Why Conversation Analysis (CA)?
According to Psathas (1995), the basic assumption of CA is that “social actions are meaningful for those who produce them and they have a natural organization that can be discovered and analyzed by close examination. Its interest is in finding the machinery, the rules, the structures that produce that orderliness” (p.2). In particular, CA implies the avoidance of preformulated theoretical categories. According to Psathas (1995), one of the main concepts on which CA is grounded is that “orderliness” is produced by the parties in situ; thus it is situated and occasioned (p. 3). This is very important since the context of interaction–Webchat–constitutes a new and different communicative context which forces both native (NS) and nonnative speakers (NNS) to produce new and different structures and patterns. Furthermore, the adoption of a CA perspective allows the researcher to approach the data without preconceived theories, free to discover, describe, and analyze the conversation and SLA
