Personal Care Assistants (PCAs) from non-English-speaking backgrounds working in the Australian aged care sector are expected to have the pragmatic language skills to efficiently negotiate challenging and face-threatening care tasks with older persons (OPs) in time-pressured environments. Using applied conversation analytic (CA) methodology (Lester & O’Reilly, 2018) this paper discusses how CA tools can identify the linguistic and paralinguistic practices PCAs use to recruit the cooperation of OPs and manage the competing demands of expediency and face-saving. Data consists of 8:42 hours of audio recordings of nine PCAs and twelve OPs in four aged care homes.

Findings are discussed in terms of entitlement and contingencies (Craven & Potter, 2010), where entitlement describes the speaker’s perceived right to expect the hearer to comply with their directives, and contingency describes the ability or willingness of the participant to engage in the directed activity.  By examining the design and sequential placement of PCAs’ recruiting actions and OPs’ responses, I describe how PCAs can address the temporal urgency for task completion while orienting toward the recipient’s individual preferences, abilities and (face) needs by using mitigated directives. My results show PCAs tend to downgrade their stance of entitlement when initiating activities by using an interrogative (e.g., Can you x?). Once the OP is engaged in an activity, the PCAs use imperatives (Rossi, 2012) showing high entitlement but mitigate them prosodically and lexically (e.g., Please just walk a little bit backwards?) to orient to the OP’s contingencies.