Abstract
Office hour is a common practice in some university settings. In The Interactional Organization of Academic Talk, one of the most recent analyses, and probably first book-length analysis, of office hours, Limberg presents ethnographic and detailed analysis of academic office hours in English departments in two German universities. As Limberg puts it in the introduction, the goal of the volume is ‘to analyze different phases of an office hour talk in order to find out how teachers and students interactionally organize talk in this setting and how they modify conversational turn-taking mechanisms to display their orientation to office hours as a form of instructional talk’ (p. 14).
After the brief introduction presented in the first chapter, in Chapter 2 Limberg defines and contextualizes office hours as a situated event in academic settings by providing such information as historical development of office hours, classification of office hour types (e.g. administrative, course- and exam-related, and counseling business) as well as a review of literature in two related areas: research on office hours and literature on academic counseling. Drawing upon studies focusing on both Anglo-American and German university contexts, Limberg reports findings from previous research on academic consultations and office hour talk. Following this literature review, a methodological framework and research design is detailed in Chapter 3. Adopting a conversation analysis framework, Limberg analyzed the corpus which was compiled for the purpose of this research. The corpus consisted of video-recordings from office hours held by six faculty members in English departments from two public universities in Germany. The office hour sessions were transcribed using a program called Transana. The average total length of office hour interactions recorded was six hours and 20 minutes, but Limberg does not provide a total word count of the transcribed corpus in this section.
The results are presented in the following chapters and are grouped according to the different phases of office hours. Detailed analysis of office hour openings is presented in Chapter 4. The office hour openings include, but are not limited to, preliminaries to the opening, opening a consultation and identity construction. Chapter 5 provides a detailed overview of presenting the agenda in office hours. Some of the main phases in this section of academic office hours include mechanisms for introducing the academic concern, request types and requests for verbal action. In Chapters 6 and 7, Limberg presents the two phases of the body of office hour talk, ‘The body of the consultation’ and ‘Advice-giving in office hours’. The final analysis chapter, Chapter 8, looks at the details of the closing phase of office hours.
The main findings of the book are summarized in the final chapter (Chapter 9). While there seem to be certain activities and tasks that can help both teachers and students to complete the agenda for office hours (e.g. discussing stay abroad, credit points, making arrangements or signing forms), such formal procedure is not necessarily followed in certain cases in office hours (e.g. discussing a term paper).
Although office hours can be a very common practice in some university settings, they still are relatively under-explored compared to other domains of instructional talk (e.g. classroom talk). By investigating important phases in office hours, such as how participants open office hour talk, how they establish an agenda, how they manage advice-giving and how they close the consultation, the volume provides critical insights into this common practice. By combining an ethnographic account of office hours with a more detailed analysis of the interactions, Limberg presents detailed analysis of academic office hour talk in a way that has not been presented before. For researchers who are interested in conducting similar research studies, the book presents very reader-friendly tables throughout, and a sample transcript in the appendix.
However, the volume does have some limitations. While a very brief explanation of conversation analysis is provided in Chapter 3, a good background in conversation analysis would help readers better understand the technical conventions and data-driven research discussed by the author. In addition, that the research only includes recordings from English departments and only from German universities means that it remains an empirical question whether office hours are structured in the same ways in English departments in other countries and in non-English departments worldwide. For this reason, it is important for future research to investigate this practice by focusing on scholars working in different disciplines and also in different parts of the world. Finally, at the time I drafted this review, there was no paperback version that is more affordable than the hardbound version. This might be a drawback for many readers who might be interested in the content of the volume.
In spite of its limitations, the volume should be particularly useful for faculty members as well as scholars from different disciplines who work in the areas of institutional talk and talk-in-interaction. In addition, it should serve as essential reading for graduate level courses on discourse analysis of instructional talk. Junior faculty members who do not have much experience of holding office hours would also benefit from this first book-length treatment of office hours. Given the fact that no other large-scale corpus of office hours has been transcribed and analyzed based on the conversation analysis framework in the way that Limberg did, Limberg’s groundbreaking work provides a much-needed model in the detailed exploration of spoken corpora of academic office hours.