Conversation Analysis Of Job Interviews And Exploration On Response Strategies—A Case Study

The interview is the key phase in job hunting and the interview performance decides whether the applicant can succeed or not to a large extent.In pursuit of their respective goals,the interviewer and the interviewee have to communicate effectively with each other during the interview.Conversation is the basic form of communication and taking some conversational strategies may help interviewees achieve their goals more successfully.In total,30 pieces of one-to-one interviews in a large Singapore company are transcribed.This study aims to analyze the conversation structure in job interviews from the perspective of conversation analysis.Meanwhile,the author also attempts to discuss the response strategies that interviewees have employed and hopes to provide some useful suggestions for interviewees.Sacks,Schegloff and Jefferson are representative characters in the field of conversation analysis.They notice that speakers take turns in the communication and put forward the basic content and theoretical framework of turn-taking.Based on their conversation structure theory,this study analyzes the turn-taking,adjacency pair,the opening and closing system in job interview conversations.The author summarizes the feature of interview conversation with some related examples.Then based on Professor Liu Senlin's summary of pragmatics strategies about turn-taking,the author explores the strategy that interviewees have taken in interviews.The results show that the interviewer manages the interview.The basic form in turn-taking process is that interviewer asks questions and interviewee answers.Also,the adjacency pairs mainly represents “question-reply” format.The overall structure of an interview conversation includes a beginning,main body and closing section.The beginning of a conversation usually takes a form of “summons-answer sequence”.It mainly consists of a small talk and interviewees' self-introduction.As for the closing part,it usually contains topic bounding sequence and closing sequence.The author also finds that interviewees use response strategies to control the turn or the adjacency pair subconsciously.In terms of turn-taking strategies,the strategy of keeping the turn is used most by interviewees to answer the question specifically.And strategies to claim the turn and transfer the turn are occasionally adopted.As for strategies to control the adjacency pair,interviewees employ some strategies to present the dispreferred second part.They also use variant forms of adjacency pair like pre-sequence and side sequence to attain their communicative goals.In the opening and closing parts,most interviewees behave politely in order to leave a good impression to the interview.This research can not only help job seekers further understand the rules and strategies about turn taking in job interview conversations,but also apply these strategies into practice so as to get a better result in interviews.