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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

At the Faculty of Medicine in Heidelberg, implementation of an interdisciplinary longitudinal curriculum was started in 2001 with the goal of achieving sustained promotion of communicative and clinical competences. The aim of this paper is to describe the development and implementation of Heidelberg's longitudinal communication curriculum. Furthermore, innovative aspects and strategies are discussed. The methodological approaches for development and implementation were Kern's "Six-step Approach" and a SWOT analysis. The process resulted in an innovative communication curriculum that starts with an integrated curriculum for developing clinical and communicative competence in the pre-clinical phase and continues in the clinical phase with medical communication and interactive training. Satisfaction with the communication curriculum and its effectiveness were rated highly by students. Residents who had graduated from Faculty of Medicine in Heidelberg rated the extent to which they had communicative competencies at the time of their graduation at their disposal significantly higher than residents who had graduated from the other 4 medical faculties in Baden-Württemberg. The experiences gained in Heidelberg can be applied by other faculties.