Constituting the Listening Student: Compliments in Ph.D. Supervision

Abstract

There is a growing body of research on best-practice models, both at the conceptual level and in supervision practices such as instructional activities and giving feedback. Substantial efforts have been undertaken to improve Ph.D. supervision effectiveness in reflecting the teacher/student relationship between supervising professors and their candidates. This paper is about how the relationship is lived and established: the real-time interaction between candidate and supervisor. Video recordings of supervisions are analyzed from a conversation-analytic perspective, following a fairly frequent phenomenon, a rather rough and evident form of assessment: compliments paid to the Ph.D. candidate often in front of an audience of other students and supervisors. For the paper presented here, the leading questions are: What kind of interactional work do compliments accomplish in formal supervision settings? How are they enmeshed in the turn-taking practices? How do they help set the supervision scene, and how do they establish the Ph.D. candidate as a learning subject?