Spring 2022
April 13 Olga Anatoli Smith, Child Studies, Linköping University
Child-initiated tellings and preschool participation
In this data session I will share excerpts from a bilingual preschool in Sweden, focusing on very young children’s (1-5 yo) practices for including adults (teachers) in a meaningful conversation.
The context of a preschool, where children are offered both education and care, is a productive site for observing learners’ evolving linguistic and social competences beyond classroom interaction. When talking about enabling and encouraging participation in early childhood education and care, existent research has mainly focused on actions initiated by teachers. This can be explained with the great asymmetry in epistemic access between teachers and children, as well as their institutional roles. Outside of children’s conversational storytelling, there have not been many studies about tellings initiated by a child toward an adult, and such instances will be presented for analysis.
April 20 Julia Katila, Tampere, Pirkanmaa, Finland Feeling the Touch: the emergence facial expressions during kisses and hugs among romantic couples
The facial expressions are a salient channel through which participants of interaction continuously make visible their involvement both in the ongoing interaction as well as in “inner” processes such as emotions or thinking (see Goodwin and Goodwin, 1986). Drawing from Kendon’s (1975) work on facial patterns during kissing (p. 327–330), I identify and uncover the moment-by-moment emergence of an experiencing face among Finnish romantic couples during kissing. Upon such moments of intimate touch, the facial gestures often momentarily “shut down” and give way to simply experiencing the emotion and tactile “being-with another person while cuddling” (M.H. Goodwin, 2017: 76). It is this facial expression of both experiencing and “showing an orienting towards” the inner experience of an affective moment that is of my interest. While many studies take an expressive and/or communicative (e.g. Bavelas & Chovil 2018; Ekman 1997) approach to facial gestures, I add to the study of facial expressions by including a focus on the simultaneity of and an interplay between expressive and experiential aspects of face in interaction. Taking a phenomenological approach to interaction studies based on Merleau-Ponty (1962), we approach the facial postures from an intercorporeal perspective (Meyer et al. 2017; Katila and Turja, 2021): they are expressions of “living bodies” (Streeck, 2013) entailing experienced, expressive, and interactional features.
April 27 Amanda Bateman, Education, University of Waikato, New Zealand and Amelia Church, Early Childhood, U of Melbourne, Australia
Questions as pedagogical opportunities in early childhood education
In our talk we explore analysis of question–answer sequences during problem inquiry between ECE teachers and children in New Zealand and Australia. Conversation analysis is used to reveal which questions the teacher asks, how children answer the questions, and the teacher’s responses to the child’s answers. Although adults’ ‘effective’ questions were identified and promoted in the REPEY study much less attention has been given to how adults respond to children’s answers. It is imperative to investigate the sequences of talk which follow a question in order to establish how teaching and learning is co-constructed in context, one utterance at a time and as a joint project between teacher and child. In analysing this data, we are paying attention to how the teacher’s talk is contiguous to the child’s response; that is, how the teacher builds on the display of the child’s understanding by (re-)designing (the next question in) the next turn.
May 4 Asta Cekaite and Malva Holm Kvist, Child Studies, Linköping University
Play and affection in embodied encounters: Touch that brings out stance inversion
We will present data from adult-child interactions where playfulness is invoked through embodied means. Mundane situations where touch is used to playfully manipulate the child’s body, sensorial and affective experiences are examined. Extracts address daily encounters where the adult uses (similar forms) of touch, e.g., tickling, for various social aims, such as to (i) play; (ii) distract the child by shifting her affective and embodied stance.
It is commonly acknowledged that touch communicates by producing sensations in the other. Various issues can be further discussed, e.g. how embodied actions can be used to recalibrate: the recipient’s affective stance (by accomplishing stance inversion), participation in an activity, and how participants relate to each other. It is also of interest to see how touch is used to ’trigger’ changes in the recipient’s/participants’ social conduct by ’coaxing’ an outburst of bodily experiences such as when the recipient shifts/is ’forced’ to change from acting as ’an imobile, interactionally unavailable body’ to an embodied object-subject for the other’s ’manipulation’.
Data: video-ethnography in a middle-class preschool in Sweden.
May 11 Ali Reza Majlesi, Education, Stockholm University
The emergence of trouble in turn taking in human-robot interactions
This study is based on around 10 hours of experimental, video-recorded interactions between pairs of recruited participants and a social robot called Furhat. The robot was programmed to play a language game with the participants. In this study, we explore the source of trouble leading to restarts in talk in the introductory sequences of the interactions where the robot greeted the participants and invited them to introduce themselves. Drawing on the multimodal analysis of talk-in-interaction, we display the significance of coordination in talk in its details and how the robots’ scripted verbal behavior may mismatch the basic rules of turn-taking known in human-human conversations (Sacks, Jefferson, Schegloff, 1974). The study demonstrates how the projectability of turn-completions, which usually are naturally used for the minimization of gaps and overlaps in human-human talk, may sometimes get lost in talk with robots. In the studied sequences, the robot’s action-designs do not allow early turn-transitions when an action is recognized in the procedure of its production, and the completion of a turn is projected by a human partner. Moreover, we will show how human conversation partners have to do some interactional work to figure out the idiosyncrasy of the speech exchange system to coordinate with the robot. The results of the study point not only to the improvables in robot engineering but also to the humans’ routine practice of projection and their abilities to adapt to the robot’s interactional skills.
May 18, Ignasi Clemente, Anthropology, Hunter College
From Joking to Serious Gestures: Failures and Successes of Communicating Worry and Pain without Words
In this presentation, I examine two sequences in which Alan, a young adult whose ability to speak has been severely limited by a traumatic brain injury (TBI), both fails and succeeds to communicate gesturally about his worries about TBI sequelae. Whereas in previous presentations I focused on Alan’s rich multimodal gestural resources to initiate and bring to completion short joking/teasing sequences during a physical therapy session, I examine here the challenges of initiating and bringing to completion extended and more semantically-syntactically complex messages in the absence of words and of a conventionalized form of sign language. In particular, I argue that Alan’s success depends on his miniscule step-by-step breaking down of his gestural message to ensure not only his recipients’ collaboration, but also to check that they understand his course of action up to that point, before he can build upon that mutual understanding to move on to the next “bit” of his action. Thus, the intelligibility of Alan’s gestures not only depends on Alan’s resourcefulness to use anything and everything in his environment to construct meaning, but on his strategic use of the sequential organization of communication and the interactive “litmus test” that recipients’ next action provides him with.
May 25 Jan Hauck , Anthropology, UCLA and Anthropology and London School of Economics and Political Science
‘Yo tengo un amigo que vy’ama’ (I have a friend who is happy): Codeswitching, Languaging, and Translinguistic Misunderstandings in Aché Children’s Songs
Children in the Indigenous Aché communities grow up being exposed to a variety of languages in their environment: Aché, Guaraní, Guaraché (a mixed language composed of elements of both of these), and Spanish. In everyday discourse distinctions don’t matter much, if at all. Aché and Guaraní are genetically very closely related languages and have a large number of cognates. Guaraché arose through a gradual process of language shift from Aché to Guaraní. Spanish has been in contact with Guaraní for 500 years with convergence on multiple levels. Thus, for children, who learn Guaraché as their first language, it is not straightforward to distinguish items in terms of linguistic belonging. However, children also learn standard versions of Aché in school, to which Guaraní and Spanish are added later as well. Moreover, they learn specific texts in these languages, such as songs. Through such texts they learn standardized constructions in each of these languages. And yet, given phonotactic similarities in all of the four languages, at times even here constructions may blend into one another, leading to translinguistic misunderstandings. In this data session we will closely look at a Spanish song, a part of which is heard by a boy as Guaraní, and then corrected by his elder peers. We will use this example for a critical discussion of (trans-)languaging approaches.
June 1 Kreeta Niemi, Education and Psychology, University of Jyväskylä, Finland, and UCLA CLIC Visitor
The spectrum of the teacher’s presence and students’ entanglement
Renewed curricula and learning spaces and greater reliance on digital tools enforce changes in teachers’ and students’ activities. Among these are an increase in co-teaching and presupposition of a range of teachers’ teaching and management skills to scaffold multiple ongoing engagements when students are working independently in peer groups in versatile learning spaces with digital devices. Unlike leading plenary talk from the front of theclassroom, teaching has become more mobile and ‘hands on’—teachers have to ‘make rounds’ to guide students for productive learning. On the one hand, teachers need to guide students by posing questions and goals; on the other hand, they have to enable students’ self-regulatory learning. At the same time, teachers must synchronise their teaching with their co-teachers. Based on my preliminary observations from the data, teachers do the ‘rounds’ very differently, which impacts students’ entanglement with the learning task and/or interaction with the teachers. The preliminary aim is to create a spectrum of teachers’ presence and students’ entanglement. The video data are drawn from relatively large Finnish primary school classrooms (up to 60 students) where teachers teach in teams, and learning interaction relies greatly on digital tools.