Anthony J. Liddicoat's Introduction to conversation analysis provides a well-organized, thorough introduction to the methodologies and theoretical focus of conversation analysis (CA), a discipline seeking “to understand [the] shared procedures which participants in an interaction use to produce and recognize meaningful action” (p. 7).

The book's ten chapters take the reader on a tour of CA's practices and findings, with numerous examples drawn from major works in the discipline. Chap. 1 provides a historical introduction to CA, explaining its origins in the work of Harold Garfinkel and Erving Goffman and moving through its development in the foundational lectures of Harvey Sacks and the work of scholars such as Emmanuel Schegloff and Gail Jefferson. Chap. 2 is an overview of transcription practices in CA. Its detailed account is useful for scholars from a wide range of analytic approaches, not just those interested in CA. In chap. 3, the author begins the exploration of conversation by presenting the turn-taking model developed by Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson in their 1974 Language paper, “A simplest systematics for the organization of turn-taking for conversation.” Chap. 4 expands on this model by discussing gaps and overlaps in conversation and illustrating how these features of talk fit into the turn-taking model. Chap. 5 explains how turns are related by explicating sequence organization in terms of adjacency pairs, and chap. 6 shows how adjacency pairs are expanded into larger sequences through a variety of speaker strategies. In chap. 7, the text turns to repairs in conversation and examines how repair can illustrate “the nature of conversation as a self-organizing and self-righting system based on rules which operate and are managed locally by participants” (211). Chap. 8, “Opening conversation,” provides a thorough review of Schegloff's work on telephone conversation openings (from Schegloff's 1979 chapter “Identification and recognition in telephone conversation openings,” in Everyday language: Studies in ethnomethodology, ed. by George Psathas; New York: Irvington) and, in so doing, focuses almost entirely on telephone conversation. Chap. 9, on conversation closing, follows this data focus and examines conversation closing strategies mostly (though less explicitly than chap. 8) in telephone conversation. While this focus on telephone interaction may appear narrow, the preponderance of CA work on openings and closings has focused on telephone recordings and, in this introductory text, Liddicoat does not attempt to expand the territory of inquiry. Finally, chap. 10 returns to sequence expansion and discusses how the telling of stories fits within the CA framework.

This text provides readers with a clearly articulated synopsis of the major works in CA. While the text does not extend the field, the comprehensive introduction will be useful to students and others who are less familiar with CA. As a final note, Liddicoat's text focuses solely on English conversation. While this follows a longstanding trend within the CA literature, it may be disappointing to some readers.