This study examines how participants’ bodily orientations organize transitions from preparation to performance during rehearsals for a Japanese theater production. Drawing on video-based conversation analysis, it shows that actors’ entry into performance as characters is collaboratively accomplished through embodied conduct involving both actors and the director. The director’s shifts in posture and visual orientation make her directorial way of seeing publicly intelligible and contribute to reconfiguring the participation frame for performance. At the same time, the intelligibility of this directorial way of seeing depends on how these bodily shifts are situated within the unfolding interaction. Performance as a creative activity is interactionally made possible through the coordinated embodied conduct of multiple participants.
Drawing on video-recordings of Chinese L2 classroom interaction, this study investigates how teachers mobilize students’ choral responses through the coordinated deployment of multimodal interactional resources, including materially anchored pointing gestures, gaze reorientation, and successive prompting. Fine-grained multimodal Conversation Analysis (CA) reveals that these multimodal resources perform analytically distinguishable yet interactionally complementary functions in the mobilization of choral responses. Materially anchored pointing gestures functions to project and delimit the content of anticipated responses; gaze reorientation signals the appropriate moment for collective entry; and successive prompts together with teachers’ reformulations serves to establish recognizable response formats when initial attempts at mobilizing whole-class participation prove unsuccessful. These findings highlight that the successful accomplishment of choral responses depends not merely on linguistic projection but on the dynamic coordination of verbal, embodied, material, and sequential resources that jointly organize both the projectability and the temporality of collective participation. This study also extends research on Classroom Interactional Competence (CIC) by showing that whole-class participation constitutes a collaborative interactional achievement, emerging through teachers’ strategic employment of multiple modalities and students’ timely orientation to those multimodal resources.
Orchestra rehearsals are complex environments where conductors and musicians collaboratively shape a public performance through dynamic, multimodal interaction. This study investigates how creativity emerges within these interactions, particularly focusing on the conductor’s use of verbal and embodied corrections and instructions to interpret and transform the musical score. Drawing on the theoretical framework of Multimodal Conversation Analysis, the research analyses rehearsal data from professional symphonic orchestras in France, Italy, and Belgium. The study explores the tension between fidelity to the score and creative innovation, examining how conductors navigate this space by employing descriptive (verbal) and depictive (gestural, vocal) modes of instruction. Languages spoken during the rehearsals are French, Italian, English, and German.
Using multimodal conversation analysis, we investigated a phenomenon in which the organization of physical examination in the medical consultation is disrupted by patients’ embodied displays of pain and withdrawal from the doctor’s touch, and doctors’ practices in managing those withdrawals. Such instances break the organization of the interaction and can thus be seen to encode patients’ disalignment with the ongoing activity. We present how the participants orient to the disalignments as accountable and, with that, restore the organization. The data consist of Finnish general practitioners’ consultations with patients suffering from upper respiratory tract problems.
In social interaction research, so-called “listeners” are known for being active co-participants of the interaction through several engagement displays, labeled as feedback, backchannel, or listener responses. Enriched by our account of interactions in French and French Sign Language, we suggest using the term ‘doing attending’ so as to not restrict this practice to a single modality and highlight its functional and interactional nature. Our analyses of video-recorded interactions during family dinners held at home, further demonstrate how such multimodal displays may not always be characterized by ‘dynamic’ forms, and are deeply shaped by polyadicity as well as co-activity and material affordances, in both languages.
This study investigates how salespeople in Japanese bedding retail stores establish interactional space as a resource for (re-)initiating sales talk. Drawing on multimodal conversation analysis of video-recorded service encounters, the paper documents the practice of remaining: salespeople staying at the spot where an initial sales pitch has been made—even when the attempt fails. Remaining displays their availability as bystander participants by configuring an object-focused interactional space. The analysis shows that salespeople (1) time their approach when customers engage in object-focused activities, (2) remain in the area of a failed pitch, (3) adjust their bodily orientation to stand just outside customer focus, and (4) display availability by standing and doing nothing. These practices demonstrate that remaining is not passive, but a socio-spatial accomplishment that supports subsequent sales interaction. The findings contribute to conversation analytic research on service encounters by explicating how “roaming” salespeople enact organizational goals through embodied practices.
This study explores the multimodal features of post-positioned question tags (PPQTs) and their temporal alignment, by using Conversation Analysis and interactional linguistics approaches. Data come from 20 hours of audio and video recordings of casual Jordanian Arabic conversations among 70 university students and graduates in Irbid City. By drawing on Jefferson (1981), Pomerantz (1984), and Stivers and Rossano (2010), the present microanalysis shows that PPQTs, such as sˤaħ? (‘right?’), together with specific nonverbal cues, pursue responses after an initial lack of uptake, while acknowledging their non-turn yielding functions.
This study illustrates how recruitment and assistance unfold in social virtual reality. Using conversation analysis, the study examines audio-visual data of peer interaction on the social VR platform Rec Room. Novice users’ actions are examined as they familiarise themselves with the virtual environment and seek assistance from their peers. The findings show that participants orient to explicit requests as recruitment and respond to them with advice, whereas embodied trouble displays do not elicit assistance from the recipient. In turn, the examined advice turns show how participants avoid taking an expert position, and their turns are framed as suggestions. Recruitment and assistance make visible asymmetries of access to virtual and physical interactional resources and different perspectives in social VR.
This paper reports an investigation of the interactions between groups of German and Danish speakers and a service robot which was programmed to produce English at an international university campus. We analysed three sets of interactions that involved an offer of water by the robot, and we used Conversation Analysis to track the human participants’ responses to the robot in examining how their language choice featured in their participation. We found that the overall organisation of the interactions was monolingual: participants used German and Danish with each other to express wonderment, frustration and confusion, and to comment on the robot’s actions, and English to respond to the robot’s offer and to ridicule it when acceptance of the offer was missed. Language choice and variations in volume when speaking each language, as added dimensions in recipient design, thus established monolingual participation frameworks. We argue that these findings reveal a different orientation to the robot as co-participant and question the extent to which robots are oriented to as social members in settings that mirror real-life contexts. Findings also raise design issues in the future development of robots.
Using video recordings collected from an online language course, this study examines activities that university students engage in simultaneously while doing groupwork in breakout rooms on zoom. As a method, this study employs multimodal conversation analysis to shed light on the students’ verbal accounts (i.e., verbalizations of the activity) for their hybridized activities, in particular how their verbal accounts make visible varying levels of moral entitlement, and how their peers react to these accounts. The findings show that the students produce accounts at various points in sequences (before the activity, during the activity, or after the activity has ended). Whilst contingent on the situation at hand, the nature of the hybridized activity, as well as the level of entitlement in the account produced affected whether the responses prompted were aligning/affiliating or disaligning/disaffiliating (see Steensig, 2019) in relation to the accounts. Overall, this study contributes to the existing literature on “fractured ecologies” in video-mediated interactions (Luff et al., 2003), while also drawing implications to the lack of monitorability and to what seems to be an increased tolerance towards multitasking in video-mediated educational interactions.
The study examines how participants of a “mirror exercise” in a community dance workshop sustain movement synchrony. They make other-adjustments by slowing down, stopping, or returning to an earlier movement phase to allow the partner to catch up. We also examine how gaze, facial expressions and talk increasingly come to play in dealing with hitches in the task, sometimes up to abandoning the task. The analyses illustrate how participants coordinate synchronious movement, the distribution of modalities in this coordination, and how it intertwines with their shifting roles as workshop participants.
Social robots are designed to mimic embodied human interaction capabilities and are envisioned as social interaction partners either for individuals or groups of people. To interact with such robots, human sensemaking and active practical effort is required. In this microanalytic study, we examine video-recorded multi-party interactions with the social robot Pepper to illustrate some interactional and collaborative practices that humans engage in to achieve interactions with the robot. We examine situations where a group of university students engages in embodied practices trying to get responses from Pepper. We coined two concepts to describe these encounters: “robot speak” refers to embodied, spoken utterances directed at the robot with the aim of prompting a response. It is a specific, situated way of speaking shaped by assumptions about the robot’s interactional competence. “Framing talk” describes the participants’ collaborative commentary used to make sense of the situation, co-constructing the human-robot interaction as a meaningful social event. Additionally, in reference to our previous work, we illustrate a practical-ethical dimension related to social robots by examining how even a minor gaze shift of a robot can become immediately recognized as contextually significant for a participant, even when such are not explicitly designed as invitations to interact.
Carrying out collaborative activities in video-mediated learning settings requires constant interactional work to maintain alignment between participants’ actions and the use of virtual and material artifacts (also known as ‘practical accord’). This study uses screen recorded data and multimodal conversation analysis (CA) to present a case analysis of an extended sequence in interaction where a group of learners has been divided into two groups, and they encounter a difficulty in sharing materials with each other during a momentary breakdown of the learning platform. The analysis shows how the teacher and learners deploy multiple channels of communication, including spoken interaction, the chat interface and WhatsApp, to accomplish practical accord in a progress-wise manner. It is also shown how verbal (i.e., both spoken and written) and embodied resources are coordinated from the moment when the trouble emerges to the point when a solution is found. The study highlights the accomplishment of practical accord as a complex cross-modal process where collaborative practices are key. The findings have implications for both research and teaching, as they can help design tasks for online learning.
EMCA research has documented how the moving human body is a core resource for sense-making. This means that people engaged in interaction are constantly foraging for materials from which to fashion their contributions (Goodwin, 2018). Co-participants, in turn, are faced with a set of raw materials being mobilised and potentially used as resources for sense-making. In this paper, we focus on a particular bodily movement, learning forward. The unsupported lean is temporally organized and bringing the body off balance projects that the lean will be resolved. The study uses video-data from a range of institutional settings to explore how a leaning body is treated as indexing a range of social actions. We discuss this as having emerged from the human capacity to stand upright, and a shared knowledge of the additional exertion required to counteract gravitational forces when bringing the upper body off its vertical axis.
Some patients require a companion to help them answer questions from medical personnel. How the companions do so may depend, in part, on the nature of the patient’s condition. In the case of the patient with a learning disability, we find the companion tending strongly to respect the patient’s agency and entitlement to speak to their own experiences, by a) allowing the patient time to volunteer the answer to the question themselves, b) glossing inadequate answers as being a temporary failure to remember and c) constructing a no-problem answer (extending previous findings by Antaki and Chinn, 2019). In contrast, with a patient who is examined for or has a diagnosis of epilepsy or multiple sclerosis, we see the companion tending to take a more proactive and interventionist approach. We discuss our findings in the light of differences between the powers and capacities attributable to people with learning disability, epilepsy, and multiple sclerosis, and the different entitlements that their companions may assume in speaking for them.
This article investigates how a digital chat tool is used during a face-to-face workshop where it is projected on a screen for everyone to see. Importantly, the chat is not used as an interactional tool but rather, in an unconventional way, as an archive for photographs the participants have taken for a workshop task. Thus, in order to discuss the photographs, the facilitator using the computer needs to navigate in the digital space with the help of the photographer to find each photograph. Drawing on multimodal conversation analysis and the concept of affordance, we show how the participants, during the course of the workshop, adapt to the task-relevant affordances and learn to conduct the navigation in an increasingly collaborative fashion.
Previous research highlights how the presence of companions can influence the trajectory and outcome of medical encounters. This study, set within the context of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), examines cases where medical professionals enlist patient companions to join the consultation when patients resist the doctors’ medical opinions. Results from this study indicate that when companions participate in this manner, they face the dilemma of either endorsing the doctors and aiding in the implementation of their medical agenda or siding with the patients and being a supportive companion. This may explain why this practice is not always effective in countering patient resistance and securing patient adherence, especially when the patient's resistance is overt and strong.
This paper explores classroom desk interaction where the student has a visual impairment (VIS), and the interaction involves a third supportive party, the student’s learning support assistant. Based on video recordings and multimodal conversation analysis, the paper examines how a VIS, his assistant, and the teacher within a contingent socio-material environment work toward solving an assignment. The analysis is organized following the sequential unfolding of the assignment-solving situation, going from a) determining the need for teacher assistance, b) the recruitment of the teacher’s assistance with the assignment, c) how the participation framework for the joint activity of reviewing the assignment is established with the assistant positioning herself as a fellow “learner”, and d) how the issue is identified and solved. The analysis shows the situated properties of the socio-material environment in which the participants and the local material contingencies are assembled and thus become consequential for the collaborative and observable production of the situation.
Technologists often claim that virtual assistants, e.g., smart speakers, can offer 'smart companionship for independent older people'. However, the concept of companionship manifested by such technologies is rarely explained further. Studies of virtual assistants as assistive technologies have tended to conceptualise companionship as a 'special form of friendship' or as a way of strengthening 'psychological wellbeing' and 'emotional resilience'. While these abstractions can be measured using psychological indices or self-report, they are not necessarily informative about how 'virtual companionship' may be performed in everyday interaction. This case study focuses on how a virtual assistant is used by a person living with dementia and asks to what extent it takes on a role recognizable, from interactional studies, as 'doing companionship'. We draw on naturalistic video data featuring a person living with dementia in her own home using a smart speaker. Our results show how actions such as complaints about and blamings directed towards the device are achieved through shifts of ‘footing’ between turns that are ostensibly ‘talk to oneself’ and turns designed to occasion a response. Our findings have implications for the design, feasibility, and ethics of virtual assistants as companions, and for our understanding of the embedded ontological assumptions, interactive participation frameworks, and conversational roles involved in doing companionship with machines.
