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Footing in meetings JIRCD REVISION.pdf (803.73 kB)

Supporting adults with intellectual disabilities by protecting their footing in a challenging conversational task

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journal contribution
posted on 2018-10-31, 09:44 authored by Charles Antaki
One element of empowering vulnerable clients is to accord them conversational rights they are otherwise denied. The objective of this study was to identify the conversational practices used by staff supporting clients with intellectual disabilities in a linguistically demanding, but ostensibly empowering, task: taking control of a meeting. An analysis of Goffman's 'production formats' was used to identify how staff supported service-users in: nominating next speaker, asking questions, and evaluating answers, and moving to next speaker. Staff's support strategies ranged along a gradient, from those that most respected the service-user's footing as chair (by displays of low entitlement in suggestions, provision of candidate questions, speaking on behalf of the chair, and so on) to those that least did so (ultimately taking full control of the meeting).Without staff intervention, service-users with intellectual impairments struggle to meet the demands of chairing meetings. The practices identified here work to preserve the service-users' entitlement to carry out a designated task, in appearance if not in reality.

History

School

  • Social Sciences

Department

  • Communication, Media, Social and Policy Studies

Published in

International Journal of Research in Communication Disorders

Volume

9

Issue

1

Citation

ANTAKI, C., 2018. Supporting adults with intellectual disabilities by protecting their footing in a challenging conversational task. Journal of Interactional Research in Communication Disorders, 9 (1).

Publisher

© Equinox Publishing

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Publisher statement

This paper was accepted for publication in the journal International Journal of Research in Communication Disorders and the definitive published version is available at https://doi.org/10.1558/jircd.36199

Acceptance date

2018-10-01

Publication date

2019-01-17

ISSN

2040-5111

eISSN

2040-512X

Language

  • en