“Praising, Criticizing and Preference: Insights from Parent-Teacher Interaction”
Conversation analytic research on “preference organization” empirically demonstrates that human interaction is organized to promote social affiliation at the expense of conflict. In this presentation, I examine a recurrent part of life for most families with school-aged children – the parent-teacher conference – to exemplify discoveries about the social actions of both praising and criticizing, showing how these relate to the preference structures of interaction.
Analyzing video-recorded naturally occurring sequences of student-assessment, I elucidate: how parents praise and criticize students, how parents present themselves as involved, credible caregivers, how parents respond to teachers’ student-praise versus student-criticism, and how teachers praise and criticize students. Although reports of parent-teacher conflict pervade extant literature, previous studies do not explain how conflict emerges in real-time, nor how conflict is often avoided during conferences. This research addresses this gap, demonstrating that parents and teachers have a regular pattern of interacting – constituting a systematic preference organization – through which they tacitly collaborate to maximize affiliation and avoid conflict. This presentation concludes by showing that this preference organization transcends parent-teacher interaction, thus offering insights for other areas of research on human social interaction.