Ethnomethodological, conversation analytic (CA) research has highlighted the nature of instructions as inherently underspecified plans (Lindwall et al., 2015); yet students orient to instructions as repositories of what it means to accomplish the target task in the “right” way. This paper illustrates such orientation by exploring how a laminated card with printed task instructions is used as a material, pedagogical artifact. The data consist of 6 video-recorded task-based interactions between pairs of upper-secondary school students in Sweden who engaged in an open-ended problem-based task in the English-as-a-foreign-language classroom. All pairs read the instructions at the beginning of their task-based interaction and interpreted the task as entailing the co-construction of narratives. However, they also oriented to the task instructions during their engagement with the task by talking the instructions into relevance while pointing or looking at the instructions card. These instances have been collected and examined with a multimodal CA lens. Our analysis shows that the students oriented to the instructions card to: (a) check their interpretation of the task to determine what to do next; (b) get back on task after extended side sequences; (c) verify their understanding of the scenario described in the instructions; and (d) check their emergent narratives against such scenario. These findings illustrate the students’ emic concern for fostering task progressivity and for doing the task correctly as they oriented to the instructions card as a publicly accessible locus of epistemic authority which embodied a tangible focus of joint attention.

References

Lindwall, O., Lymer, G. and Greiffenhagen, C. (2015). The Sequential Analysis of Instruction. In N. Markee (Ed.), The Handbook of Classroom Discourse and Interaction (pp.142-157). John Wiley and Sons.