PsyCen Seminar (Speech and Language Programme)

Kate Hoffman Memorial Lecture

Therapy as an interactional process: Creating change through sequences of talk 

Speaker: Professor Ray Wilkinson, Department of Human Communication Sciences,

University of Sheffield

 https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/hcs/staff/wilkinson

Organiser: Dr Sarah James http://www.leedsbeckett.ac.uk/staff/dr-sarah-james/

Talk can be used as a mechanism for creating change in other people’s knowledge, behavior and emotional wellbeing. It can be used in this way in everyday life between family members or friends, such as when a parent teaches a young child a name for something during a book reading activity, or when someone listening to a friend’s trouble responds in a way that makes that friend feel emotionally understood and validated. In certain professions too, how the professional (1) elicits talk or other behavior from the client, and/or (2) responds to the client, is central to how that professional may be able to change the client. Psychotherapy, for example, is famously known as the ‘talking cure’, but teaching and speech and language therapy are also professions where the professional’s skill in talking interactively with the pupil or client is central to how change may be achieved for that person.

In this presentation I will discuss some key findings from research examining how talk is used in interactional situations with the aim of creating change in people. The main research field I will be drawing on is conversation analysis, a method for examining talk and non-verbal behaviour in real-life social situations. Using video clips of real interactions I will explore in particular the types of sequences of talk that speech and language therapists engage in when doing certain kinds of therapy, and I will discuss some of the rather implicit skills that the therapists can be seen to be using in these interactions. I will also examine how family members or friends of people with communication disorders may attempt to incorporate elements of therapy or teaching into conversations at home, and will show how this combination of conversation and therapy may often create difficulties in the interaction.  

Overall, then, my aims in this presentation are: to discuss one approach to unpacking the ‘black box’ of what therapy is, to examine how therapy is done as an interactional process between therapist and client, and to explore why its use by some people or in some situations may become problematic.  

Ray Wilkinson is Professor of Human Communication in the Department of Human Communication Sciences at the University of Sheffield. Previously he worked at University College London and the University of Manchester, and as a speech and language therapist in the NHS. Much of his research investigates the nature of atypical interaction, in particular social interactions involving people with acquired brain damage such as aphasia and the communicative impairments secondary to dementia or traumatic brain injury.

All welcome

Refreshments will be available from 4.30pm outside the lecture theatre.