Based on German data from history-taking in doctor-patient interaction, the paper shows that the three basic syntactic types of questions (questions fronted by a question-word (w-questions), verb-first

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Discourses o f helping professions unites contributions on prominent helping set tings and interaction types and offers an overview of similarities and differences as regards interactive affordances and communicative tasks and the discursive prac tices applied for their solution within and across the various helping professions. Whereas traditional helping professions such as medical and psychotherapeutic communication are by now well-established objects of research in discourse and conversation analysis (see e.g. Byrne and Long 1976; fferitage and Maynard 2006; Spranz-Fogasy 2010; Sator and Spranz-Fogasy 2011 for doctor-patient interac tion and Labov and Fanshel 1977; Peräkylä et al. (eds.) 2008; Pawelcyzk 2011 for psychotherapy), so-called developmental formats like supervision or executive coaching have only lately attracted linguistic attention (see Aksu in prep.; Graf et al. 2010; Graf 2012; Gräfin prep.). Yet, research on both traditional and less tra ditional formats revolves around similar questions such as: What represents their endemic communicative core tasks and what is interactants' discursive repertoire to solve these? A closer look at the various professional practices thereby evinces a highly differentiated and complex picture of these helping professional formats with numerous sub-types, transitions and hybrid formats.A helping profession is defined as a professional interaction between a help ing expert and a client, initiated to nurture the growth of, or address the problems of a persons physical, psychological, intellectual or emotional constitution, in cluding medicine, nursing, psychotherapy, psychological counseling, social work, education or coaching. To speak with Miller and Considine (2009:405), helping professions deal with "the provision of hum an and social services'' . The helping profession is constituted in and through the particular verbal and non-verbal in teraction that transpires between the participants. Interaction types, in turn, are (tentatively) defined here as bounded (parts of) conversations with an inherent structuring of opening, core interaction and closing section, in which participants solve complex communicative tasks. The specific interaction the participants POSTPRINT

Questions symbolize an important, if not the most important intervention tool in coaching according to the coaching literature and training manuals. Despite such claimed omnipresence and omnirelevance in coaching theory, there are hardly any empirical findings to back up such claims. Neither in quantitatively operating psychological effectiveness-research nor in qualitatively operating linguistic or psychological process-research on coaching questions have received much empirical attention. It is vital to close this research gap via a cooperation between coaching practice and relevant disciplines and methods. In a first preliminary step, this programmatic paper establishes "questions in coaching" as a proper research object in conversation analysis. Questions are discussed in their formal and functional dimensions as well as an institution-specific social practice. Conversation-analytic findings from surrounding professional formats such as psychotherapy or doctor-patient interaction serve as points of orientation. The linguistic and CA discussion focusses on the impact of question-sequences on change and thus on the efficiency of coaching. The article ends with a critical evaluation of a conversation analytic approach to question sequences in coaching and sketches out the added value (for the coaching practice) of an interprofessional and interdisciplinary research that draws on coaching theory as well as linguistic and psychological methods and theories.