Bridging the gap between conversation analysis and ESP – an applied study of the opening sequences of NS and NNS service telephone calls

This article adopts conversation analysis (CA) techniques to examine the way in which participants in service telephone calls to bookshops negotiate their requests. The study, which is based on data from NS and NNS corpora, concentrates particularly on the reason-for-call sequence – the part of the telephone call opening in which the business of the phone call begins to be addressed by callers and receivers. A description is made of the pre-sequences which introduce reason-for-call and the strategies deployed by NS and NSS in formulating their pre-sequences are analysed and compared. Two claims are made – firstly that conversation analysis data on telephone calls is an important and neglected source for LSP research and applications, and secondly that reason-for-call is a particularly difficult area for NNS and that the correct management of pre-sequences is crucial for successful negotiation of a request. Suggestions based on the analysis are given for LSP materials production for service calls. It is also suggested that this type of applied analysis could usefully be extended by LSP practitioners to other areas of institutional talk for which CA data is available.