This article investigates how members of the public are guided or ‘signposted’ out of organisations that they have contacted to third-party agencies. Using conversation analysis, we examine the interactional practices professionals use to signpost callers to external organisations when their concerns do not fit within the remit of the present service. Drawing on a corpus of over 500 calls and meetings at five different institutions in the UK (including mediation services, local council organisations, a housing charity and a politician’s constituency office), we show how the practice of signposting is intertwined with the activities of rejecting the caller’s case for receiving service, while simultaneously offering a service – namely, a redirection to an ostensibly more appropriate service provider. We show how community problems can be treated as warranting assistance along a range of offer-ability (e.g. ‘I will do X for you’, ‘That’s the kind of thing we could do’, ‘Do you want their number?’), and how troubles-tellings without a specific request can be retroactively formulated into an actionable item for an institution. Our findings demonstrate practices for negotiating institutionality itself, through delimiting service remit, and through participants’ orientations to the relevance of service provision as an institutional goal.

This paper asks whether there are any pseudo-cleft structures in Estonian. Grammars do not account for them, but we found fitting examples from both spoken and written usage, in particular from public speeches. Functionally, they are similar to what has been described in other languages: what-initial constructions project longer explanations and launch new topics, thereby structuring discourse and (re-)engaging participants. Since studies on pseudo-clefts in spoken interaction have revealed a high degree of structural variability even in languages that make prolific use of them, such as French and Hebrew, we suggest that they are also grammaticized in Estonian.

The purpose of this empirically informed, but mainly conceptual paper, is to understand what we might mean by the word ‘structure’ in cross-media design. The paper draws upon a workplace study in print and online news production at a Swedish local news publisher, where we observed the work of reporters, page planners and web editors. Structure in the context of cross-media design and production is initially defined as the pattern of arrangement of elements in the media. We identified three kinds of structure in our observations of the journalists’ work: category, time, and space. Category: how knowledge is ordered is foundational and explains how functions and content relate to each other. Time: the temporal structure is how functions and content are ordered in time (what comes before and after). Space: The spatial structure is the layout of functions and content in 2-dimensional or 3-dimensional space. These three kinds of structure have corresponding design representations in interaction design: concept maps, flow charts, and wireframes.

Despite attempts by the scientific community to persuade us that the planet is in the midst of an ecoogical crisis, there exists a significant degree of resistance to the necessary changes that might allow us to address the environmental challenges that we face. Much of this resistance is compounded by our exposure to discourses, both societal and corporate, which actively encourage environmentally damaging behaviour. There has therefore never been a greater need for an education system that develops the conept of critical language awareness regarding our relationship with the non-human natural world. There is a need for future second language teachers to be equipped with teh skills of critical language analysis in order to empower their learners to resist environmentally destructive discourses. This paper both details the first iteration of an education design research project carried out as a form of practitioner research for the development and implementation of pro-environmental critical language awareness within an English teacher degree programme, and advances an approach for the establishment of ecoinguistic language awareness within language teacher education.

Despite attempts by the scientific community to persuade us that the planet is in the midst of an ecological crisis, there exists a significant degree of resistance to the necessary changes that might allow us to address the environmental challenges that we face. Much of this resistance is compounded by our exposure to discourses, both societal and corporate, which actively encourage environmentally damaging behaviour. There has therefore never been a greater need for an education system that develops the concept of critital language awareness regarding our relationship with the non-human natural world. There is a need for future second language teachers to be equipped with the skills of critical language analysis in order to empower their learners to resist environmentally destructive discourses. This paper both details the first iteration of an education design research project carried out as a form of practitioner research for the development and implementation of pro-environmental critical language awareness within an English teacher degree programme, and advances an approach for the establishment of ecolinguistic languge awarness within language teacher education.

This chapter presents the collaborative research project ‘From monologues to dialogues’. The project included several small-scale classroom studies conducted by a research team of teachers and researchers. The collaboration encompassed all stages of the project (design, implementation and analysis), which combined theory and practice to produce findings relevant for the teaching profession. The project was grounded in a practice-based problem: How do we get the pupils to talk to each other in the target language in the classroom? The research team hypothesized that the issue might lie with oral classroom activities and that the problem could be solved by designing meaningful tasks aimed at promoting co-constructed interaction. Our findings related to task design indicate that problem-based tasks with brief instructions and artefacts can elicit ‘good interaction’, which–with the analytical affordances of conversation analysis–we empirically defined as co-constructed interaction where pupils attend to each other’s turns-at-talk and formulate fitting turns that foster the progressivity of the activity. Challenges in our collaboration included negotiating different expectations and perspectives; we argue, however, that the benefits outweigh the challenges. Most importantly, by working side by side in the research process our research team has produced findings that are both actionable and sustainable for the teaching profession.

I alla slags aktiviteter uppvisar deltagare i sitt manifesta beteende en ständig känslighet för vad övriga deltagare gör, verbalt såväl som genom övriga kroppsliga utryck. Mobilitet, eller deltagares förflyttning i förhållande till omgivningen, har visat sig vara en relevant aspekt av mänsklig interaktion. Detaljerade analyser har visat hur mobilitet och andra interaktiva resurser formar varandra ömsesidigt och att det är den multimodala och situerade helheten som deltagare baserar sitt meningsskapande på.

När vi kommunicerar och deltar i olika aktiviteter tolkar vi inte bara det som sägs, utan vi läser också av blickriktningar, kropps­position och mycket annat som finns närvarande i situationen. Ömsesidig förståelse åstadkoms alltså i flera dimensioner, eller modaliteter. Denna bok är den första på svenska som introducerar det mångfacetterade forskningsområde som kallas multimodal interaktionsanalys. Detta fält intresserar sig för hur människor tillsammans utför handlingar med hjälp av språkliga, kroppsliga och materiella resurser. Bokens första del presenterar perspektivets teoretiska grunder och förklarar hur en interaktionsanalytisk studie kan genomföras ”från ax till limpa”. Bokens andra del introducerar ett antal centrala kommunikativa resurser, från röst och gester till objekt och teknologier. I den tredje och mest omfångsrika delen ges en lång rad exempel på hur man genom multimodal interaktionsanalys kan nå nya insikter inom olika forskningsområden. Multimodal interaktionsanalys vänder sig till studenter och forskare som vill förstå hur det egentligen går till när människor agerar och skapar mening tillsammans.

Multimodal interaktionsanalys syftar till att förstå människors agerande genom att studera naturligt förekommande aktiviteter där deltagarna gör något tillsammans. Multimodal betyder att man i sin kommunikation använder sig av flera modaliteter, såsom språket, ansiktet, händerna och övriga kroppen; interaktion syftar på samspel, det som händer när människor deltar i en gemensam aktivitet och med analys avses här att göra beskrivningar av hur, i detalj, deltagare i aktiviteter åstadkommer det de gör. I detta första kapitel redogör vi för fältets grunder.

Inom multimodal interaktionsanalys utgörs data av videoinspelningar. Utan en videoinspelning kan man inte utföra multimodal interaktionsanalys i enlighet med vad som avses i denna bok. Videoanalysen inbegriper generellt såväl identifiering av relevanta sekvenser i förhållande till ett visst forskningsintresse som transkription av vad som dokumenterats i videofilmen och framskrivande av en empiriskt grundad argumentation. Det är denna analysprocess, ”från ax till limpa”, som utgör ämnet för detta kapitel. Olika undersökningar kan naturligtvis se olika ut. Vår framställning kan därför ses som ett vägledande förslag på arbetsgång.

Using publicly uploaded videos of the Waymo and Tesla FSD self-driving cars, this paper documents how self-driving vehicles still struggle with some basics of road interaction. To drive safely self-driving cars need to interact in traffic with other road users. Yet traffic is a complex, long established social domain. We focus on one core element of road interaction: when road users yield for each other. Yielding - slowing down for others in traffic - involves communication between different road users to decide who will go and who will yield. Videos of the Waymo and Tesla FSD self-driving cars show how these systems fail to both yield for others, as well as failing to go when yielded to. In discussion, we explore how these problems illustrate both the complexity of designing for road interaction, but also how the space of physical machine/human social interactions more broadly can be designed for.

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in two different teaching hospitals that deployed the da Vinci surgical robot, this paper traces how the introduction of robotics reconfigures the sensory environment of surgery and how surgeons and their teams recalibrate their work in response. We explore the entangled and mutually supportive nature of sensing within and between individual actors and the broader world of people and things (with emphasis on vision and touch) and illustrate how such inter-sensory dependencies are challenged and sometimes extended under the conditions of robotic surgery. We illustrate how sensory (re)articulations and compensations allow the surgeon and surgical teams to adapt to a more-than-human sensorium and conclude by advocating new forms of sensory-aware design capable of enhancing and supporting embodied sensory conditions both individually and across teams.

Although psychological states have been widely examined as social objects indiscursive psychology (DP), little is known about the interactional organisationof perception. This chapter is about joint sensorial activities in driver training.Specifically, we explore how neophyte drivers are being trained in identifyingand analysing kinetic information—including the car’s vibration, movementand direction—when performing routine car control operations. Throughmultimodal conversation analysis of four video-recorded examples, wedemonstrate how driving instructors gesturally enact sensations to invite theirstudents to “feel” the car’s kinetic status, how they jointly produce coordinatedsensory activities and how the sensoriality of the event is intersubjectivelyestablished through “feel enquiries”. Treating sensory perception asembedded—and embodied—in practical social activity, highlights the benefitsof including corporeality in future DP enquiry.

In this paper, I question how a researcher might fulfil the unique adequacy requirement when studying novices in a setting in which the researcher is already a member. Since novices by definition lack the expected competencies in a setting, having unique adequacy for novice methods may appear oxymoronic. However, this paper suggests that unique adequacy requires enacting specific ways of seeing as part of accomplishing local order; once one is competent, it becomes difficult to enact incompetent action in a locally adequate way, suggesting one can actually lose unique adequacy. Furthermore, as any given situated involves a multifaceted set of competencies, exactly which or whose competencies are relevant is both an analysts and members issue to solve. With reference to examples, I discuss how analysts and members delimit the provinces of meaning in the process of finding what is locally adequate.

This paper contributes an analysis of practices for managing a preallocated turn-taking system in board games, expanding existing studies of preallocation beyond question-answer sequences. Although board games have existed for thousands of years across human cultures, and despite being a widely used method of data elicitation in many fields of research, there are few studies of how adults accomplish play. Using conversation analysis, this paper demonstrates how participants organize transition between board-game turns, finding that participants treat the game turns as analogous to the organization of pre- and post-possible completion. However, the preallocated nature of game turns results in alternate sense making concerning delays and overlap, especially where such occurrences threaten the achievement of the activity. Data are in English.

Conversation analysis strives to use naturalistic data in its research, but the definition of “natural” is often unclear (Speer, 2002) and can be at odds with both ethnomethodological understandings of data (Lynch, 2002) and practices of data collection (e.g., Stevanovic et al., 2017; Goodwin, 2018). In this paper, I reconsider the concept of naturalness with respect to a particular data collection practice: When the researcher themselves is a participant in the recorded data. I argue that analysis may be guided by how the researcher-participant is treated by others in the data, and that researchers may be considered as any other participant if treated as making activity-adequate (rather than research-adequate) contributions. Furthermore, researcher presence can demonstrate unique adequacy and provides opportunities to experiment with situated practices that otherwise are atypical or hard to access. This version of “natural” respecifies naturalness as a members’ concern in recorded interaction.

This article examines nonlexical vocalizations in board game interactions, focusing on "moans." Moans are prolonged, voiced, response cries. Moans react to game events where the player has suffered in some way. Despite the complaint-relevant nature of moans, game actions are never withdrawn in response to a moan, Moans are treated as laughable, while lexical complaints invoke arguments and apologies. This article suggests that moans are a manifestation of managing Batesons play paradox in that they denote suffering but also willingness to continue play and a validation of the prior event. Moans are suggested to be a contextualization cue for "this is play." Given the relative unconventionality of the form of moans, these tokens are suggested as evidence that lack of conventionalization may be a members resource rather than a problem. The article analyzes a corpus of 34 hours of video-recorded board game play (169 tokens) in English (Canadian, American, and British).

Sequence organization was the pioneering insight that gave rise to conversation analysis (CA) and it remains the primary assumption in CA studies about how discourse is structured and how speakers manage their talk. In order to study discourse in an empirically grounded way, we must demonstrate how our analysis reflects the participants’ understanding of their own talk. CA does this through the concept of “response relevance.” When a speaker talks, they make relevant some “next” response, so speakers are always responding to some prior turn and simultaneously making relevant a next turn. In this way, participants demonstrate their understandings of prior talk while responding. These demonstrations form the basis of the “next turn proof procedure,” which is how CA uses participants’ responses as demonstrations of participants’ own analyses of prior talk. In this chapter, I explain how CA’s focus on sequence and “next” turns allows for an empirical understanding of how discourse is organized. I first outline the principles of sequence organization, starting with the concept of response relevance and adjacency pairs, before explaining pre-, insert and post-expansion components. Next, I review sequence research from the past four decades, highlighting the focus on specific sequences such as pre-sequences, storytelling and the effect of institutional contexts. More recent streams in sequence research include the investigation of “lapses” or discontinuities in interaction, the attempts to describe overall sequence structures of full (typically institutional) encounters, the focus on temporality, and investigations of closing sequences. Finally, I discuss the (sometimes uncritical) use of the words “activity” and “project” in CA research, and what evidence is presented for its effect on sequence.

Thinking is an embodied and social practice. Although discursive psychology has opened exploration of ‘mental’ phenomena to analysis as members’ resources, the activity of ‘thinking’ has remained bracketed off as inaccessible or irrelevant. However, this chapter will demonstrate that members orient to each other as thinking and as displaying the activity of thinking through embodied practices. Using a corpus of board game play, this chapter will show how multimodal resources, for example, visibly suspended movements like hovering a game token and non-lexical vocalizations like ‘uh’s or singing, are not only employed to manage taking game-turns and account for delay, but are oriented to as the enaction of thinking. Data are in English.

Studying interaction as embodied means that, in addition to verbal information, we take into account the contribution of the participants’ bodies. On the one hand, speaking itself is embodied, as language is produced in the vocal tract and with a variety of functional prosodies. On the other hand, we also use gesture, posture, gaze and movement to make sense to each other, often with the support of the materialities in the environment. Embodied interaction analysis centrally targets the question how human beings use their available bodily and material resources to bring about social action that is treated as meaningful by other participants (Streeck, Goodwin and LeBaron 2011). It dissects both the verbal and embodied methods of action formation at various occasions, and thus does not inevitably treat language as the most important vehicle of meaning. This approach accounts for a wider range of human activity, by covering the embodied aspects of everyday conversation, but also by elucidating the role of language in highly embodied activities.

While the lexico-grammatical and embodied practices in various instructional activities have been explored in-depth (Keevallik, 2013; Simone & Galatolo, 2020), the vocal capacities deployed by instructors have not been in focus. This study looks at how a Pilates instructor coaches student bodies by modulating the prosodic production of verbal instructions and adjusting vocal quality in reflexive coordination with the students ongoing movements. We show how the body of one participant can be expressed and enhanced by anothers voice in a simultaneous assembly of action and argue for the dialogical conceptualization of a speaker. These voice-body assemblies constitute evidence of how actions were brought about jointly rather than constructed individually.

People speak not only under relaxed conditions but also during strenuous activities, and grammatical resources can be used to achieve displays of strain. This study looks at the relationship between progressivity of talk and bodily strain, focusing on the practice of temporarily suspending syntax while the speaker is accomplishing a physically challenging task. Based on examples from two different physical activities, rock climbing and opera rehearsals, the paper argues that the practice of suspending syntax is a resource available across contexts to render prominence to the strained body and highlight ongoing movement or other bodily action. By placing the strain-based display of incapacity to talk at a moment when the emerging syntactic structure is incomplete, participants maintain rights to resume talk while also presenting themselves as possessing the physical capacity to do so. Suspending syntax is shown to be a minutely timed speakers technique that takes advantage of the emergent nature of syntax and that demonstrates how speakers organize language in relation to the sensing and moving body.

This conversation-analytic (CA) paper contributes to the line of research focusing on the materiality of pedagogical settings (Guerrettaz et al. 2021) and its impact on classroom discourse (Mathieu et al. 2021). Specifically, we explore the affordances provided by cutout pictures that were oriented to as visually ambiguous by students engaged in an open-ended problem-based task. This kind of task was designed to promote students’ collaborative interaction in the English-as-a-foreign-language classroom. The data consist of six video-recorded interactions between pairs of upper secondary school students. The students were given six cutouts illustrating various items (i.e., boomerang, sunglasses) and an instruction card that read: “At an excavation of a cave a person was found together with these items. How did this person end up in the cave?” Our multimodal CA analysis shows that all students co-constructed imaginative narratives revolving around the cutouts and that they oriented to the visual ambiguity of the cutouts when they (a) named the items on the pictures and (b) discussed potential storylines. In particular, the students solved impasses concerning the emerging narrative by suggesting different identifications for the relevant cutouts, which allowed them to develop alternative storylines. Overall, we argue that by interpreting the cutouts as visually ambiguous the students engaged in collaborative interaction as they accomplished a variety of actions such as agreements, challenges, and disagreements. In conclusion, our findings suggest that the selection of material objects such as cutouts has an impact on task-based interaction and is a crucial aspect of task design.

References

Guerrettaz, A.M., Engman, M.M., & Graves, K. (Eds.) (2021). Material Use Across Diverse Contexts of Language Learning and Teaching [Special Issue]. The Modern Language Journal, 105 (S1), 1-185.

Mathieu, C.S., Marcos Miguel, N., & Jakonen, T. (2021) Introduction: classroom discourse at the intersection of language education and materiality. Classroom Discourse, 12 (1-2), 1-14.

This paper focuses on the role that material artifacts play on students’ task-based interactions in the EFL classroom. While conversation-analytic research has focused on students’ implementation of tasks as observable activities (e.g., Balaman & Sert, 2017; Kunitz & Skogmyr Marian, 2017; Lee & Burch, 2017), the role of artifacts on the ongoing task- oriented interactions has just started to be explored (Burch, 2019; Kunitz et al., 2022). Our conversation-analytic study aims to fill this gap by investigating the interactional consequences that the use of specific artifacts might have in six videorecorded task-based interactions between pairs of first-year EFL students. The students were presented with the scenario of a person found during an excavation with various items (illustrated by cut-out pictures). Our fine-grained analyses suggest that artifacts play an important role in: (i) the broader sequential organization of their task-based interaction; and (ii) the actions-in- interaction accomplished in order to complete the task. After an initial artifact-manipulation phase, the students co-constructed emergent narratives based on the scenarios suggested by the artifacts. The discussion over the visual ambiguity and the role of different artifacts on the story behind the excavation involved students in actions-in-interaction such as formulating hypotheses, agreeing, and disagreeing. The findings of this study therefore illustrate the importance of artifacts in task accomplishment and suggest that the selection of artifacts is a crucial aspect of task design that aims to elicit co-constructed, collaborative interaction. 

References

Balaman, U., & Sert, O. (2017). Local contingencies in L2 tasks: A comparison of context-sensitive interactional achievements across two different task types. Bellaterra Journal of Teaching & Learning Language & Literature 10(3). 9-27.

Burch, A.R. (2019) Pedagogical Documents and Language Partner Interaction: The Co-accomplishment of how a Handout Constrains an L2 Interaction. Paper presented at International PragmaticsAssociation (IPrA): Hong Kong

Kunitz, S., Berggren, J., Haglind, M., & Löfquist, A. (2022). Getting students to talk: A practice-based study on the design and implementation of problem-solving tasks in the EFL classroom. Languages. 

Kunitz, S., & Skogmyr Marian, K. (2017). Tracking immanent language learning behavior over time in task-based classroom work. TESOL Quarterly 51(3). 507-535. 

Lee, J., & Burch, A.R. (2017). Collaborative planning in process: An ethnomethodological perspective. TESOL Quarterly 51. 536-570.

This paper focuses on the role that material artifacts and artifact features play on students’ task-based interactions in the EFL classroom. While conversation-analytic research has focused on students’ implementation of tasks as observable activities (e.g., Balaman & Sert, 2017; Kunitz & Skogmyr Marian, 2017; Lee & Burch, 2017), the role of artifacts on the ongoing task-oriented interactions has just started to be explored (Burch, 2019; Kunitz et al., 2022). Our conversation-analytic study aims to fill this gap by investigating the interactional consequences that the use of specific artifacts might have in six video-recorded task-based interactions between pairs of first-year EFL students enrolled in two upper secondary schools in Sweden. The students were presented with the scenario of a person found during an excavation with various items (illustrated by cut-out pictures) and were instructed to answer the question: “How did this person end up in the cave?”. Our fine-grained analyses of the ongoing interactions suggest that artifacts play an important role in: (i) the broader sequential organization of their task-based interaction; and (ii) the actions-in-interaction accomplished in order to complete the task; and (iii) the affordances for topical talk that they provide. After an initial artifact-manipulation phase, the students co-constructed emergent narratives based on the scenarios suggested by the artifacts. The discussion over the visual ambiguity of some artifacts and over the role of different artifacts on the story behind the excavation involved students in actions-in-interaction such as formulating hypotheses, agreeing, and disagreeing. The findings of this study therefore illustrate the importance of artifacts in task accomplishment and suggest that the selection of artifacts is a crucial aspect of task design that aims to elicit co-constructed, collaborative interaction. Overall, the study contributes to the literature on task-based instruction and provides relevant insights for both researchers and practitioners.

References

Balaman, U., & Sert, O. (2017). Local contingencies in L2 tasks: A comparison of context-sensitive interactional achievements across two different task types. Bellaterra Journal of Teaching & Learning Language & Literature 10(3). 9-27.

Burch, A.R. (2019) Pedagogical Documents and Language Partner Interaction: The Co-accomplishment of how a Handout Constrains an L2 Interaction. Paper presented at International PragmaticsAssociation (IPrA): Hong Kong

Kunitz, S., Berggren, J., Haglind, M., & Löfquist, A. (2022). Getting students to talk: A practice-based study on the design and implementation of problem-solving tasks in the EFL classroom. Languages. 

Kunitz, S., & Skogmyr Marian, K. (2017). Tracking immanent language learning behavior over time in task-based classroom work. TESOL Quarterly 51(3). 507-535. 

Lee, J., & Burch, A.R. (2017). Collaborative planning in process: An ethnomethodological perspective. TESOL Quarterly 51. 536-570.

This paper focuses on the role of instructions during the accomplishment of an oral task in the English language classroom. The study is part of a four-year project originating from the observation that, when accomplishing oral tasks, students often engage in parallel interaction (Galaczi, 2008) that resembles a series of prompted monologues. The project is grounded on the assumption that the way oral tasks are designed and set-up might be problematic and that it should be possible to design meaningful tasks which promote co-constructed, collaborative interaction in the language classroom.

To address this issue, the project engaged school teachers and researchers in the exploration of task design and in the analysis of the task interaction accomplished by the students. Over the years, tasks have been designed, implemented and revised (Ellis, 2003) through an iterative process of three cycles. So far, findings show that task design affects pupil interaction. Specifically, results indicate that “less is more”, in that comprehensive instructions and the use of many instructional materials may hinder the pupils’ interaction (Berggren et al., 2019). What is missing from the research conducted so far is a focus on the role played by instructions during task accomplishment.

In the present dataset we focus on 6 pairs of first year EFL students enrolled in two upper secondary schools in Sweden. The students engaged in a task that was designed based on results from previous cycles, which suggested that brief instructions, the use of artefacts and a problem to be solved are features that might be conducive to a more engaged interaction among the participants. The task revolved around the story behind a person found during an excavation. In the present study, we track occurrences in which the pupils orient to the written instructions as they engage in the task. With the methodological tools afforded by conversation analysis (Sidnell, 2010) we describe the unfolding interaction, with a particular focus on the sequential environment in which such occurrences emerge and on their function.

Our preliminary findings suggest that pupils orient to the instructions when they are uncertain about their interpretation of the task and when they are in disagreement regarding their emerging hypotheses. The orientation to the task instructions therefore seems to have three main functions: (a) checking the pupils’ interpretation of the task in order to determine what to do next; (b) verifying their understanding of the scenario described in the instructions; and (c) checking their own hypotheses. The findings illustrate the pupils’ emic concern for the progressivity of the task, while relying on the epistemic authority (Heritage, 2013) of the task instructions as repositories of what it means to accomplish the target task.

Overall, the study contributes to the literature on task-based instruction and speaks to the need of bridging the gap between practice and theory by promoting the collaboration of teachers and researchers.

References

Berggren, J., Haglind, M., Löfquist, A., Nyström, K., Anfält, H., Finnson, G., Johansson, E., & Rönquist, A. (2019). En språngbräda till bättre undervisning – att använda ett teoretiskt ramverk för att konstruera uppgifter. Lingua, 1/2019, 8–12.

Ellis, R. (2003). Task-based language learning and teaching. Oxford: Oxford University Press.  

Galaczi, E. (2008). Peer-peer interaction in a speaking test: The case of the First Certificate in English examination. Language Assessment Quarterly, 5(2), 89–119.

Heritage, J. (2012). Epistemics in conversation. In J. Sidnell & T. Stivers (Eds.), The Handbook of Conversation Analysis (pp. 370–394). Oxford: Wiley Blackwell.

Sidnell, J. (2010). Conversation Analysis: An introduction. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell

Over the last 30 years, there has been substantial debate about the practical, ethical and epistemological issues uniquely associated with qualitative data sharing. In this paper, we contribute to these debates by examining established data sharing practices in Conversation Analysis (CA). CA is an approach to the analysis of social interaction that relies on audio/video recordings of naturally occurring human interactions and moreover works at a level of detail that presents challenges for assumptions about participant anonymity. Nonetheless, data sharing occupies a central position in both the methodology and the wider academic culture of CA as a discipline and a community. Despite this, CA has largely been ignored in qualitative data sharing debates and discussions. We argue that the methodological traditions of CA present a strong case for the value of qualitative data sharing and offer open data sharing practices that might be usefully adopted in other qualitative approaches.

In this article we investigate spoken professional interaction at construction sites in Sweden, where workers from Poland, Ukraine and Estonia are temporarily employed as carpenters, ground workers and kitchen installers. We study how the workers use resources associated with different languages and how these resources are mobilized along with embodied resources for meaning-making. The analysis aims at investigating what social space the workers construct by going between or beyond different linguistic structures, as defined in the theory of translanguaging. The study is based on Linguistic Ethnography and Conversation Analysis is used for close analysis. We focus on instances of translanguaging, such as Swedish-sounding institutionalized keywords, practices of receptive multilingualism and the search for communicative overlaps in repertoires. The findings from busy construction sites show that the stratifying aspect gives some workers a voice in the organization, while others remain silent. Hence, it is primarily professionals functioning as team leaders, who talk to different occupational categories and use resources associated with different languages. The data provide an opportunity to investigate the theory of translanguaging and its transformative power in relation to professional settings that are linguistically diverse, but also strictly hierarchical.

This paper looks at the Estonian coordinating conjunction ja ‘and’ in video- recorded Pilates classes, focusing on the instructors’ practical problem of making the students perform proper movement sequences. It shows how grammatical coordination emerges within a multimodal activity in which the instructor’s talk both directs and responds to student performance. As opposed to the frequent juxtaposition of clauses without connectors, explicit coordination with ja isused for the overall structuring of the class as well as the temporal extensionof talk to achieve synchronicity of vocal and embodied behavior. In contrast to formal theories that consider grammar as a device for coherent expression of pre-planned propositions, this study argues that grammatical structure emerges as part of practical action across participants and modalities.

Kommunikation brukar förknippas med språk i någon form. För att kommunicera med svensktalande personer behöver man behärska ord på svenska och veta hur man kombinerar dessa på ett begripligt sätt. Men språket i sig räcker inte för att vi ska förstå varandra i varje konkret situation. Om jag säger "Ta bort den där" så måste du koppla ihop uttrycket "den där" med en gest och koppla gesten till ett objekt i rummet, för att förstå vad jag menar och hur du kan reagera på mitt önskemål. Multimodal interaktionsanalys utgår ifrån att talarna förenar grammatiska resurser - ord, morfologi och syntax - med relevanta aspekter av kontexten, och därmed kan visa hur förståelsen uppnås mellan dig och mig i stunden. I detta kapitel fokuseras grammatikens roll i denna komplexa verklighet.

This chapter targets grammar in the interactive process between a Pilates teacher and the exercising students, an activity context in which instruction and compli- ance can be designed to merge in time. It shows how linguistic structure, such as counts, formula, and phrases, emerges step-by-step sensitively to the others’ cur- rently moving bodies. At the same time, the situation-designed structures direct the students through the partially known moves. In contrast to formal theories that consider grammar as a device for coherent expression of propositions, this study argues that grammatical structure emerges through recurrent use in a spe- cific activity context. The video-recorded data is in Estonian.

In co-present interaction, our bodies are continuously available for sense- making. Linguists, however, have generally analyzed grammatical patterns, such as noun phrases, separately from the rest of human behavior. This chapter looks at a collection of cases in Swedish, English, and Estonian, where the speaker initiates a noun phrase but completes it with an embodied demonstration. Other participants treat this multimodal structure as complete and comprehensible. Building on earlier research on syntactic-bodily units (Keevallik 2013, 2017) this study calls into question the analytic boundary between language and the body and argues that grammatical projection cross-cuts modalities even within the assumedly robust noun phrase.

This chapter looks at how people vocally display bodily strain. While strain sounds can be a “leakage” of an individual bodily effort, they can also be performed without tension beyond what is necessary for their production, and acted upon by co-present others. The study re-specifies the pioneering but impressionistic account of response cries by Goffman (1978) through analyzing the minute mutual temporalities of vocal and bodily strain in the recordings of naturally occurring strain grunts during physical work and body instruction. The chapter argues that strain grunts are regularly produced alongside bodily effort, with variable phonetic characteristics, with outbreaths reflecting tension release, and at moments when the success of the effort is at risk. This leads to local (re)configuration of embodied participation in the task at hand and the emergence of strain displays as having been informative.

Communicative action can be carried out by not only verbal but also embodied means. People regularly use multimodal resources to make sense for each other. Consider a mundane activity, such as a greeting. In addition to the choice of lexical items to fit the relationship, such as “hi,” “yo,” or “good morning, Mister Smith,” extreme prosody featuring high pitch, increased loudness, and extensive lengthening on a “hi” may be necessary for your friend to feel recognized and truly appreciated. In some contexts and relationships, a handshake, a bow, or a hug may be mandatory, while the appropriate duration of those behaviors, the adequate spatial distance, and the exact positions of touch are culturally significant. Across activity settings, bodily behavior is regularly treated as meaningful by coparticipants, as it plays a role in action formation alongside the use of lexicon and grammar. Qualitatively different semiotic resources are juxtaposed so that they mutually elaborate each other and constitute actions within the locally emerging interactional sequences, as understood by the current participants. Aspects such as gaze, gesture, posture, objects, and movement are all potentially recruited to achieve social action, depending on the praxeological context. It is, for example, crucial to pay attention to a specific area in the surrounding space when someone does a pointing gesture or to adjust one’s pace when interacting on the go. We are held socially accountable for our embodied behavior, be it designed for others or not, and the body is constantly interpreted in regard to its action import. Social actions can furthermore be exclusively carried out by the bodies within their spatial, material, and praxeological settings.

Language is believed to be a central device for communicating meaning and knowledge between humans. It is superb in its capacity to code abstract ideas and displaced information, which can be conveyed from person to person, sometimes across centuries. When it comes to instructing a bodily skill in co-present situations, language is used along with other multimodal resources. This paper focuses on the role of vocalizations in dance teaching, syllables that express simultaneous body movement rather than abstract lexical content. While being essentially a vocal resource, the meaning of vocalizations arises in the simultaneously moving bodies. By carrying indexical and only partially conventionalized meaning, vocalizations constitute a puzzle for linguistic theory that preferably targets the arbitrary, symbolic and conventionalized aspects of human vocal production. The meanings conveyed from one body to another through a vocalization are experiential rather than intellectual. Vocalizations provide a solution to the problem of transferring body knowledge from one autonomous organism to another, and can even be embedded in syntax. The analysis is based on an occasion of teaching a jazz routine to a larger group of students.

This study targets conventional mutual touch in dance hold positions and shows how dancers orient to extended out-of-dance holds as being awkward and illegitimate. It focuses on transitions from teacher instruction to practice in classes of Lindy Hop that recurrently pose practical problems for the students: when to take a hold of the prospective dance partner and how to let go, in case the projection of an upcoming practice is suspended through further teacher talk. The paper documents practices of diverting and releasing touch and shows that they involve various types of self-grooming, as well as steps and shifts in balance away from the prospective partner. A dance hold release is a distinct social achievement that is accomplished jointly as soon as possible after the prospect of a dance is delayed.

This article analyzes the tacit norms of embodied turn-taking in a specific dance activity, Lindy Hop jam circles. Building on an extensive tradition of scrutinizing turn-taking in conversation, it shows how dancing couples negotiate the right to a next turn by visual means. Using multimodal interaction analysis, the article dissects the behavior of the exiting couple, the next dancing couple, and the spectators. The analysis shows that music is but one factor in turn-taking, and that maximally three publicly visible steps are necessary for a successful entrance: displaying “couplehood,” displaying imminent entrance, and occupying the exclusive central space. In a case of competition the dancers’ speed and determination are decisive.

Standard models of language and communication depart from the assumption that speakers encode and receive messages individually, while interaction research has shown that utterances are composed jointly (C. Goodwin, 2018), dialogically designed with and for others (Linell, 2009). Furthermore, utterances only achieve their full semantic potential in concrete interactional contexts. This SI investigates various practices of human sounding that achieve their meaning through self and others ongoing bodily actions. One person may vocalize to enact someone elses ongoing bodily experience, to coordinate with another body, or to convey embodied knowledge about something that is ostensibly only accessible to anothers individual body. This illustrates the centrality of distributed action and collaborative agency in communication.

This study investigates the practice of "sounding for others," wherein one person vocalizes to enact someone elses putatively ongoing bodily sensation. We argue that it constitutes a collaborative way of performing sensorial experiences. Examples include producing cries with others strain or pain and parents sounding an mmm of gustatory pleasure on their infants behalf. Vocal sounds, their loudness, and duration are specifically deployed for instructing bodily experiences during novices real-time performance of various activities, such as tasting food for the first time or straining during a Pilates exercise. Vocalizations that are indexically tied to the body provide immediate displays of understanding and empathy that may be explicated further through lexicon. The existence of this practice challenges the conceptualization of communication as a transfer of information from an individual agent - even regarding assumedly individual body sensations - instead providing evidence of the joint nature of action and supporting dialogic theories of communication, including when language-marginal vocalizations are used.

Some language patterns appear fixed at a certain time, enabling their description as grammatical structures. Semi-fixed patterns that routinely accomplish specific social actions constitute more of an analytical challenge. This chapter targets the phrase ma saan aru ‘I understand’ in Estonian together with the ensuing other-attentive formulation ‘2nd person expression + a cognitive concept’ and argues that it is a semi-fixed expression, a “claim to the intersubjective”, that manages a misalignment between participants. While claiming to have successfully accessed the other’s motives or feelings, the speaker regularly advances her own agenda through the formulation of the other. This suggests a systematic relationship between cognitive lexicon, grammatical structure, and interactional function, and calls for a language theory that incorporates semi-fixedness.

This chapter on Estonian and Polish OKAY focuses on complying responses to high entitlement directives. The responses are built of two parts, the verbal OKAY that completes the adjacency pair and an embodied compliance that ensues. The OKAY provides an immediate verbal notification and acceptance of the suggested action trajectory, which is relevant for the co-participants’ continuing coordination of activities in progress, while the projected embodied compliance is necessarily deferred. By looking at two genetically and historically unrelated languages and showing a similar response pattern in them, we hope to illustrate the general interactional potential of the particle OKAY, and perhaps begin to understand some of its cross-linguistic allure.

Hur ska kyrkan i dag förverkliga sitt uppdrag att räcka evangeliet till vår tids människor? Varför svalnar missionsintresset på många håll? Hur ser ett djupt möte mellan evangeliet och vår kultur ut?