PART FOUR NOTES TO ACCOMPANY THE CDROM Introduction The CDROM and these notes must be used together. Both background notes and additional notes on how to use the CDROM are given here in hard copy form and do not appear on the CD. Also, the initial rough transcription exercises will need to be done by you with traditional pen and paper! You may be surprised at how relatively little material is presented for you to practise your transcription skills. One practical reason for this is that digitised video material takes up a great deal of memory on the disk and, therefore, one CDROM is easily filled up. But there are other good reasons for presenting only a small amount of material. The focus, as we discussed in the introduction, is on smallness and slowness: going into depth with a relatively small amount of data rather than transcribing large swathes. Accurate fine-grained (or narrow) transcription of only a few minutes of data may take an hour or more. So, if you only have a few hours to improve your transcription skills, it is better to work in depth on a short text. Minimum Technical Requirements for your computer: • 256mb RAM. • gb free space. • A computer with a sound card so that you can hear and not just see the video. • Headphones if you are watching the video in a resources centre. • At least a 15 inch monitor. (A smaller monitor will affect the lay out of the transcription on the screen.) These are the minimum requirements. A more powerful machine with larger memory will allow you to install the CDROM more quickly and MAY give you slightly better sound quality. It may be possible to run the CDROM on a machine with 128mb but certainly not one with only 64mb. If there is only 128mb, you may find that the sound and picture synchronisation is not perfect. Installation Instructions To install: Create a directory/folder on C:\ called Ttool Copy all files on CD into this directory Create a shortcut on the desktop to the file ttool.exe Rename short cut transcription tool.

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To run: Double click the icon on desktop for “Transcription Tool”. N.B. To adjust volume, use window volume control for your sound card. If this is not available as the speaker icon on the taskbar, access by: Control Panel Multimedia Audio Properties Trouble Shooting If you have problems accessing the CDROM, it may be because the computer you are using has an old CDROM drive in it. The only solution is to find a computer with a more up to date CDROM drive. The disc should be accessible from any PC with CD writing software installed. Networking Most of the computers for student use, in most university departments, are networked. This means that students cannot simply take the CDROM and play it on the computer. The staff in charge of the networked computers will have to be asked to put it on the network. They will also have to ensure that it is available on computers which have sound cards and that headphones are available or, at least, that students can plug their own headphones into the machine. In some universities the ICT staff are only willing to put new material on the network once a year. This is frustrating and you may be able to persuade them to make an exception. If not, then it is important to find out when the new material is networked. (This is usually in the summer vacation). The following notes give further explanations and some background to the data used in the Transcription Tool. The title page has accompanying music composed by John Cook - click on the music icon. Remember to click on it again to stop the music before forwarding to the next page.

GOING THROUGH THE CDROM PAGE BY PAGE Page One: What does the Transcription Tool do ? The data was originally recorded with an analogue camera in the 1980s for research purposes. Neither the sound nor the visual quality, therefore, come anywhere near the quality of a digital recording. This is a disadvantage in some ways. However, most students will not be able to audio and video record in ideal conditions with state of the art equipment. So, practising transcription with less than high quality recorded data may well reflect the reality for students working on their own data. The reason for using this data is that it has already been partially transcribed and analysed in the paper by John Gumperz, ‘Interviewing in Intercultural Situations’ (Gumperz 1992). Students should have this paper with them when they use the CDROM as they will be referred to it as they go through the tasks.

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If they have read Part Two ‘Notes on Prosody’ then they should have already be familiar with this paper. If they moved straight to Part Three, then they should stop and read the Gumperz paper before starting the CDROM. The sections of data selected for the CDROM have been re-transcribed, using slightly different transcription notations and with some minor changes. The CDROM versions should be used rather than the original transcriptions published in the paper. Gumperz’s paper is typical of work done in interactional sociolinguistics in a number of ways: • it uses naturally occurring gatekeeping settings where the ways in which candidates present themselves will crucially effect their access to scarce resources; in this case the chance to do a government funded training course. • it includes a fine grained analysis of the data to show how contextualisaton cues - both verbal and prosodic - feed into the assessment of the candidates and the final decisions made about them. • it contrasts the local communicative style of the white candidates with those of South Asian origin whose style of speaking is influenced by their first language - in this case Panjabi. The data to be transcribed comes from extracts from two interviews: the Bricklayer interview and the Electrician interview. Each extract should be viewed in full first and a rough transcription made. Then each one is broken into two parts: Exercise One and Exercise Two. At this stage a detailed transcription should be made and this can then be compared with the Model Answer. A word of warning, however - as has been made clear in Part One of these materials - there is no such thing as a complete, or perfect or ‘model’ answer. What you will find is one attempt to produce as accurate a version as possible, given the political issues related to representation also discussed in Part One. You may disagree with the ‘model answer’. This may be because you have not yet trained your ear sufficiently. Or it may be that the transference of the original to CDROM has made it more difficult to hear some words or nuances of intonation, tempo etc. Or it may be that you consider some features of the data have not been adequately attended to in the transcription for the purposes of the research. Or that you think your transcription is more accurate than the so-called model etc. etc. Any disagreements are fine because they continue the dialogue between you and the data which your transcriptions have begun. As well as helping you to become a more accurate transcriber, they will help you to think through some of the other issues raised in the earlier parts of the materials. A great deal of transcription is done on audio data only. There are lots of practical reasons for this but if you are interested in social interaction, then only looking at words, prosody and paralinguistics strips away significant elements of the context and contributes to what has been criticised as a very logocentric view of discourse. For this reason we have used video extracts for the transcription tool. One obvious reason for this is that it is easier to transcribe when you are more aware of the physical and social context of the interaction. But also, video recorded data allows you to look at the ways in which verbal and non-verbal communication are co-ordinated and how the non-verbal aspects of communication feed into the overall assessment of intent in conversation.

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Page Two: Menu This page gives you the opportunity to view and roughly transcribe the complete sequence of the Bricklayer and the Electrician Interviews. Before watching the Bricklayer interview, you should read through the transcription notes: ‘Steps in Doing a Transcription’ (Part Three). Once you have completed Exercise One and Two for the Bricklayer clip, return to the Menu page and follow the same sequence for the Electrician clip. You will need to use the following sections of the ‘Steps’ notes in order to do a rough transcription: • STEP ONE: Tuning in • STEP TWO: Doing a rough transcription Page Three. Bricklayer Clip: complete sequence Background : This interview takes place in a Skillcentre which is a Training Centre run by the then Training Agency of the Department of Employment. (NB The Department of Employment has been reorganised several times since the late 1980s when this video was made but there are still government run courses similar to the skillcentre courses that these candidates are applying for). Applicants are interviewed for a training place which leads to a vocational course in a trade such as building, engineering, electric installation and so on. They will already have completed a paper based test in maths. The interviewers represent this interview to the candidates as a chance for applicants to confirm their interest and for both sides to check that this is the appropriate course for them. The unstated purpose, however, is to assess the candidates’ motivation and background knowledge and experience to decide whether they should be offered a place on the course. It is, therefore, a classic gatekeeping interview. In both the bricklaying and electrician sequences, the interviewers are the same. The first speaker is Reenie who is a training adviser working for the Training Agency. She deals with the procedural aspects of the training. The second interviewer is Mr C. who is a Skillcentre instructor. The Skillcentre is in North West England and the interviewers and J, the candidate for the bricklaying course, are local people who speak English with a regional accent. The sequence on the CDROM is some six turns into the start of the interview, after the initial greetings and introductions. R is beginning to ask J, the candidate, some routine questions about the skillcentre. Using the clip: Use the slide for repeat viewing/listening Doing a rough transcription: • Listen and view the complete sequence several times • Decide how many distinct phases there are in the activity • Listen and view several more times until you feel quite familiar with the overall sequencing and turn-taking. Try also to tune in to the overall tempo and rhythm of the sequence. • Think about lay-out, line numbering, spacing and use of upper and lower case.

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• Now try and do a very rough transcription, using conventional pen and paper. Try to transcribe all the words, indicate pausing, examples of overlapping speech and indicate any doubtful words. • You may also want to note any outstanding examples of non- verbal communication and any vocal but non-lexical phenomena such as coughing. Page 4 Bricklayer: Exercise One Check your rough transcription against the transcription in the box. You may well have a better lay-out than we have been able to achieve! Because of the need to run the transcription alongside the video sequence, it has not been possible to space it out, with, for example, only one breath group per line which would give more space for a fine-grained transcription. Remember that the version in the box is not the perfect or complete transcription. Using the icons: • Click on these icons under the video: > < to move forward and back frame by frame and for pausing. • Click on TRANSCRIBE to do a fine grained transcription. This will give an editable text which you can add your notations to. • Click on REFRESH TEXT to start the transcription over again. Doing a fine-grained transcription. Read through STEP THREE in the ‘Steps’ notes. These are the basic CA notations and you should be familiar with them as they are so widely used. Then read through STEP FOUR carefully and the summary list of notations at the end of the ‘Steps’ notes. These will be your basic notations for doing a detailed transcription based on Interactional Sociolinguistics. Now work through the section of the interview given in Exercise One. Remember to bear in mind the purpose for which you are doing the transcription and the academic audience who would be your readers. Link back your transcription decisions both to the notes in Sections One and Two and to your reading of the Gumperz paper. For example, you will need to think about which features of the interaction are likely to be most salient for the participants and, particularly, for the two gatekeepers. Once you are reasonably satisfied with your transcription, click on the ‘model’ answer to compare. You may then wish to listen/view the clip again. In order to keep your version, you will need to print it out. Page 5 Bricklayer: Exercise Two Go though the same procedures as Exercise One. Then return to the Menu Page for the Electrician Interview. Page 6 Electrician clip : Complete sequence

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Background: The candidate in this clip came from Pakistan, about ten years before this video was made, to live in the area. His first language is Panjabi which he would have used ,alongside his developing English, in the cotton textile mill from which he was made redundant. Together with many of his co-workers, the majority of them also from Pakistan, A had to seek some form of retraining in a new trade if he was to have any job prospects. By the time of the interview, A had a good functional command of English but the rhetorical and interpretive demands of the gatekeeping interview put pressure on him. In particular, the indirect means of conveying speaker intention through prosody used by the white interviewers creates difficulties which are never fully resolved. Although, A has highly relevant experience and is strongly motivated, unlike J, he is not offered a place on the course. This outcome raises a lot of questions about, for example, indirect and institutional discrimination and the value (or not) of using interview talk to assess suitability for a trade course. The Training Agency’s rejection of A, with the consequent possibilities of long-term unemployment, shows how relatively small differences in communicative style contribute to much larger and potentially very damaging outcomes. Now do a rough transcription following the Bricklayer guidance (see above) Page Seven Electrician clip: Exercise One Check your rough transcription with the ‘model’ given. Then do a fine-grained transcription, following the same procedures as with the Bricklayer clip. Page Eight Electrician clip: Exercise Two Use the same procedures as for the Bricklayer clip. You have now finished the CDROM exercises. Other Transcription Exercises • Read through the Gumperz paper again and relate his analysis to your detailed transcriptions. How far do you agree with his analysis now that you have done your own detailed work on some of the data he used? • Spend more time looking at the non-verbal features of the video and how they are coordinated with speech. Compare the non-verbal features of the two candidates and check to see if the interviewers use different non-verbal features with the different candidates. (For more details on the co-ordination of verbal and non-verbal communication within a CA tradition, look at Christian Heath’s studies, 1986.) • Now that you have done some detailed analysis, go back to parts one and two to relate your own decision making and final transcription to the issues raised there e.g. Should the two applicants be represented differently in the written transcript? How much of the context of the gatekeeping interview needs to be written about in order for the reader to interpret the transcription ? • Try out these transcription tools on your own data, using them both for ear training and accuracy and to think about issues of purpose, interpretation and representation.

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References Heath,C 1986 Body Movement and Speech in Medical Interaction. Cambridge: CUP

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