Chapter 9 illustrates how conventional grammatic categories such as a specific tense or auxiliary verb may be linked with interactional behaviour as it is described in this grammar. The chapter shows how formal grammatical items may be practised in interactional sequences in the classroom.

In this chapter we introduce the topic and aims of the book and define key terms such as anxiety, corpus linguistics and discourse. We provide the motivation for writing the book and outline other studies which have examined language in healthcare contexts, in particular focusing on studies which have looked at healthcare forums and/or mental health issues, as well as studies which have used corpus linguistics techniques for corpus-assisted discourse analysis. We then outline the research questions which drive the analysis in the book. We introduce the corpus that we worked with and discuss ethical issues in dealing with online data, as well as issues relating to data processing. We also provide a description of the tools and techniques that we used to carry out our analysis. We then reflect on our own position in relationship to the topic we are researching. Finally, we provide an outline of the remaining chapters of the book.

Here, we consider the interactive and online affordances of the forum by looking at the ways that posters respond to each other’s posts. What kind of language use characterises those which receive numerous responses vs those which receive none at all? We also ask, how do posters reach consensus and, considering the range of posts of people from different backgrounds, how is disagreement around understandings of anxiety negotiated? We code a sample of the forum posts using Egbert et al.’s (2021) coding scheme for functional discourse units. This is based on nine codes which indicate the particular purpose of a stretch of interactive text; for example, joking around, engaging in conflict or giving advice. Additionally, we look at uses of computer-mediated communication, including acronyms such as lol and emojis which are often used for affiliative purposes and disambiguation. This chapter uses corpus-based frequency approaches to identify longer stretches of interaction which are then examined qualitatively.

In Chapters 4 and 5, we focus on the smallest component of the interactional grammar: expressions. Chapter 4 presents a way of analysing and describing expressions which are meant to lubricate the flow of interaction. The acquisition of such expressions is very important for learners, who need to be made aware of their use. We define this category of expressions as Gambits. While it is a popular assumption that Gambits – often called ‘discourse markers’ in the literature – are devoid of meaning, we shall show that this is far from being the case.

Chapter 2 discusses the dilemma posed by the requirement that ‘communicative’ English be taught in a foreign language classroom – which is naturally different from real life – and suggest different ways out of this dilemma as general possibilities. The chapter therefore provides a practical applied linguistic background for the more theoretically motivated chapters that follow. We argue that many of the teaching dilemmas triggered by the setting of the foreign language classroom relate to the fact that the classroom provides its own ritual space, in which the conventions and practices and related rights and obligations holding for daily life are turned upside down.Thus, a key dilemma invariably facing the foreign language teacher is how to teach real-life language use in a non-real-life setting.

Our analysis begins with a focus on the word anxiety, using the corpus analysis tool Sketch Engine to provide a detailed ‘Word Sketch’ of its use in the forum; for example, looking at its occurrence in different grammatical patterns. This analysis identified four clines in terms of how anxiety is discursively constructed: 1) catastrophisation vs minimisation (e.g., some patients refer to having terrible anxiety while others downplay their condition using phrases such as it’s just anxiety); 2) medicalisation vs non-medicalisation (e.g., use of medical terminology such as anxiety disorder vs colloquial expressions such as anxiety crap); 3) personalisation vs impersonalisation (e.g., some posters represent their anxiety as a conscious being with its own wants and grammatical agency, such as anxiety is playing mind games with them, while others represent anxiety as an abstract concept, such as as an illness); and 4) internalisation vs externalisation (e.g., some people claim their anxiety is part of themselves – my anxiety – while others refer to it as something separate – the anxiety monster).

Chapter 6 presents a key component of this interactional grammar: illocutionary acts. In this grammar, we use the expressions ‘illocutionary act’ and ‘speech act’ interchangeably. The chapter provides a systematic and replicable interactional typology of illocutionary acts. This typology is particularly suitable for analysing discourse and understanding the role of illocutionary acts in any types of data and any language.

In this chapter we compare posts from the two countries which most posters identified as residing in. Within the forum, 38.84% of posts were made by people from the UK, 33.94% were made by those from the USA, 17.41% were made by people who did not specify a country and 9.81% consisted of all other countries. While the main language in the UK and USA is English, an analysis of keyword differences indicates numerous differences which point not only to spelling (favorite) and lexical choices (vacation) but also to ways that anxiety is understood. In addition, we consider the extent to which posters are influenced by external cultures; for example, is there evidence that British posters are adopting language and discourses used by American posters, or vice versa? As with the previous chapter, the analysis concludes by considering the role of culture on understandings of anxiety.

Chapter 3 presents a comprehensive way of analysing and describing interaction, serving as a model for the descriptions offered in the rest of the book. In the descriptive system explicated in this chapter, we approach interaction through units of various size, including expressions, illocutionary acts and Types of Talk representing discourse. The system presented in this chapter was not derived in a top-down manner, but ratheremerged as an outcome of extensive empirical research.

The concluding chapter of this monograph summarises the main findings from the preceding chapters and brings those findings together to establish overall patterns and trends in online discourses of anxiety. Concordant with our Critical Discourse Studies approach, these representations are then related to the contexts in which they are situated as well as their implications for understanding mental health in wider society. The chapter also critically reflects on the approach we took, the questions that emerged as a result of engaging with the corpus of forum posts and potential extensions to our study.