In university student
supervision, communicating troubles and concerns with supervisors to solicit
advice or other kind of support constitutes a fundamental part of a meeting.
However, it can prove interactionally problematic, due to face concerns (Brown
& Levinson, 1987) or other sources of delicacy (Jian, 2022).
In this study, I will, first, present how members of supervisions achieve expressions of
troubles in different sequential environments: supervisory open questions like
“how are things” and queries that solicit a course experience like “how did it
go” make trouble relevant. However, more frequently, students respond to
various supervisory questions and create the relevance of trouble expressions. The
second part is how they are realised, such as utterances that centralise the
lack of knowledge and negative emotional states. When the topic of trouble relates
to the institution, supervisors complete the turns started (and left
unfinished) by the student to collaborate on the formulation of trouble. The
third part of the study will show how supervisory advice-giving is delivered in
response to specific troubles to minimise advice resistance (Jian, in
press), one of the most prominent features in advice-giving (Vehviläinen, 2009;
West, 2021; 2023).
This study focuses on how students act as an agentic role in supervision interaction,
rather than simply a receipt or respondent of activities. It shows that
expressing trouble is not just a means of requesting needed support, it is more
of a way in which students exercise their autonomy and co-construct the
interaction. Despite supervisors initiating most of the activities, they are
able to maneuver the interaction in the responding turns via expressions of
troubles.