Conversational structures of ‘reports’ in writing class group work

As students are participating in group work in writing classes, what are they talking about and how is their interaction organized? This study analyzes the structures of talk and embodied interaction in student group work in university writing classes. Using video data of naturally occurring interactions, the study draws from conversation analysis (CA) and from analytic approaches to the way talk, gesture, and other forms of embodiment join in a semiotic ecology to produce social action in the course of interaction (see C. Goodwin 1984, 1986, 2000, 2003). Students in group work ‘share their ideas’ in highly structured ways. Their ‘reports’ to each other about work they have completed outside of their group work are similar to the ‘storytelling’ structures of ordinary conversation (Sacks 1974, 1995). This paper looks at those structures in detail and also makes a case for the ‘institutional’ nature (Drew and Heritage 1992; Schegloff 1992) of group work talk.