Are coaching training manuals asking the “Right” Questions? - Linguis...

Due to profound socio-cultural and economic shifts, professional helping is flourishing and various, more or less related, formats such as psychotherapy, counselling, or coaching take on social and supporting responsibilities (Miller & Considine 2009; Graf & Spranz-Fogasy 2018a). Analysing discursive communalities and differences, as well as interaction-type specificities of helping professional interactions thus represents a central research theme in applied linguistics (Graf et al. 2014; Scarvaglieri et al. in press). Questioning practices constitute one particular scholarly focus here. This core intervention fulfills two major functions in helping professional interactions: (1) for the help provider, questions have central processual and conversational steering power, and (2) they localize knowledge gaps, allow knowledge transfer, invite self-reflection, and elicit new perspectives in clients (Graf et al. 2020a): Due to their inherent sequentiality, questioning practices, i.e. “question – response – third position”, function as (prototypical) transformative sequences (Peräkylä 2019) and perform “moment-by-moment informational and relational management” (Graf et al. 2020a, p.225).  As such, questions have been established as powerful agents of change in helping interactions (e.g., Muntigl 2013; Graf & Spranz-Fogasy 2018b; Voutilainen et al. 2018).

The relatively recent helping format coaching is a prominent case in point. Coaching literature emphasises both relevance and effectiveness of questions across a growing number of publications by practitioners; at the same time, empirical findings regarding authentic questioning are scarce. In this talk, we presented first insights into coaching-specific questioning practices from our interdisciplinary project “QueSCo” (Graf et al. 2020b) that uses Conversation Analysis and Interactional Linguistics on authentic coaching data. The empirically developed questioning typology illustrates a profound discrepancy between idealized “talk-in-theory” as exemplified in practice literature and coaches’ “talk-in-practice” (Stokoe 2012). The relevance of such applied linguistic research for helping professionals, whose main “tool” is language and communication, was also addressed.