Example of a FTE in the administrative phase of a session

The second of the ‘contrasting context’ examples is taken from a therapy session involving a young man who has had a motor vehicle accident, which has left him with a range of

movement problems, including problems with his shoulder and problems with speech intelligibility. The extract occurs towards the end of a discussion regarding sending out a survey, about the client’s speech intelligibility, to people with whom the client regularly communicates. This is a different context to the social, phatic interaction in the previous section. Here, the talk is related to the overall purpose of their interaction, namely the

client’s speech, but it is ‘administrative’ rather than ‘task-focused’: it relates to a survey that the SLT wants to send to significant people in the client’s life, such as his family and his rehabilitation team. In this environment, the client initiates a FTE about the physiotherapy service he is receiving.

Excerpt 4.18: problems with my shoulder

54 T so I might email them (.)copies then

55 (2.0)

56 C yeah

57 T .Hhh wha-

58 C a:::h um [[ recorder clicks off and on again]]

59 C AH:: we- (.) w’ll (0.2) ‘f- I’m not havin it (xx) he cn

60 only see me once a month until I have it? And so-

61 T oh yeah

62 (0.8)

63  C ah:: it’s not good enough. (.) um (0.2) coz (.)I’ve

64 got problems with m’shoulder.

65 T mmhmm .hh so: have you spoken to James (.) about this?

66 (0.6)

67 C nuh not yet. (.) ah: I’fought- how many family meetings

68 have I mentioned my shoulder’s not working properly.

69 T Mmm Mmm 70 C (nine)

71 (1.2)

72 C I just want it (0.7) t’function (.) properly=

73 T Yeah

74 T =Yeah. se::- an::d (.) you’ve made that decision not to

75 have that operation haven’t you? (.) a- at- (.) until it

76 gets a bit warmer anyway. yeah

77 C m:: eh:::

78 C m:: eh:::

79 T SO have y’spoken to (.) K(h)a::te (.) at TAC?

80 (0.6)

81 C mm

82 T That’s who- you’ve spoken to her about- (.) that you ar:e

83 (0.4) wanting to change physios?

84 C nyeah 85 T o:kay 86 C yeah so::-

87 T >alright< so you don’t need me to(.)follow-up

88 C Ah:: coz (0.3) once a

89 month, I- ‘member I ah- progress is very impot’nt to me and

90 T mm

91  C once a month isn’t (0.7) helpful (.)at all=

92 T mm

93 T =yep= 94 C =so yeah.

95 T that’s fair enough. (0.3).(tch)hh OKA::Y d’you remember

96 about your:: (0.4)long words?

Following the SLT’s confirmation that she can send out the survey (line 54), which the client receipts with an agreement token, the SLT appears to be about to start a new turn (line 57). However, the client also starts a turn, in overlap, and when the SLT halts hers, he proceeds to negatively evaluate the service he is currently receiving from the

physiotherapist, presumably triggered by the prior discussion of the ‘team’. At issue is how often he can be seen by the physiotherapist in the lead-up to a shoulder operation (line 59: “he cn only see me once a month.”). He evaluates this level of service, i.e. monthly visits, as “not good enough” (line 60) and follows this negative evaluation with a reason (line 61: “coz I’ve got problems with m’shoulder”) that builds out of his prior evaluation through the conditional conjunction because.

The SLT receipts this negative evaluation with an acknowledgement token, before launching into a query about whether the client has spoken to the therapist about his concerns, which she prefaces with a so (line 63: “so: have you spoken to James about this?”). As

Bolden (2009) noted, so-prefacing is often done to pursue a course of action that emerges from incipiency or even courses of action that are not specifically implied in the previous talk. Bolden (2009) also noted that “[by] using ‘so’ constitutively, speakers license the launching … of a particular course of action by reference to some interactional agenda. Notably, only recipient-oriented courses of action receive ‘so’ prefaces, which suggests that speakers may use it for particular interpersonal goals (such as, to enact other-attentiveness)” (2009:996). The institutional agenda here is to clarify whether the client has taken his concerns, and his negative evaluations, to the relevant person. The client acknowledges that he has not discussed the matter directly with his physiotherapist, but provides details of how many times (line 70: “nine”) he has mentioned problems with his shoulders at family

meetings, presumably where the physiotherapist was present. The SLT then produces another so-prefaced turn, in line 79 - “so have you spoken to (.) K(h)a::te (.) at TAC?”). Again, she is re-directing the client away from further discussion of his negative evaluation/ complaint, to focus on whom he should take these concerns to, in the second instance his case manager at TAC. In doing so, she is also avoiding a ‘second’ assessment (Pomerantz, 1984), which might involve her in evaluating a fellow professional.

The upshot of these multiple re-directions is that the client ends up downgrading his initial negative evaluation, from “not good enough” (line 60) to “not very helpful – at all” (line 91). This second negative evaluation occurs in turn-final position, following an account of why this issue concerns him so strongly, namely “progress is very

import’nt to me”. The SLT has receipted each element of the client’s account of the problems with his physiotherapy sessions as it unfolds, but her minimal responses and so- prefaced questions constitute a refusal to take up the topic of the client’s physiotherapy. Eventually, she does produce a second assessment (line 95: “that’s fair enough”), just before she launches into the first ‘task’ of the session. She heralds the shift away from the interactional problem of the client’s physiotherapy, to ‘next-positioned matters’ (Beach, 1995:127), through production of a markedly loud okay (line 95: “.(tch)hh OKA::Y”). This

signals that, from her perspective at least, some resolution of the issue of the physiotherapist has been reached, and that some new action or topic is about to be launched. She does this immediately, by asking him to recall his long words (lines 95-96: “d’you remember about your:: (0.4) long words?”).

In this extract, we see a client initiating a negative FTE about a service he is receiving in a relevant environment. In doing the FTE, the client claims his epistemic rights to evaluate, and defends his position with a range of reasons. The lack of uptake, by the SLT, of the evaluations done by the client, is not so much a denial of the client’s epistemic rights to evaluate his physiotherapist; it is more a case of refusing to be drawn into a discussion about a professional colleague. The extended discussion that ensues, once the client has produced a negative FTE, is markedly different from the ways evaluation sequences develop when SLTs produce first-turn evaluations.