Ett samtal är ett dynamiskt växelspel som kännetecknas av initiativ och olika former av återkoppling. Vem som gör vad i samtalet påverkas av den aktuella situationen, av samtalsdeltagarnas förhållande till varandra och av den språkliga och kulturella inramningen. I den här artikeln presenteras en studie av återkoppling i handledningssamtal där hand-ledare och studenter vid svenskspråkiga universitet och högskolor i Finland respektive Sverige interagerar med varandra.Med återkoppling menar vi hur samtalsdeltagarna reagerar på varandras kommunikativa handlingar och samtidigt visar att handlingarna åtminstone i någon mån tagits emot. Återkoppling inkluderar därmed såväl uppbackningar som responsiva turer. En uppbackning fungerar som ett stöd till men inte ett direkt svar på eller kommentar till en annan samtalsdeltagares samtalsbidrag (Green-Vänttinen 2001:57), medan en responsiv tur utgör en självständig språkhandling som bidrar till samtalsämnet (Linell & Gustavsson 1987:60). I avsnitt 2 för vi ett närmare resonemang kring fenomenet återkoppling och de avgränsningar och indelningar vi använt oss av i denna studie.Syftet med föreliggande undersökning av återkoppling i handledningssamtal är att jämföra autentiska finlandssvenska och sverigesvenska samtal för att söka likheter och skillnader i kommunikativa mönster. Studien utgör således ett bidrag till den variationspragmatiska forskningen. Variations¬pragmatiken är en relativt ny forskningsinriktning som kombinerar ett intresse för pragmatisk variation med ett intresse för geografisk och social variation (Schneider & Barron 2008:1).

Universities invest in teaching academies to reward outstanding teachers. Few studies have been published about the impact of teaching academies on teaching communities. The aim of this study was to see who excellent academic teachers spoke to when they discussed teaching and learning, and what kind of community a Teachers' Academy established in 2013 offered to its Fellows. We analysed the answers to two open-ended questions from two surveys. The first survey (2013) was addressed to first-round applicants to the Academy in 2013 (N = 46, 32%) and the second (2018) to its Fellows (N = 56, 65%). In both surveys, most teachers had meaningful discussions with their close colleagues. In the second survey, the conversations with pedagogical experts merged with the discussions at the Academy. The 2018 survey also examined how well the Academy's key objectives of providing teachers with an interdisciplinary community and peer support had been achieved in five years. The Academy had become an important community for teachers, in which teachers shared mutual appreciation for teaching and collaborated across disciplinary boundaries and campuses. A challenge for a teaching academy is to support its fellows in implementing the principles of scholarship of teaching and learning, that is, carrying out scholarly educational projects and sharing the results locally, nationally and internationally.

Intersubjectivity is a complex concept, and some central approaches to it have been discussed in areas of, for example, philosophy (based on e.g. early work by Schuetz 1953), developmental psychology (Trevarthen & Aitken 2001), neuroscience (Iacoboni 2008) and primatology (Tomasello 2008; Tomasello, Carpenter & Hobson 2005). In the realm of the interactional approach that the chapters in this volume represent we can initially note the following. Intersubjectivity is a precondition for all human life: for social organization as well as for individual development and well-being. A primordial site for its creation and maintenance is human interaction. By focusing on the creation and maintenance of intersubjectivity, the authors of this book approach the topic from the perspectives of turn and action design, action attribution, challenges in achieving shared understanding, embodied practices in meaning-making and synchronized participant conduct, as well as developmental aspects of intersubjectivity. The core theoretical and methodological framework is Conversation Analysis, combined with methods of interactional linguistics and multimodal interaction analysis as well as the study of gesture and psychophysiology. This research promotes an understanding that intersubjectivity involves joint understanding and sharing of experience between humans (see e.g. Linell 2017). Intersubjectivity in interaction requires referential common ground, shared understanding of the meaning of linguistic forms, shared understanding of actions and sequences of action and shared understanding of the expression of emotion in sequences of action.

In this chapter, we discuss design features of second assessments in German and Swedish conversation. We focus on opinion-verb constructions (finden, tycka) in full and reduced clausal formats. The study shows that reduced formats are followed by sequence closure while full formats are followed by more talk on the topic. We explain this finding by arguing that by using reduced formats, second speakers claim less agency and display low affiliation with the first assessment, whereas full formats work in the opposite way. The full and reduced opinion-verb constructions represent standardized action patterns with recognizable implications, leading to predictable interactional trajectories and coordinated intersubjective behavior.

Background: Conversation is central to building and maintaining relationships. Thus, it is unsurprising that people with aphasia and their familiar conversation partners often desire improved conversational ability. However, to facilitate real-world communication, focusing on improving aphasic language difficulties is not enough. We also need a comprehensive understanding of how social actions are accomplished in everyday aphasic conversation, including the means of participation people with aphasia possess. Aims: To investigate the in-situ participation of people with non-fluent aphasia by analysing how they bring up, i.e., initiate, issues of importance to them in home-based authentic conversations with their familiar conversation partners. Methodology: Using conversation analysis, we examined 6 hours of video-recorded everyday conversations of two dyads, each consisting of a person with severe/moderate Broca's aphasia and their spouse. We analysed 89 instances of the persons with aphasia initiating talk and how these initiations were produced, where in the conversation such initiations appeared, and what the initiations accomplished socially. Outcomes & Results: We identified two descriptive groupings of initiations by the persons with aphasia: formulaic initiations, and initiations striving for propositional content. Formulaic initiations were used in unproblematic ways to accomplish social actions like offerings, or to assess or summarize a topic after it has lapsed. Such initiations are considered important in building social cohesion. Most initiations strived for propositional content, i.e., entailed a content word, or an attempt to produce one. Such initiations were regularly intertwined with multimodal and material resources usually resulting in recognizable social actions like topic initiation irrespective of whether they included an identifiable content word or not. However, the achievement of topic initiation was crucially dependent on interactional work by the spouse. Finally, we discovered a difference in the sequential environment of propositional initiations between the dyads as only one of the spouses regularly provided slots for the person with aphasia to initiate talk. Conclusions: Our analysis revealed persons with Broca's aphasia participated in conversation through initiations relying on formulaic language and initiations striving for propositional content. The latter demonstrated the pronounced multimodality and interactivity of aphasic conversation. Our findings highlight the significance of the conversation partner's skills to facilitate the person with aphasia to initiate talk. Thus, our results imply the importance of providing conversation partner training to promote participation in aphasia.