Reconstructing Institutions

This book examines the use of language in face-to-face encounters between some university students and their academic counselors. It describes the role language plays in shaping institutional role identities, in accomplishing institutional tasks and activities, and in constituting associated knowledge and affective stances. It documents how the academic counselors and student clients do what they do through grammatical and interactional details. Put more generally, it investigates how certain aspects of institutional life are lived linguistically. Methodologically, this book focuses on specific lexicogrammatical forms, turns, sequences, and narrative episodes which constitute the seemingly routine, ordinary life of academic counseling. It relies on detailed transcripts from audio and video recordings of naturally occurring academic counseling activities, knowledge gained from participant observation, field notes and interview data to advance a tripartite approach to researching institutional discourse.