Article published In: Language as Action
Edited by Maurice Nevile and Johanna Rendle-Short
[Australian Review of Applied Linguistics 30:3] 2007
► pp. 31.1–31.17
Who’s the friend in the background?
Interactional strategies in determining authenticity in calls to a national children’s helpline
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.
For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.
Published online: 1 January 2007
https://doi.org/10.2104/aral0731
https://doi.org/10.2104/aral0731
A significant number of calls made to Kids Help Line are seen by the organisation as not requiring counselling support, but are rather young people testing or ‘checking out’ the service. Although the status of many of these ‘testing calls’ is self-evident, determining the authenticity of others presents the helpline counsellors with a dilemma: confronting the caller if they have doubts about the caller’s reason for calling while, at the same time, avoiding a premature challenge when the call is genuine. We examine the various interactional strategies that the counsellors artfully deploy in their determination of the status of a call. Outright challenges are rare, and counsellors typically will employ devices that announce their suspicions indirectly and which, at the same time, seamlessly accomplish the mundane business of responding to a call in ways which treat the callers with respect.
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Cited by (10)
Cited by ten other publications
Nason, Jacob A., Carrie A. Moylan, Abbie Nelson, Michelle L. Munro-Kramer, Tana Fedewa & Rebecca Campbell
Stokoe, Elizabeth & Emma Richardson
Bloch, Steven & Geraldine Leydon
Bateman, Amanda, Susan Danby & Justine Howard
Danby, Susan, Jessica Harris & Carly W. Butler
Stommel, Wyke & Hedwig te Molder
Backett‐Milburn, Kathryn & Sharon Jackson
Cromdal, Jakob, Håkan Landqvist, Daniel Persson-Thunqvist & Karin Osvaldsson
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