Expressing Trouble in Conversation: An Interactional Challenge and an Achievement in Student Supervision

This thesis describes an understudied yet ubiquitous phenomenon in student supervision interaction: students’ expression of problems or concerns (“trouble” for short) in here-and-now supervision meetings. It can be a brief assessment like “first term was not great” or more complex descriptions of a problematic situation. The thesis investigates how students get to talk about the trouble and how supervisors respond to them. The study adopts conversation analysis to examine 94 cases of trouble reports and their responses from 12 hours of recorded real-time supervision meetings.

It is found, across all kinds of supervision meetings, that students adopt two approaches to express trouble: direct trouble reports or “trouble projections” (utterances that project a trouble report). When students produce a trouble report without being solicited by supervisors, they establish the relevance of an incipient trouble report via embodied (e.g., face-touching, face tilting upwards, eye closing, and gaze aversion) and linguistic resources. When students have created the environment via these moves by students, trouble reports are produced as the claims of, e.g., negative emotions, difficulties and lack of knowledge. The thesis shows that trouble reports can be co-constructed by students and supervisors together to handle delicate matters. Students can start, but the supervisors collaboratively complete or produce the trouble reports in overlap when the trouble projectably involves critical elements toward the supervisor or the institution. Lastly, it is revealed that supervisors orient to advice-giving in response to trouble reports. Before the arrival of advice, supervisors frequently use other-initiated repair or follow-up questions to get to understand the trouble and to foreground the advice. Moreover, supervisors may respond with a comparable experience of their own to convey an empathetic stance. Alternatively, supervisors may offer “unsupervisable responses” in which they normalise the trouble as something that inevitably happens and thus is not advice relevant. Drawing on these findings, I argue that student trouble reports in supervision meetings are the product of emerging interaction, highly contingent on the elements of the sequential environment, the supervisor’s prior turns, and preference organisation.

The thesis for the first time offers a systematic examination of student expression of trouble in supervision interaction. It reveals the embodied, linguistic, and sequential resources required for trouble reports. It also adds to the literature on the organisation of supervisory advice-giving.