Student expressions of troubles in supervision interaction: How do students co-construct the interaction?

In university student supervision, communicating troubles and concerns with supervisors to solicit advice or other kind of support constitutes a fundamental part of a meeting. However, it can prove interactionally problematic, due to face concerns (Brown & Levinson, 1987) or other sources of delicacy (Jian, 2022).

In this study, I will, first, present how members of supervisions achieve expressions of troubles in different sequential environments: supervisory open questions like “how are things” and queries that solicit a course experience like “how did it go” make trouble relevant. However, more frequently, students respond to various supervisory questions and create the relevance of trouble expressions. The second part is how they are realised, such as utterances that centralise the lack of knowledge and negative emotional states. When the topic of trouble relates to the institution, supervisors complete the turns started (and left unfinished) by the student to collaborate on the formulation of trouble. The third part of the study will show how supervisory advice-giving is delivered in response to specific troubles to minimise advice resistance (Jian, in press), one of the most prominent features in advice-giving (Vehviläinen, 2009; West, 2021; 2023).

This study focuses on how students act as an agentic role in supervision interaction, rather than simply a receipt or respondent of activities. It shows that expressing trouble is not just a means of requesting needed support, it is more of a way in which students exercise their autonomy and co-construct the interaction. Despite supervisors initiating most of the activities, they are able to manoeuvre the interaction in the responding turns via expressions of troubles. 

About the speaker: Zhiying Jian did her PhD research at the University of York, studying supervision interaction using the CA approach, and was particularly interested in how various institutional activities were achieved in supervision interactions. Now she continues to research students’ bodily conduct in supervisory advice-giving sequences as a postdoc fellow at Southwest University, College of International Studies.

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