients and 15 social workers have participated in audio-taped interviews).

ANALYSIS

The recorded conversations and interviews were transcribed in extenso. The analyses are based on the transcriptions as well as the audio-tapes. The conversations have been analysed in several ways, e.g. in terms of sequential structure and contents as well as their function in the institutional context.

The written documents - the applications and decisions etc. - included in the study have been analysed mainly with regard to their significance in the processing of the individual cases. The documents have made it possible to investigate both the relation between spoken and written discourse and the processing of 'cases' through several stages, which is common in many areas of bureaucratic organizations (Jönsson, 1988).

RESULTS

The presentation of the results of this study follows the stages which have been identified in the processing of the cases. This handling of the clients is found to follow a distinct order which includes the following steps: 1) the client's initial telephone call to the social welfare office; 2) the application form which is supposed to be filled in by the client; 3) the social welfare interview; 4) the decision concerning the client's application. In short, the findings may be summarized as follows.

The initial telephone conversation functions as a buffer between the social welfare officer and the applicants. During this stage in the processing of people, a 'screening' takes place. This gives the social worker a chance to make informal judgements as to whether the client should persist in seeking help and also to provide the ' client-to-be' with information concerning other ways of solving her or his financial difficulties. If the client's financial (and social) position seems to fit into some of the categories that make a person eligible for financial  assistance, a slot for the client is found (i.e. this person is offered an appointment for an interview and/or provided with an application form).

The application form is used to collect information about the applicant. This form, however, plays a more prominent role in the different stages than expected, since it gives a structure to many of the routines and procedures used when a client's application is being handled. This procedure may moreover be seen as a way of disciplining clients, and teaching them 'the client role' (cf. Lipsky, 1980, p. 61). When a person has filled in the necessary details on this application form, he or she has been accepted and given a client status in the further relations with the social welfare office.

The social welfare interview gives the client access to the social welfare office and gives him the opportunity of providing more information about his or her financial difficulties. The conversation usually begins with a revision of the application form. In connection with this, the client often talks about the events in the past which are related to the need for financial assistance (cf. Cedersund, 1992). It is during the interview that we are able to observe how the client's financial problems are reformulated in a way that may be accepted within the social welfare organization. This transformation of 'problems' into 'cases' is made possible through the use of a typification where the clients are assigned to certain categories which are usually implicitly expressed in discourse.

The decision is made by the social workers or in some cases her supervisor and/or the district board for social welfare services (Sw. : social distriktsnämnd). The decision is often given to the client in the social welfare interviews and the written decisions are mostly produced after this encounter. These written texts in most cases include a short summary of the specific details of the client's financial difficulties and needs. This summary may be similar to a later version of the client's own oral account of his or her financial difficulties given during the welfare interview. The last part of the written decisions always includes statements which show the approval (or rejection) of the client's application. The written decisions seem to be produced in order to document the processing of the applications within the office rather than as a text to be read by the clients.

This work focuses on the role of talk and text in the processing of people in public organizations. It is a study of communication between citizens and officials in one such organization, namely, the Swedish social services. The aim of the study is to examine some of the micro-level processes which make up the daily operations and routines of this kind of institution.

The work consists of three parts. The first part reports a study of the initial telephone contacts between parents who need day care for their children and the clerks in charge of the 'waiting-list' for municipal day-care services. The data that have been analysed consist of 10 audio-taped telephone conversations between parents and clerks. Theanalyses focus on the local organization of talk and show that the professional dominance is maintained during all the various phases of the call. Starting the conversation with an extensive 'filling-in-the-form phase' turns out to be an effective way of preserving the institutional order. The clerks manage to achieve communicative dominance, while theparents are induced to accept the limited repertoire of bureaucratic expressions as valid descriptions of their own needs and wishes concerning the future day care for their children.

The second part is a study of clients who are applying for financial assistance. It is an attempt to scrutinize the mode in which clients present their financial problems in social welfare interviews. The data consist of 25 audio-taped social welfare interviews. The clients' talk about their financial problems has been analysed in detail and this analysis has served as a basis of a typology, which contains the following basic discursive formats: 1) monological narratives, 2) dialogical talk, 3) minimal contributions from the client.

The third part, which is published as a separate monograph written in Swedish, deals with the processing of applications for financial assistance. This part includes a detailed documentation of the processing of 25 applications. The study is based on a documentation of the following stages in the handling of the cases: 1) the client's initial telephone cali to the social welfare office; 2) the application form which is supposed to be filled in by the client; 3) the social welfare interview; 4) the decision concerning the client's application. One of the main interests behind this part has been to examine how institutions, such as the social welfare bureaucracy, deal with people's troubles and difficulties; how a private problem is transferred to the language used within a public institution.

This work describes how the processing of people relies on standardization of communicative practices where oral discourse is embedded in routines which also comprise the use of texts and other artifacts. The texts are important tools for maintaining the institutional order and they are integral parls in encounters between citizens andofficials in institutional settings. The tools seem to provide for continuity and coherence and to be an important element in the ability of the organization to maintain the 'proper procedures' irrespective of who the individual actor is.

Flerspråkighet bland barn är ett aktuellt ämne i Norden, såväl för forskare som inom skolans värld. Men synen på flerspråkighet präglas fortfarande i mångt och mycket av en enspråkig världsåskådning, där tvåspråkiga individer ses som "dubbelt enspråkiga".Denna nordiska antologi förhåller sig kritisk till den enspråkiga normen. Genom att i detalj studera hur barn och ungdomar i flerspråkiga miljöer samspelar i vardagliga situationer på skolgården och i klassrummet, visar författarna hur flerspråkighet kan förstås som en social praktik, som något människor använder i sin vardag för en rad olika syften

This paper explores the mutually oriented work involved in collaborative, computer-aided text production taking place in a bilingual 4th grade classroom at an English school in Sweden. It reports on an in-depth analysis of a 55-min videotaped session in which two students engage in the production of a written report of the past weeks' project work. The analysis focuses on the students' language alternation, showing how a specific bilingual conversational order is produced by their extensive use of the co-available languages. Specifically, the analysis highlights a distinct division of labor between the two languages in which English is used exclusively for the purpose of producing the text proper, while Swedish is used for other forms of interaction. The results are discussed in terms of the relation between social structure and local bilingual practices of meaning construction. More generally, the paper argues for an approach to social interaction that treats the issue of social order as, above all, a matter of participants' situated concerns. © 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

The paper attempts to highlight the bilingual nature of social interaction in task-focused groups taking place in school environments where more than one language is readily available for the purpose of everyday social affairs. Specifically, the following analysis highlights three issues, central for our understanding of bilingual group work. These are: * the linguistic organization of task-oriented actions, which will lead us to specify a socially shared division of labor between the two languages * the use of code-switching and related bilingual practices in the pursuit of various interactional projects * the notion of pedagogic tasks as interactional resources, exploited by the participants for a range of practical purposes (clearly, this issue is not specific for bilingual groups) To illustrate the relevance of these matters, samples of bilingual talk-in-interaction from two different settings will be fleshed out in some detail, combining the task-oriented as well as interpersonal aspects of students- actions, and treating the issue of language choice (and alternation) as an integral part of their social conduct.

With the publication of this volume we present some of the invaluable help which we have received from distinguished colleagues in our attempt to analyze and understand some of the data collected during our ten years of study of the linguistic development of successively bilingual Turkish-Danish grade school students. We gathered a group of interested scholars who have also worked with bilingual speakers of Turkish in North-Western Europe for at seminar at the University of Copenhagen in November 1999. The papers in this volume are the result of the discussions during our seminar, and subsequent discussions among the participants.