The power of questioning practices in c...

This contributiondiscusses the transformational power of questioning practices in the helpingprofession ‘coaching’ and addresses the following two aspects: How doquestioning practices contribute to clients’ change, i.e., learning anddevelopment, as the underlying goal of coaching? And how can such power – inthe sense of questioning practices’ local and global effectiveness – best bedocumented and analyzed? While we detail the linguistic means to do so usingConversation Analysis, we also sketch the limitations of such a bottom-up,qualitative approach to assess the overall power of questioning practices andpresent an interdisciplinary solution in the form of the research project QueSCo (Questioning Sequences in Coaching) (I 4990 G). This project, which webriefly introduce and whose first findings we illustrate, combinesdescriptive-phenomenological linguistics, addressing the local effectiveness,with theory-guided psychology, addressing the global effectiveness ofquestioning practices.