A closer look into the ‘black box’ of coaching – linguistic research into the local effectiveness of coaching with the help of conversation analysis

ABSTRACT

This paper, located in the paradigm of Linguistic Coaching Process Research, theoretically introduces Conversation Analysis (CA) as a means to explore the ‘black box’ of coaching, i.e., the concrete conversation, and to address pressing research gaps in this field. CA, developed to describe, analyse, and understand practices and patterns of talk-in-interaction, presents a rigorous, systematic, and transparent qualitative method to document and research the sequentially organised conversational structure of coaching as well as the discursive practices of coach and client. The analytical power of CA lies in identifying change-inducing practices and in detailing how these contribute to the local effectiveness of coaching. A case in point are questioning practices, whose transformative power as local agents of change emerges in their sequential set-up as ‘coaches’ question – clients’ response – coaches’ reaction in third position’. In an exemplary analysis using CA, we illustrate the (un-)successful processing of questions in coaching. The two data extracts stem from the ongoing project Questioning Sequences in Coaching. While the paper aims to shed predominantly theoretical light on how to linguistically unpack the ‘black box’ of coaching, it also aims to sensitise practitioners to consider interventions, e.g., questions, as embedded in the locally transpiring, turn-by-turn interaction with their clients.

KEYWORDS:

• Linguistic coaching process research
• conversation analysis
• sequentiality
• local effectiveness
• client change
• questioning practices

Acknowledgements

This research was funded in whole by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) [I 4990-G]. For the purpose of open access, the authors have applied a CC BY public copyright licence to any Author Accepted Manuscript version arising from this submission.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The authors confirm that the data supporting the findings of this study are available within the article [and/or] its supplementary materials. The original German data are available from the corresponding author, [M.F.], upon reasonable request.

Notes

1 CA drawing on linguistic terms and insights has been widely applied to describe and analyse key interactional and change-inducing practices of therapeutic talk, focusing primarily on the therapist's responsive (e.g., formulation, interpretations, extensions) and initiatory (e.g., questions) actions and their sequential organisation and achievements in a particular therapeutic context (see Peräkylä et al., 2008).

2 Written informed consent was obtained from all participants (coaches and clients) for the publication of anonymised data as part of the QueSCo project (https://questions-in-coaching.aau.at/en/). Persons, organisations, places etc. referred to within the coaching, including names of coaches and clients, have been replaced in the transcription.

3 Despite the critical attitude towards closed questions in coaching practice literature, research has shown that answers to such ‘closed questions’ are not necessarily shorter or less detailed (Deplazes, 2016) as clients may account for or explain their answers or use the question as a topic proffer to start a narrative (Schegloff, 2007).

4 A note on transcription conventions: .h / .hh / .hhh = in-breath with increasing length; h. / hh. / hhh. = out-breath with increasing length; (.) = micro-pause; (0.5) = refers to the length of pauses, 0.5 meaning half a second; [...] = indicates overlapping talk; ((...)) = gives information on para-/non-verbal actions; _ = indicates latching talk; CO = coach; CL = client; the numbers, e.g., CO7/CL1, refer to the specific coaching dyad.

5 When working with the "inner team", a client's personality traits (positive or obstructive with regard to the coaching goal) are identified and named, thus allowing concerns to be address on the intra-personal level. Clients should then enter into a dialogue with these parts, either strengthening positive or appeasing negative ones (see Graf 2019).

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded in whole by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) [I 4990-G]. For the purpose of open access, the authors have applied a CC BY public copyright license to any Author Accepted Manuscript arising from this submission.

Notes on contributors

Melanie Fleischhacker

Melanie Fleischhacker, BAKK. BA MA has been working as a writing coach and writing instructor for several years. She hast been a guest editor for the topical collection ‘Interventions in Writing Coaching’ of the journal Coaching | Theorie & Praxis. As an applied linguist, she has been interested in gender and sociolinguistics, as well as professional interaction. As part of her MA thesis in English and American Studies, she investigated (multimodal) representations and discourses of gender and sexuality in EFL textbooks. In ongoing projects, she focuses, among other things, on the identity construction of adolescent female football players and develops alternative (gender-sensitive) teaching materials. As part of the linguistic project team of ‘Questioning Sequences in Coaching’, she is involved in the development of a coaching-specific typology of questioning sequences and will write her dissertation in the context of the project. She is focusing on solution-generating questions, their sequential organisation and prior actions.

Dr. Eva-Maria Graf is a professor of applied linguistics working on, among other things, helping professional interactions with a special focus on coaching. She is a founder of linguistic coaching process research. Amongst numerous other publications in this field, she has authored the first linguistic monograph on coaching (‘The Pragmatics of Executive Coaching’). In addition to the overall project management of the ‘DACH’ research project ‘Question Sequences in Coaching’, she leads the Austrian team based in Klagenfurt. She has already been granted – also by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) – a three-year ‘Elise-Richter Habilitation’ Fellowship. Eva-Maria Graf has been working as a coach for many years focusing on coaching in academia. She is also a senior coach and trainer. Together with Hansjörg Künzli (as well as Elke Berninger-Schäfer and Robert Wegener), she is editor-in-chief of the journal Coaching | Theory & Practice.