A fundamental objective of the university professor is to help students learn how to perceive and understand the world around them in a new way. The interdisciplinary research method and field of conversation analysis (CA) is remarkably well-suited to helping teachers achieve this objective, because CA provides tools that enable first the perception, and then the scientific description and analysis of regular patterns of human social conduct—patterns that organize, and make meaningful, the world of everyday life. Because CA has such power, it is unfortunate that conversation analytic writing has earned a reputation for often being terminologically dense (at times riddled with acronyms) and thus impenetrable to the uninitiated. But with the publication of these two books, teachers interested in introducing their students to the close observation of naturally occurring social interaction are now armed with two clearly-written, engaging, and reliable resources, each an indispensable contribution to the conversation analytic teaching arsenal.

Having field-tested the material they present in their respective books on their own students over a number of years, the authors share a common aim: to provide newcomers to CA with a foundational understanding of basic conversation analytic methods, procedures for analyzing various levels of interactional organization, and exemplary empirical findings. Sidnell's book focuses on introducing readers to the analysis of ordinary conversation, and Heritage & Clayman's book focuses on introducing readers to the analysis of institutional talk.

Sidnell introduces the CA research tradition by guiding readers through a large body of established conversation analytic findings (published or available as of 2008) resulting from the detailed examination of recordings of naturally occurring conversation. The first two chapters of his book (“Talk” and “Methods”) provide a conceptual and theoretical framework for understanding the following ten substantive chapters, each of which focuses on a particular domain of conversational organization (“Turn-taking,” “Action and understanding,” “Preference,” “Sequence,” “Repair,” “Turn construction,” “Stories,” “Openings and closings,” “Topic,” and “Context”). Sidnell designs each chapter to show via exemplification (rather than tell via argument or description) core CA principles and findings. The book's concluding chapter then demonstrates how one can use the analytical resources presented throughout the course of the book to do sustained analysis of single excerpts of conversation.

At the outset, Sidnell acknowledges that a key challenge for his book is: where to begin? This is a challenge because any given excerpt of conversation is the product of “intersecting machineries” (2)—or several different, concurrently operating “organizations” (e.g. the organized set of practices involved in getting a turn-at-talk, and then constructing that turn-at-talk, and then repairing problems of hearing or understanding that turn-at-talk). Dexterous at putting himself in his reader's place, Sidnell recognizes that a term like “organizations” may initially seem obscure and abstract, and thus he prioritizes providing concrete examples of what this means. He immediately presents a short data fragment—just four lines of transcript excerpted from a conversation between wife and husband—using it to walk the reader through specific, grounded observations that a conversation analyst could make about that data fragment. Sidnell thereby shows via illustration not only what CA terms like “overall structural organization,” “repair organization,” and “word selection organization” mean, but also how these interconnected organizations concurrently operate.

With training and interests rooted in linguistic anthropology, Sidnell brings a refreshing perspective to the canonical story of CA's emergence through the collaboration of Harvey Sacks, Emanuel Schegloff, and Gail Jefferson. After first discussing the influence of CA's two most widely credited sociological forebears—Erving Goffman (who argued that face-to-face interaction is simultaneously its own social institution and the foundation of everything else in society) and Harold Garfinkel (who argued that everyday activities are made possible by an underlying substratum of practical reasoning) —Sidnell goes on to argue that CA developed in dialogue with a range of other social and human science perspectives. This included influences from anthropology (notably Evans-Pritchard's (1937) close observation of the Azande revealing the underlying rationality of ordinary human practice) and Freudian psychoanalysis (particularly its recognition of the importance of examining apparently small human phenomena to reveal patterns far from random).

One of the most invigorating aspects of Sidnell's approach in this book is that he manages to present CA's technical focus on the “system” of conversation (e.g. how interactants achieve and maintain mutual understanding) while also highlighting CA's power to generate deep insights into the “intrigue” of conversation—how interactants constantly make choices about how they design their social actions such that they either support or undermine their social relationships.

Heritage & Clayman's book introduces readers to the other main tradition within the field of CA: the analysis of institutional talk. The book is divided into five parts. Part 1 provides a brief introduction to the CA approach, explicating CA's view of social context as produced through participants' actions. Thus, institutional contexts are “talked into being” (cf. Heritage Reference Heritage1984:290), continuously and endogenously created, maintained, and altered by interactional participants. In focusing on institutional talk, the authors are careful not to draw a dividing line between professional, task-focused talk on the one hand, and ordinary conversation on the other. Rather, their aim is to show the ways in which ordinary conversational practices are brought to bear in task-focused interactions. They conclude Part 1 with a chapter that describes the three basic elements of institutional talk as involving: (i) participants in specific identity-based goals, (ii) special constraints on allowable contributions to the talk, and (iii) special inferential frameworks.

In Part 2, Heritage & Clayman focus on citizen telephone calls for emergency service (e.g. in the United States, citizens' calls to “9-1-1” through which they request police, fire and/or medical help). They examine this particular interactional domain first because they view it as exhibiting all three of the basic elements of institutional talk (mentioned above) in a particularly stark and transparent way. Three chapters constitute Part 2: the first provides background on public safety communication centers, and then contrasts emergency calls with ordinary conversational telephone calls; the second describes how these calls embody a gatekeeping process; and the third discusses problematic, “emotionally charged” calls involving distraught callers.

Heritage & Clayman launch Part 2 by presenting a basic finding about emergency calls: though the topical content of each call varies widely in terms of type and urgency of reported problems, the underlying actions done through the talk are strikingly similar across calls (e.g. all calls are organized around a core request-response sequence). Starting with this basic observation not only serves the immediate purpose of preparing readers to examine structural patterns that systematically organize these particular emergency interactions; it also implicitly prepares readers to examine any interaction (institutional or ordinary) by conveying a critical component of the CA approach: focus on the actions participants are doing (rather than simply focusing on the topics of their talk).

In their subsequent discussion of emergency calls, Heritage & Clayman demonstrate the importance of attending to the actions speakers do through talk. For example, after showing an excerpt of transcript from a 9-1-1 call in which the citizen caller says, “somebody just vandalized my car,” they guide readers through an illustration of how this same utterance may be heard as performing very different actions depending on the social context in which it is produced. If said to a close friend in response to a “how are you” question, it might be heard as doing the action of complaining about a personal trouble and inviting sympathy. If said to a doctor's receptionist on the morning of an appointment, it might be heard as doing the action of accounting for the need to cancel that appointment. But when said to a dispatcher of emergency service, such a problem description is routinely heard as doing the action of requesting (in this case police) help. This is just one way in which Heritage & Clayman have skillfully designed their book to embody a “double curriculum”: by guiding readers through an examination of particular institutional domains (many of which students find “intrinsically interesting”), it provides them with the motivation to learn some of the basic methods of conversation analysis.

In Part 3 of their book, Heritage & Clayman focus on doctor-patient interaction in primary care “acute” visits in which patients present newly arising health issues to their doctors for the first time. The four chapters that comprise Part 3 examine the twin themes of doctors' and patients' medical authority and accountability, including how these can be interactionally challenged. The first chapter shows how a patient's problem presentation is co-constructed by doctor and patient, and the second chapter describes how patients present the specifics of their problems so as to constitute them as legitimate medical concerns. The next two chapters examine how doctors question patients about their medical problems, and then ultimately present patients with diagnoses and treatment recommendations.

Part 4 considers legal system interactions. Two of its three chapters discuss key aspects of formal courtroom trial proceedings—witness examination and jury deliberation—showing how talk in these environments generates the determination of guilt or innocence. The third and final chapter of this section then describes relatively informal modes of dispute resolution: plea bargaining and mediation.

Part 5 presents the fourth and final institutional domain considered in their book: political, mass media-based interactions. Focusing first on broadcast news interviews between journalists and political figures, Heritage & Clayman describe the basic rules for taking turns at talk in this environment. They then elucidate how, during news interviews as well as during presidential news conferences, reporters design their questions sensitive to the professional journalistic norms of objectivity and adversarialness, and interviewees use regular methods for resisting adversarial questions. In the last substantive chapter, Heritage & Clayman broaden traditional notions of what constitutes naturally occurring social interaction by highlighting the interactional dynamics between audiences and political figures delivering scripted speeches, describing the rhetorical formats that speakers regularly use to invite applause. By ending their book in this way, Heritage & Clayman demonstrate conversation analysis's capacity to generate compelling insights across a wide range of domains relevant to a wide range of scholars—including those interested in the analysis of interpersonal communication, mass media, and rhetoric.

Taken together, these books by Heritage & Clayman and Sidnell demonstrate the immediacy of the research methods and findings of conversation analysis, decidedly conveying CA's relevance and usefulness to the human social science disciplines (including anthropology, communication, linguistics, sociology, and social psychology). It is, however, possible that a reader of these books could get the mistaken impression that CA is focused exclusively on examining actions accomplished through talk—particularly lexical and syntactic resources. Apparently alive to this possibility, Sidnell attempts to prevent this misinterpretation at two key points in his book. In his chapter introducing CA methods, Sidnell states that “perhaps the best way” to obtain data is to “go out and video-record face-to-face interaction,” since video “provides an extremely rich source of data that allows the conversation analyst to examine not just talk but also the use of the body and especially gaze and gesture in the organization of interaction” (22). And in his concluding chapter that walks readers through extended analyses of single fragments of video-recorded conversations, Sidnell includes observations about a speaker's use of self-repair (e.g. “they– they”) to draw a recipient's gaze, a participant's use of facial expressions hand-in-hand with his talk to first convey “serious” and then convey “joke” (262), and a speaker's saying of another participant's name using a “particular prosodic pattern” to do the action of reprimanding (266). Critically, Sidnell devotes the very last paragraph of his book to explicitly formulating CA's commitment to studying any observable conduct in interaction that the participants to the interaction treat as relevant (268; cf. Schegloff Reference Schegloff2005).

Aided by recent advances in video-recording technology, CA researchers now simultaneously examine speech, prosody, gaze, gesture, facial expression, body posture, spatial arrangements, and manipulation of materials in the environment. CA is a discipline dedicated to the continual discovery of orderliness in all practices of human social conduct. By providing crisp, cogent, and compelling introductions to the fundamentals of CA, these books by Sidnell and Heritage & Clayman will undoubtedly not only help teachers create “Aha” experiences for their students (Tannen 1984), but also attract and inspire future generations of conversation analytic scholars.