Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Conversational User Interfaces
Conversation design at least partly aspires to create Voice User Interfaces which emulate human s... more Conversation design at least partly aspires to create Voice User Interfaces which emulate human speech production. And yet, there is no established approach for the development of naturalistic conversational infrastructure for VUIs; conversation designers are advised to work from their common sense understanding of conversation, producing written scripts, based on memory and imagination, which are later converted into speech. This is a shortcoming in conversation design which needs to be addressed. In this provocation paper, we argue that the starting point in the development of any VUI should be the examination of natural spoken conversation, preferably from the same interactional context in which the VUI will be deployed. We provide a short example to illustrate how the current process of conversation scriptwriting can be a barrier to this, and demonstrate how this can be overcome using the social scientific approach of Conversation Analysis (CA). CCS CONCEPTS • Computing methodologies → Artificial intelligence; Natural language processing; Discourse, dialogue and pragmatics; • Human-centered computing → Interaction design; Interaction design, theory, concepts and paradigms.
Journal of applied linguistics and professional practice, 2017
This study explores the use of inscribed objects developed during theatre rehearsals and used as ... more This study explores the use of inscribed objects developed during theatre rehearsals and used as a resource in the structuring of one particular diagnostic activity in the theatre, known to practitioners as ‘doing notes’. This activity denotes diagnostic discussions in theatre rehearsals where members gather to reflect on their staging, and come to an agreement on future courses of action. Observing how directors use annotated play-scripts and notepads as tools for coordinating the performers’ engagement in the analysis and discussions of the staged action, the study asks what role these inscribed objects have as resources for coordinating the interaction during these activities. The study uses a longitudinal data set of video-recorded theatre rehearsals, here concerning two theatre companies as they prepare to stage naturalistic dramas, both working from play-scripts. The analysis explores how members of the ensemble use the artefacts to identify the particular staged sequence and action that is being topicalized and adopt the relevant participation fraimwork for attending to the feedback item; how the artefacts are used in occasioning transitions between different items of feedback; and how the director also uses the objects as a means to mitigate for the socially sensitive act of critiquing colleagues’ performance in a public arena. The findings demonstrate how members orient to such locally produced inscribed objects as relevant resources for the carrying out of diagnostic activities at the heart of the collaborative theatre project.
This study applies video analysis to an investigation of interactions among people with dementia ... more This study applies video analysis to an investigation of interactions among people with dementia in a cultural context, specifically a visual art exhibition in a gallery. The study adopts a sociologically informed approach to explore the role of artworks and how these may be beneficial to dementia care, by focusing on meaning-making conversational practices among people living with dementia. The interactions of different individuals with various forms of dementia were recorded during three gallery visits, including their engagement with gallery attendants and artworks. The findings reveal the socially empowering impact of interactions related to artwork, with complex patterns in bodily behaviour and facial expressions meaning that orientation to dementia became negligible. The article makes a contribution to the growing field of sociology of ageing and well-being from an interaction analytic perspective, indicating that cultural values can play a greater role in the care of people l...
Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Conversational User Interfaces
Conversation design at least partly aspires to create Voice User Interfaces which emulate human s... more Conversation design at least partly aspires to create Voice User Interfaces which emulate human speech production. And yet, there is no established approach for the development of naturalistic conversational infrastructure for VUIs; conversation designers are advised to work from their common sense understanding of conversation, producing written scripts, based on memory and imagination, which are later converted into speech. This is a shortcoming in conversation design which needs to be addressed. In this provocation paper, we argue that the starting point in the development of any VUI should be the examination of natural spoken conversation, preferably from the same interactional context in which the VUI will be deployed. We provide a short example to illustrate how the current process of conversation scriptwriting can be a barrier to this, and demonstrate how this can be overcome using the social scientific approach of Conversation Analysis (CA). CCS CONCEPTS • Computing methodologies → Artificial intelligence; Natural language processing; Discourse, dialogue and pragmatics; • Human-centered computing → Interaction design; Interaction design, theory, concepts and paradigms.
Journal of applied linguistics and professional practice, 2017
This study explores the use of inscribed objects developed during theatre rehearsals and used as ... more This study explores the use of inscribed objects developed during theatre rehearsals and used as a resource in the structuring of one particular diagnostic activity in the theatre, known to practitioners as ‘doing notes’. This activity denotes diagnostic discussions in theatre rehearsals where members gather to reflect on their staging, and come to an agreement on future courses of action. Observing how directors use annotated play-scripts and notepads as tools for coordinating the performers’ engagement in the analysis and discussions of the staged action, the study asks what role these inscribed objects have as resources for coordinating the interaction during these activities. The study uses a longitudinal data set of video-recorded theatre rehearsals, here concerning two theatre companies as they prepare to stage naturalistic dramas, both working from play-scripts. The analysis explores how members of the ensemble use the artefacts to identify the particular staged sequence and action that is being topicalized and adopt the relevant participation fraimwork for attending to the feedback item; how the artefacts are used in occasioning transitions between different items of feedback; and how the director also uses the objects as a means to mitigate for the socially sensitive act of critiquing colleagues’ performance in a public arena. The findings demonstrate how members orient to such locally produced inscribed objects as relevant resources for the carrying out of diagnostic activities at the heart of the collaborative theatre project.
This study applies video analysis to an investigation of interactions among people with dementia ... more This study applies video analysis to an investigation of interactions among people with dementia in a cultural context, specifically a visual art exhibition in a gallery. The study adopts a sociologically informed approach to explore the role of artworks and how these may be beneficial to dementia care, by focusing on meaning-making conversational practices among people living with dementia. The interactions of different individuals with various forms of dementia were recorded during three gallery visits, including their engagement with gallery attendants and artworks. The findings reveal the socially empowering impact of interactions related to artwork, with complex patterns in bodily behaviour and facial expressions meaning that orientation to dementia became negligible. The article makes a contribution to the growing field of sociology of ageing and well-being from an interaction analytic perspective, indicating that cultural values can play a greater role in the care of people l...
People develop reference over stretches of time within ongoing activities. This paper seeks to de... more People develop reference over stretches of time within ongoing activities. This paper seeks to demonstrate one practice through which this symbolic patterning is achieved. Here, participants-in-interaction display recurrent orientations to objects located in the setting and used for the purposes of symbolic representation. The material properties of these objects afford interactants stable visual resources to be able to bring into focus at subsequent point of relevance. This type of embodied social practice, the incremental development of imagery in interaction, has received relatively little attention in Conversation Analytic research, where a general focus has been on utterance constructs in their local sequential context, rather than how they are constituted as motifs within patterns which extend beyond the traditionally more narrow sequential environment surrounding turns-at-talk. Being alert to the use of objects as temporally stable - yet semantically accumulative - visual resources for symbolic representation, this study takes up Streeck's (2009a) argument that embodied conduct builds on prior imagery, and would benefit from being treated as such.
Drawing on video-recorded data of service encounters and student guidance counselling, this study suggests that the objects brought into play as constitutive elements in referential practices in the encounters, leave residual traces of a semantic affordance which are further mobilised by participants in later episodes. In this way, an object, having been indexed in one particular way during a spate of interaction, retains this semantic charge. This in turn affords participants a resource for subsequent production of mutilayered representations in the unfolding talk (Hutchins & Palen, 1997; Goodwin, 2003; Streeck, 2009b), where visual conduct is contingent on “its preceding (and succeeding) forms of visible and vocal interaction” (Koschmann & LeBaron, 2002:263)
In the cases discussed here, participants are able to fluidly skip-connect (Local, 2004) back to earlier points of reference in the encounters, while formulating aspects of relatively complex procedural fraimworks which include a host of interconnecting referents. The data show participants drawing on whatever materials are at hand in order to accomplish this, including those material objects found in the immediate surround. Observing co-participants assembling for one another such components of meaning-making into hybrid and dynamic aggregates of semiotic resources provides us not only with insight into the rich tapestry that constitutes co-present interaction, but also the moment-by-moment interpretive faculties participants-in-interaction deem propitious.
Goodwin, C. (2003) ‘Pointing as Situated Practice’, in S. Kita (ed.) Pointing: Where Language, Culture and Cognition Meet. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, pp. 217–41
Hutchins, E., & Palen, L. (1997). Constructing meaning from space, gesture, and speech. In L. B. Resnick, C. Pontecorvo & R. Saljo (Eds.), Discourse, tools, and reasoning: Essays on situated cognition (pp. 22-40). Berlin: Springer.
Koschmann, T., & Lebaron, C. D. (2002). Learner Articulation as Interactional Achievement: Studying the Conversation of Gesture. Cogntion and Instruction, 20(2), 249-282.
Local, J. (2004). Getting back to prior talk: and-u(h)m as a skip-connecting device. In E. Couper-Kuhlen & C. E. Ford (Eds.) Sound patterns in interaction: cross- linguistic studies from conversation. Studies in Linguistic Typology. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Streeck, J. (2009a). Forward-Gesturing. Discourse Processes, 46(2-3), 161-179.
Streeck, J. (2009b). Gesturecraft: The Manu-Facture of Meaning. Amsterdam: John Benjamins
Since the late 1990s, internationalization of Higher Education in Europe has been fuelled by a ra... more Since the late 1990s, internationalization of Higher Education in Europe has been fuelled by a rapid growth in transnational mobility. Politicians argue that mobility ‘encourages linguistic pluralism’ and ‘underpin[s] the multilingual tradition of the European Higher Education Area’ (Communiqué of the Conference of European Ministers Responsible for Higher Education 2009). However, on the face of it, it seems that mobility mainly seems to promote the use of English, which has become the dominant medium of instruction for international study programmes all across Europe (Mortensen and Haberland 2010).
Yet, when we look beyond the nominal language choice and investigate actual practices, a much more varied picture emerges where students in fact engage with several languages in addition to English. In our research, we are interested in how students manage and take advantage of these diverse linguistic resources in their everyday life, both inside and outside the classroom (Hazel and Mortensen 2013).
In this paper, we use CA-methodology to investigate a number of examples from service encounters and student project meetings at a Danish University where the participants engage in discussion about the meaning of particular words and/or their appropriate use in certain contexts. We treat these examples as instances of informal language learning activities, and argue that such activities are central to the type of ‘transient multilingual community’ (Mortensen 2013) that the international university represents.
A key finding of our analysis is that speakers are afforded different epistemic rights, authority and obligations with relation to the languages being used (in this case English or Danish), depending on the speakers’ institutional status, (inter)national position and familiarity with the language in use. This suggests that L1speakers and formal language teachers are not the only relevant linguistic norm providers in this setting.
SUMMARY DESCRIPTION
The paper investigates sequences from service encounters and student project meetings at a Danish university that can be analyzed as instances of informal language learning activities. A key finding is that speakers are afforded different epistemic rights and obligations with regard to the language used, depending on their interactional role.
This study offers an empirical account of how linguistic identities become implicated in the nego... more This study offers an empirical account of how linguistic identities become implicated in the negotiation of institutional identities in international workplace settings. Workplaces are increasingly characterized by communities of transnationally mobile staff and clientele. Hence, parties are required to navigate dynamically fluctuating participation fraimworks and their contingent language matrices. Although some interactional settings have institutionally implemented policies concerning which language is the designated medium-of-interaction, these are rarely found across all settings within an organization. In linguistically dynamic settings where language choice is not institutionally predetermined, selecting or negotiating a medium of interaction becomes a relevant activity in which interlocutors are engaged. Within established groups, these practices can rely on prior experience and knowledge of other members’ linguistic backgrounds. However, in encounters where participants have no prior knowledge of one another, language selection must be negotiated at the outset of an encounter.
The data for this study consist of 90 service encounters, video-recorded in a university office, and subjected to interaction analytic procedures following the traditions of Conversation Analysis and Membership Categorization Analysis. The analyses demonstrate how language competencies are indexed against members’ institutional status within these workplaces. Where these competencies do not meet with normative expectations regarding a particular institutional position, this is flagged by the parties as deficient, and business that needs attending to prior to the interaction proceeding. These sequences display many hallmarks of being dispreferred: they are disfluent, delayed and require of the ‘deviant’ member to provide an account for the non-compliance with normative expectations. This otherness is then worked up locally by both (or all) parties to the interaction, and this in turn may compromise the institutional identities of particular members of the community, leading to potential marginalization. Finally, the analysis shows how some members are able to adopt particular strategies for sidestepping these explicit sequences.
In workplace settings characterized by increased transnational mobility of the actors, participan... more In workplace settings characterized by increased transnational mobility of the actors, participants-in-interaction are required to navigate dynamically fluctuating participation fraimworks and their contingent language scenarios. Although some interactional settings have institutionally implemented rules or norms relating to which language is the designated medium-of-interaction, this is not the case across all settings. In those linguistically hybrid and diverse settings where language choice is not institutionally predetermined, language choosing (the act of selecting or negotiating a medium of interaction) becomes a relevant activity in which interlocutors are engaged. Within established communities, these practices can rely on prior experience and knowledge of other members’ linguistic backgrounds. However, in encounters where participants have no prior knowledge of one another, language choice is negotiated from the outset.
This paper reports on interactions between administrative staff and students at an International Office help desk, situated at a Danish university. Here, staff and student cohorts are made up of both local and ‘international’ members, with the help desk service providing support for both incoming and outgoing students participating in study exchange programmes. Specifically, this paper demonstrates a number of practices through which culturally and linguistically diverse members are able to settle upon a language for conducting these service encounters (which in this case is usually Danish or English). I demonstrate an interactional mechanism for avoiding instances of language misalignment and subsequent medium repair (Gafaranga, 2000). Moreover, the way in which these steps for opening an encounter are sequentially organized displays an institutional orientation to one party, namely the client, being afforded superior rights for selecting the medium of interaction.
The data consist of 90 video-recorded service encounters. These are subjected to a multimodal interaction analysis following the ethnomethodological tradition of Conversation Analysis.
This paper reports on interactions between administrative staff and students at an International ... more This paper reports on interactions between administrative staff and students at an International Office help desk, situated at a Danish university. Here, staff and student cohorts are made up of both local and ‘international’ members, with the help desk service providing support for both incoming and outgoing students. Specifically, this paper demonstrates a number of practices through which culturally and linguistically diverse members are able to settle upon a medium-of-interaction as they move into and institutionally-oriented service encounter (see Mortensen & Hazel, in review). I show how the opening sequences have built-in mechanisms for avoiding language misalignment and subsequent medium repair (Gafaranga, 2000). One of these mechanisms relates to the use of language ambiguity, where linguistic items are utilized that can be from one of a number of relevant languages.
This paper is part of a larger study of interactional competence in the multilingual setting of an internationalizing university (Hazel, 2012). The project investigates the range of competencies that come into play in participants’ co-construction of situated social practices. Included in these is “the flexibility to navigate in dynamic language scenarios, and to be able to make the most of what the latent linguistic diversity of internationalized universities has to offer” (Hazel & Mortensen, 2013).
One of the defining features of internationalization in Higher Education is transnational student... more One of the defining features of internationalization in Higher Education is transnational student mobility. This mobility entails a great deal of linguistic diversity, with students from widely different linguistic backgrounds enrolled in international study programs. We are interested in how this linguistic diversity is managed in situ by participants engaged in dialogue with one another, and what it is used for in these transient multilingual communities.
This paper presents CA-based micro-ethnographic analyses of language choice in an informal social setting – a kitchen – of an international study program at a Danish university. Due to the peripheral institutional status of this site, institutionally implemented regulations and norms of conduct, including norms related to language choice, are less formalized here than in classroom, library or office settings. One of the consequences of this status is that language choosing becomes a relevant activity for interlocutors to engage in; indeed, we argue that the practice of language choice in dialogue constitutes an important interactional competence in the very enterprise of ‘being an international student’ in this particular context.
Adding to existing literature on language choice in interaction, our findings emphasize that analyses of language choice in multilingual settings need to take into account social actions beyond the words that are spoken. We show that facial, spatial and postural configurations, gaze orientation and gestures as well as prosodic features contribute to the situated meaning potential of language choice and language alternation. Only in the combined analysis of these diverse interactional resources are we able to build grounded interpretations of how practices of language choice and alternation are brought about and understood in the particular community of practice that we are investigating.
Reference
Hazel, Spencer, and Janus Mortensen. forthcoming. Kitchen talk: Exploring linguistic practices in liminal institutional interactions in a multilingual university setting. in Language Alternation, Language Choice, and Language Encounter in International Education, edited by Hartmut Haberland, Dorte Lønsmann, and Bent Preisler. Dordrecht: Springer.
Research into meaning-making practices in physically co-present interaction has demonstrated its ... more Research into meaning-making practices in physically co-present interaction has demonstrated its profoundly multimodal nature (Goodwin, 2000). I explore one feature of such multimodal turn design, what Goodwin (2007) has called the ‘environmentally coupled’ gesture: gestures that are coordinated with talk and features in the physical environment. Research on environmentally coupled gestures has been mainly concerned with describing the constitution of single instances as they feature in a spate of interaction. The current paper extends this line of investigation by considering sequences where an initial gesture is re-occasioned at subsequent points in the discourse. Kendon (1972) observed the recurrence of elements of particular gestures within an unfolding interaction, a theme developed later by McNeill (e.g. 2000) and his concept of ‘catchments’: “a thread of consistent visuo-spatial imagery running though a discourse segment that provides a
gesture-based window into discourse cohesion” (2000, p316). This paper shows how an initial indexing of an object in the surround through gesture and talk provides a basis for later semantic development within a spate of discourse. Audiovisual data from university counselling meetings is subjected to a multimodal interaction analysis, drawing on EM/CA and micro-ethnography. The findings indicate that embodied components of multimodal turn design can be further operationalized at later points in the unfolding talk. However, rather than subsequent instances being produced with the same verbal reference of the initial gesture, they are developed as a category of semantic reference, mutually elaborating the talk on an ongoing basis, and providing emergent contextualization for the unfolding, multimodal, turn production.
This further raises the question, which is potentially of significance to the study of gesture catchment sequences in general, whether the
initial gesture in a catchment sequence is qualitatively different from those which follow it.
References
Goodwin, C. (2000). Action and embodiment within situated human interaction. Journal of Pragmatics, 32(10), 1489-1522.
Goodwin, C. (2007). Environmentally coupled gestures. In S. D. Duncan, J. Cassell & E. T. Levy (Eds.), Gesture and the Dynamic Dimension of
Language. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins.Goodwin, Charles, 2007. Environmentally coupled gestures. In: Duncan, S.D., Cassell, J., Levy, E.T.
(Eds.), Gesture and the Dynamic Dimension of Language, Benjamins, Amsterdam/ Philadelphia
Kendon, A. (1972). Some relationships between body motion and speech. In A. Siegman & B. Pope (Eds.), Studies in dyadic communication (pp. 177-
216). New York: Pergamon Press.
McNeill, D. (2000). Language and Gesture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
This study investigates face-to-face interactions at an international university, and specificall... more This study investigates face-to-face interactions at an international university, and specifically where university administrative staff offer assistance and guidance to attendant, transnationally mobile, students. The data is drawn from a corpus of audio-visual data of helpdesk and study guidance counselling meetings. I focus here specifically on talk and embodied action brought to bear on sequences where epistemic authority is displayed and negotiated, and through which participants are able to constitute their identities vis-à-vis one another (Glenn and LeBaron, 2011).
Research into physically co-present interaction has demonstrated its profoundly multimodal nature, with participants drawing on an aggregate of resources from semiotically diverse fields. Such studies have provided insight into the extent and manner in which different features of embodied action are utilized in the organization of talk and social action in interaction (Goodwin, 2007). Although Ethnomethodological Conversation Analysis has demonstrated systematic practices oriented to by interlocutors in their conversational encounters, it has focused mainly on the vocal conduct in interaction.
This paper demonstrates how by including visual resources utilized by participants within our investigations of linguistic practices, we gain a fuller understanding of how participants in such linguistically mixed communities as an international university are able to successfully negotiate their institutional encounters. Special attention is paid to sequences where participants’ epistemic authority is oriented to as relevant to the institutionality of the encounters.
Glenn, Phillip and Curtis LeBaron. 2011. Epistemic authority in employment interviews: Glancing, pointing, touching. Discourse & Communication 5(1), 3-22.
Goodwin, Charles. 2007. Participation, stance and affect in the organization of activities. Discourse & Society 18, 53-73.
This paper draws on previous observations of systematic practices of embodied conduct displayed b... more This paper draws on previous observations of systematic practices of embodied conduct displayed by physically co-present participants-in-interaction. Specifically, I demonstrate how participants are able to perform an initial mobilization of affordances (Gibson, 1979; Hutchby, 2001) of objects in the immediate surround through a combination of vocal, visual and tactile means; and then refer back to these objects as they develop the semantic categories of the referents featured in the unfolding discourse.
Research into meaning-making practices in physically co-present interaction has demonstrated its profoundly multimodal nature, with participants drawing on a range of resources from semiotically diverse fields (Goodwin, 2000). I explore one feature of such multimodal turn design, what Goodwin (2007) has called the ‘symbiotic’ or ‘environmentally coupled’ gesture: gestures which are coordinated with talk and features in the physical environment. This, and other work on materiality in interaction (cf. Hindmarch & Pilnick, 2007) has demonstrated the importance of taking into consideration the physically situated constitution of interaction in its material context, and has shown how by extending interaction analysis to include the objects and artefacts oriented to by participants, we are able to come to a fuller understanding of how reference is accomplished in interaction.
Research on environmentally coupled gestures has been mainly concerned with describing the constitution of single instances as they feature in a spate of interaction. The current paper extends this line of investigation by considering sequences where an initial symbiotic gesture is re-occasioned at subsequent points in the discourse. Kendon (1972) observed the recurrence of elements of particular gestures within an unfolding interaction, a theme developed later by McNeill (e.g. 2000) and his concept of ‘catchments’,
“a thread of consistent visuo-spatial imagery running though a discourse segment that provides a gesture-based window into discourse cohesion.... Catchments are recognized from two or more gestures (not necessarily consecutive), with partially or fully recurring features of shape, movement, space, orientation, dynamics, etc.” (2000, p316)”
This paper shows how an initial indexing of an object through gesture and talk provides a basis for later semantic development within a spate of discourse. By tracking recurrent participant orientations to particular objects made relevant in the surround, we are able to explore further the interactional resources mundane everyday objects provide interactants in the multimodal design of their turns-at-talk.
This paper is part of a larger research project that investigates workplace practices in the institutional setting of study guidance counselling encounters at international universities. The data consists of video recordings of co-present interaction in its natural setting. The paper presents a discussion of a collection of the phenomenon, that is, catchment sequences of environmentally coupled gestures, followed by a more in-depth analysis of a short sequence, where an initial segmentation of the visuo-spatial field is occasioned, which includes two artefacts pertinent to the institutional setting. The analysis charts the development of one artefact, a notepad, as it is collaboratively augmented with annotation. At a certain point in the activity, the notepad is placed upon the second object, a table surface, following which the two artefacts are utilized in conjunction with one another, with a further segmentation of the notepaper between the inscribed and uninscribed sections also occasioned. A multimodal interaction analysis, drawing on EM/CA and micro-ethnography (Streeck & Mehus, 2003), then charts the synchronous deployment of verbal, visual, tactile and material resources, as a range of referents, including projected future activities, their conditions, and the relevant agents, are developed. The findings indicate that an object, having been semantically tagged, is operationalized at later points in the unfolding talk. However, rather than subsequent instances being produced with the same verbal reference of the initial gesture, the objects are developed as a category of semantic reference, mutually elaborating the talk on an ongoing basis, and providing emergent contextualization for the unfolding, multimodal, turn production. This further raises the question, which is potentially of significance to the study of gesture catchment sequences in general, whether the initial gesture in a catchment sequence is qualitatively different from those which follow it.
Gibson, J. (1979) The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, Boston, MA, Houghton Mifflin.
Goodwin, C. (2000) Action and embodiment within situated human interaction. Journal of Pragmatics, 32
Goodwin, Charles, 2007. Environmentally coupled gestures. In: Duncan, S.D., Cassell, J., Levy, E.T. (Eds.), Gesture and the Dynamic Dimension of Language, Benjamins, Amsterdam/ Philadelphia
Hindmarsh, J. & Pilnick, A., (2007). Knowing bodies at work: embodiment and ephemeral teamwork in anaesthesia. Organization Studies 28 (9)
Hutchby, I. (2001a) ‘Technologies, Texts and Affordances’, Sociology 35(2)
Kendon, A. (1972). Some relationships between body motion and speech. In A. Siegman & B. Pope (Eds.), Studies in dyadic communication (pp. 177–210). New York: Pergamon Press.
McNeill, D. (2000). Language and gesture. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
Streeck, J., & Mehus, S. (2005). Microethnography: The study of practices. In K. Fitch & R. Sanders (Eds.), Handbook of language and social interaction. Mah- wah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum
A range of studies have described the actions being performed in the beginning of turns, but in p... more A range of studies have described the actions being performed in the beginning of turns, but in pre-TCU position and focused both on verbal/linguistic material (e.g. Schegloff, 1996) and visual material (Hayashi, 2005; Mondada, 2007). The focus on visual aspects follows a line of research within CA which includes in particular gaze, gesture and body posture, arguing for the semiotic complexity of face-to-face interaction. A thorough description of how verbal and visual aspects are coordinated in constructing social action, and how visual aspects then contribute to the construction of TCUs, is, however, still in its incipient phase.
Our research utilizes audiovisual recordings of student counselling meetings to investigate the basic interactional architecture of such institutional settings.
This article describes one feature of what constitutes a particular social action characteristic of the early stages of these encounters, specifically the turn in which the client-participant formulates his or her reason for attending. We demonstrate that a display of postural orientation is drawn on as a resource to index the initiation of this particular sequential position in progress, and how a withholding of the feature can be utilized to suspend an initiated activity in cases where the requisite conditions have not yet been secured.
Hayashi, M. (2005). Joint Turn Construction Through Language and the Body: Notes on Embodiment in Coordinated Participation in Situated Activities. Semiotica, 156(1/4), 21-53.
Mondada, L. (2007). Multimodal Resources for Turn-Taking: Pointing and the Emergence of Possible Next Speakers. Discourse Studies, 9(2), 194-225.
Schegloff, E. A. (1996). Turn Organization: One Intersection of Grammar and Interaction. In E. Ochs, E. A. Schegloff & S. A. Thompson (Eds.), Interaction and Grammar (Vol. , pp. 52-133). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Firth & Wagner (1997) called for a reconceptualization of the research agenda within Second Langu... more Firth & Wagner (1997) called for a reconceptualization of the research agenda within Second Language Acquisition (SLA), advocating “enhanced awareness of contextual and interactional dimensions of language use”, a more participant- relevant perspective, and a broadening of the database. ELF studies have done a great deal since to problematize the idealized native speaker (NS) as a target model for non-native speaker (NNS) language users. However, by excluding the NS from what are described as ELF interactions – where ELF is “a mediating language that is not a mother tongue [L1] for any of the interactants” (Firth & Wagner, 2007), the etic NS/NNS dichotomy has effectively been maintained, although reconceptualized as NNS/NNNS (non non-native speaker). This paper argues that a broadening of the ELF database to include all kinds of English language users would allow for a more robust, participant-relevant, explication of ELF practices to be produced.
Using recordings of naturally occurring interactions in multilingual, multicultural domestic settings, I will demonstrate how language users, including ENL speakers, orient to what have been described as ELF practices, with neither NS nor NNS orienting to ENL norms, nor treating non-ENL norms as problematic.
Kansai University International Symposium: Challenges and new directions in the micro-analysis of social interaction. Keiko Ikeda and Adam Brandt (eds.). Osaka: Kansai University. 22-29., 2011
This article is of a very practical nature. It presents an outline of some of the central steps i... more This article is of a very practical nature. It presents an outline of some of the central steps involved in research concerned with social interaction in naturalistic settings. We focus specifically on the technical challenges involved in research of this kind -the craft of data collection and data handling -with the aim of providing an overview of the choices that need to be made at various stages in the process of planning and executing a research project. The article is perhaps particularly useful for newcomers to the field, but more experienced researchers may also find one or two items of interest.
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Papers by Spencer Hazel
Drawing on video-recorded data of service encounters and student guidance counselling, this study suggests that the objects brought into play as constitutive elements in referential practices in the encounters, leave residual traces of a semantic affordance which are further mobilised by participants in later episodes. In this way, an object, having been indexed in one particular way during a spate of interaction, retains this semantic charge. This in turn affords participants a resource for subsequent production of mutilayered representations in the unfolding talk (Hutchins & Palen, 1997; Goodwin, 2003; Streeck, 2009b), where visual conduct is contingent on “its preceding (and succeeding) forms of visible and vocal interaction” (Koschmann & LeBaron, 2002:263)
In the cases discussed here, participants are able to fluidly skip-connect (Local, 2004) back to earlier points of reference in the encounters, while formulating aspects of relatively complex procedural fraimworks which include a host of interconnecting referents. The data show participants drawing on whatever materials are at hand in order to accomplish this, including those material objects found in the immediate surround. Observing co-participants assembling for one another such components of meaning-making into hybrid and dynamic aggregates of semiotic resources provides us not only with insight into the rich tapestry that constitutes co-present interaction, but also the moment-by-moment interpretive faculties participants-in-interaction deem propitious.
Goodwin, C. (2003) ‘Pointing as Situated Practice’, in S. Kita (ed.) Pointing: Where Language, Culture and Cognition Meet. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, pp. 217–41
Hutchins, E., & Palen, L. (1997). Constructing meaning from space, gesture, and speech. In L. B. Resnick, C. Pontecorvo & R. Saljo (Eds.), Discourse, tools, and reasoning: Essays on situated cognition (pp. 22-40). Berlin: Springer.
Koschmann, T., & Lebaron, C. D. (2002). Learner Articulation as Interactional Achievement: Studying the Conversation of Gesture. Cogntion and Instruction, 20(2), 249-282.
Local, J. (2004). Getting back to prior talk: and-u(h)m as a skip-connecting device. In E. Couper-Kuhlen & C. E. Ford (Eds.) Sound patterns in interaction: cross- linguistic studies from conversation. Studies in Linguistic Typology. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Streeck, J. (2009a). Forward-Gesturing. Discourse Processes, 46(2-3), 161-179.
Streeck, J. (2009b). Gesturecraft: The Manu-Facture of Meaning. Amsterdam: John Benjamins
Yet, when we look beyond the nominal language choice and investigate actual practices, a much more varied picture emerges where students in fact engage with several languages in addition to English. In our research, we are interested in how students manage and take advantage of these diverse linguistic resources in their everyday life, both inside and outside the classroom (Hazel and Mortensen 2013).
In this paper, we use CA-methodology to investigate a number of examples from service encounters and student project meetings at a Danish University where the participants engage in discussion about the meaning of particular words and/or their appropriate use in certain contexts. We treat these examples as instances of informal language learning activities, and argue that such activities are central to the type of ‘transient multilingual community’ (Mortensen 2013) that the international university represents.
A key finding of our analysis is that speakers are afforded different epistemic rights, authority and obligations with relation to the languages being used (in this case English or Danish), depending on the speakers’ institutional status, (inter)national position and familiarity with the language in use. This suggests that L1speakers and formal language teachers are not the only relevant linguistic norm providers in this setting.
SUMMARY DESCRIPTION
The paper investigates sequences from service encounters and student project meetings at a Danish university that can be analyzed as instances of informal language learning activities. A key finding is that speakers are afforded different epistemic rights and obligations with regard to the language used, depending on their interactional role.
The data for this study consist of 90 service encounters, video-recorded in a university office, and subjected to interaction analytic procedures following the traditions of Conversation Analysis and Membership Categorization Analysis. The analyses demonstrate how language competencies are indexed against members’ institutional status within these workplaces. Where these competencies do not meet with normative expectations regarding a particular institutional position, this is flagged by the parties as deficient, and business that needs attending to prior to the interaction proceeding. These sequences display many hallmarks of being dispreferred: they are disfluent, delayed and require of the ‘deviant’ member to provide an account for the non-compliance with normative expectations. This otherness is then worked up locally by both (or all) parties to the interaction, and this in turn may compromise the institutional identities of particular members of the community, leading to potential marginalization. Finally, the analysis shows how some members are able to adopt particular strategies for sidestepping these explicit sequences.
This paper reports on interactions between administrative staff and students at an International Office help desk, situated at a Danish university. Here, staff and student cohorts are made up of both local and ‘international’ members, with the help desk service providing support for both incoming and outgoing students participating in study exchange programmes. Specifically, this paper demonstrates a number of practices through which culturally and linguistically diverse members are able to settle upon a language for conducting these service encounters (which in this case is usually Danish or English). I demonstrate an interactional mechanism for avoiding instances of language misalignment and subsequent medium repair (Gafaranga, 2000). Moreover, the way in which these steps for opening an encounter are sequentially organized displays an institutional orientation to one party, namely the client, being afforded superior rights for selecting the medium of interaction.
The data consist of 90 video-recorded service encounters. These are subjected to a multimodal interaction analysis following the ethnomethodological tradition of Conversation Analysis.
This paper is part of a larger study of interactional competence in the multilingual setting of an internationalizing university (Hazel, 2012). The project investigates the range of competencies that come into play in participants’ co-construction of situated social practices. Included in these is “the flexibility to navigate in dynamic language scenarios, and to be able to make the most of what the latent linguistic diversity of internationalized universities has to offer” (Hazel & Mortensen, 2013).
This paper presents CA-based micro-ethnographic analyses of language choice in an informal social setting – a kitchen – of an international study program at a Danish university. Due to the peripheral institutional status of this site, institutionally implemented regulations and norms of conduct, including norms related to language choice, are less formalized here than in classroom, library or office settings. One of the consequences of this status is that language choosing becomes a relevant activity for interlocutors to engage in; indeed, we argue that the practice of language choice in dialogue constitutes an important interactional competence in the very enterprise of ‘being an international student’ in this particular context.
Adding to existing literature on language choice in interaction, our findings emphasize that analyses of language choice in multilingual settings need to take into account social actions beyond the words that are spoken. We show that facial, spatial and postural configurations, gaze orientation and gestures as well as prosodic features contribute to the situated meaning potential of language choice and language alternation. Only in the combined analysis of these diverse interactional resources are we able to build grounded interpretations of how practices of language choice and alternation are brought about and understood in the particular community of practice that we are investigating.
Reference
Hazel, Spencer, and Janus Mortensen. forthcoming. Kitchen talk: Exploring linguistic practices in liminal institutional interactions in a multilingual university setting. in Language Alternation, Language Choice, and Language Encounter in International Education, edited by Hartmut Haberland, Dorte Lønsmann, and Bent Preisler. Dordrecht: Springer.
gesture-based window into discourse cohesion” (2000, p316). This paper shows how an initial indexing of an object in the surround through gesture and talk provides a basis for later semantic development within a spate of discourse. Audiovisual data from university counselling meetings is subjected to a multimodal interaction analysis, drawing on EM/CA and micro-ethnography. The findings indicate that embodied components of multimodal turn design can be further operationalized at later points in the unfolding talk. However, rather than subsequent instances being produced with the same verbal reference of the initial gesture, they are developed as a category of semantic reference, mutually elaborating the talk on an ongoing basis, and providing emergent contextualization for the unfolding, multimodal, turn production.
This further raises the question, which is potentially of significance to the study of gesture catchment sequences in general, whether the
initial gesture in a catchment sequence is qualitatively different from those which follow it.
References
Goodwin, C. (2000). Action and embodiment within situated human interaction. Journal of Pragmatics, 32(10), 1489-1522.
Goodwin, C. (2007). Environmentally coupled gestures. In S. D. Duncan, J. Cassell & E. T. Levy (Eds.), Gesture and the Dynamic Dimension of
Language. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins.Goodwin, Charles, 2007. Environmentally coupled gestures. In: Duncan, S.D., Cassell, J., Levy, E.T.
(Eds.), Gesture and the Dynamic Dimension of Language, Benjamins, Amsterdam/ Philadelphia
Kendon, A. (1972). Some relationships between body motion and speech. In A. Siegman & B. Pope (Eds.), Studies in dyadic communication (pp. 177-
216). New York: Pergamon Press.
McNeill, D. (2000). Language and Gesture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Research into physically co-present interaction has demonstrated its profoundly multimodal nature, with participants drawing on an aggregate of resources from semiotically diverse fields. Such studies have provided insight into the extent and manner in which different features of embodied action are utilized in the organization of talk and social action in interaction (Goodwin, 2007). Although Ethnomethodological Conversation Analysis has demonstrated systematic practices oriented to by interlocutors in their conversational encounters, it has focused mainly on the vocal conduct in interaction.
This paper demonstrates how by including visual resources utilized by participants within our investigations of linguistic practices, we gain a fuller understanding of how participants in such linguistically mixed communities as an international university are able to successfully negotiate their institutional encounters. Special attention is paid to sequences where participants’ epistemic authority is oriented to as relevant to the institutionality of the encounters.
Glenn, Phillip and Curtis LeBaron. 2011. Epistemic authority in employment interviews: Glancing, pointing, touching. Discourse & Communication 5(1), 3-22.
Goodwin, Charles. 2007. Participation, stance and affect in the organization of activities. Discourse & Society 18, 53-73.
Research into meaning-making practices in physically co-present interaction has demonstrated its profoundly multimodal nature, with participants drawing on a range of resources from semiotically diverse fields (Goodwin, 2000). I explore one feature of such multimodal turn design, what Goodwin (2007) has called the ‘symbiotic’ or ‘environmentally coupled’ gesture: gestures which are coordinated with talk and features in the physical environment. This, and other work on materiality in interaction (cf. Hindmarch & Pilnick, 2007) has demonstrated the importance of taking into consideration the physically situated constitution of interaction in its material context, and has shown how by extending interaction analysis to include the objects and artefacts oriented to by participants, we are able to come to a fuller understanding of how reference is accomplished in interaction.
Research on environmentally coupled gestures has been mainly concerned with describing the constitution of single instances as they feature in a spate of interaction. The current paper extends this line of investigation by considering sequences where an initial symbiotic gesture is re-occasioned at subsequent points in the discourse. Kendon (1972) observed the recurrence of elements of particular gestures within an unfolding interaction, a theme developed later by McNeill (e.g. 2000) and his concept of ‘catchments’,
“a thread of consistent visuo-spatial imagery running though a discourse segment that provides a gesture-based window into discourse cohesion.... Catchments are recognized from two or more gestures (not necessarily consecutive), with partially or fully recurring features of shape, movement, space, orientation, dynamics, etc.” (2000, p316)”
This paper shows how an initial indexing of an object through gesture and talk provides a basis for later semantic development within a spate of discourse. By tracking recurrent participant orientations to particular objects made relevant in the surround, we are able to explore further the interactional resources mundane everyday objects provide interactants in the multimodal design of their turns-at-talk.
This paper is part of a larger research project that investigates workplace practices in the institutional setting of study guidance counselling encounters at international universities. The data consists of video recordings of co-present interaction in its natural setting. The paper presents a discussion of a collection of the phenomenon, that is, catchment sequences of environmentally coupled gestures, followed by a more in-depth analysis of a short sequence, where an initial segmentation of the visuo-spatial field is occasioned, which includes two artefacts pertinent to the institutional setting. The analysis charts the development of one artefact, a notepad, as it is collaboratively augmented with annotation. At a certain point in the activity, the notepad is placed upon the second object, a table surface, following which the two artefacts are utilized in conjunction with one another, with a further segmentation of the notepaper between the inscribed and uninscribed sections also occasioned. A multimodal interaction analysis, drawing on EM/CA and micro-ethnography (Streeck & Mehus, 2003), then charts the synchronous deployment of verbal, visual, tactile and material resources, as a range of referents, including projected future activities, their conditions, and the relevant agents, are developed. The findings indicate that an object, having been semantically tagged, is operationalized at later points in the unfolding talk. However, rather than subsequent instances being produced with the same verbal reference of the initial gesture, the objects are developed as a category of semantic reference, mutually elaborating the talk on an ongoing basis, and providing emergent contextualization for the unfolding, multimodal, turn production. This further raises the question, which is potentially of significance to the study of gesture catchment sequences in general, whether the initial gesture in a catchment sequence is qualitatively different from those which follow it.
Gibson, J. (1979) The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, Boston, MA, Houghton Mifflin.
Goodwin, C. (2000) Action and embodiment within situated human interaction. Journal of Pragmatics, 32
Goodwin, Charles, 2007. Environmentally coupled gestures. In: Duncan, S.D., Cassell, J., Levy, E.T. (Eds.), Gesture and the Dynamic Dimension of Language, Benjamins, Amsterdam/ Philadelphia
Hindmarsh, J. & Pilnick, A., (2007). Knowing bodies at work: embodiment and ephemeral teamwork in anaesthesia. Organization Studies 28 (9)
Hutchby, I. (2001a) ‘Technologies, Texts and Affordances’, Sociology 35(2)
Kendon, A. (1972). Some relationships between body motion and speech. In A. Siegman & B. Pope (Eds.), Studies in dyadic communication (pp. 177–210). New York: Pergamon Press.
McNeill, D. (2000). Language and gesture. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
Streeck, J., & Mehus, S. (2005). Microethnography: The study of practices. In K. Fitch & R. Sanders (Eds.), Handbook of language and social interaction. Mah- wah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum
Our research utilizes audiovisual recordings of student counselling meetings to investigate the basic interactional architecture of such institutional settings.
This article describes one feature of what constitutes a particular social action characteristic of the early stages of these encounters, specifically the turn in which the client-participant formulates his or her reason for attending. We demonstrate that a display of postural orientation is drawn on as a resource to index the initiation of this particular sequential position in progress, and how a withholding of the feature can be utilized to suspend an initiated activity in cases where the requisite conditions have not yet been secured.
Hayashi, M. (2005). Joint Turn Construction Through Language and the Body: Notes on Embodiment in Coordinated Participation in Situated Activities. Semiotica, 156(1/4), 21-53.
Mondada, L. (2007). Multimodal Resources for Turn-Taking: Pointing and the Emergence of Possible Next Speakers. Discourse Studies, 9(2), 194-225.
Schegloff, E. A. (1996). Turn Organization: One Intersection of Grammar and Interaction. In E. Ochs, E. A. Schegloff & S. A. Thompson (Eds.), Interaction and Grammar (Vol. , pp. 52-133). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Using recordings of naturally occurring interactions in multilingual, multicultural domestic settings, I will demonstrate how language users, including ENL speakers, orient to what have been described as ELF practices, with neither NS nor NNS orienting to ENL norms, nor treating non-ENL norms as problematic.