Shifting embodied participation in multiparty university student meetings

PhD ThesisStudent group work has been used in higher education as an effective means to cultivate students’ work-related skills and cooperative learning. These encounters of small groups are the sites where, through talk and other resources, university students get their educational tasks done as well as acquire essential workplace skills such as problem-solving, team working, decision-making and leadership. However, settings of educational talk-as-work, such as student group meetings, remain under-researched (Stokoe, Benwell, & Attenborough, 2013). The present study therefore attempts to bridge this gap by investigating the professional and academic abilities of university students to participate in multiparty group meetings, drawing upon a dataset of video- and audio-recorded meetings from the Newcastle University Corpus of Academic English (NUCASE). The dataset consists of ten hours of meetings in which a group of naval architecture undergraduate students work cooperatively on their final year project – to design and build a wind turbine. The study applies the methodological approach of conversation analysis (CA) with a multimodal perspective. It presents a fine-detailed, sequential multimodal analysis of a collection of cases of speaker transitions, and reveals how meeting participants display speakership and recipiency with their verbal/vocal and bodily-visual coordination. In this respect, the present study is the first to offer a systematic collection, as well as a thorough investigation, of speaker transition and turn-taking practices from a multimodal perspective, especially with the scope of analysis beyond pre-turn and turn-beginning positions. It shows how speaker transitions through ‘current speaker selects next’ and ‘next speaker self-selects’ are joint-undertakings not only between the self-selecting/current speaker, and the target recipient/addressed next speaker, but also among other co-present participants. Especially, by mobilising the whole set of multimodal resources, participants are able to display their multiple orientations toward their co-participants, project, pursue and accomplish multiple courses of action in concurrence, and intricately coordinate their mutual orientation toward the shifting and emerging participation framework during the transition, establishment and maintenance of the speakership and recipiency. By presenting the data and analysis, this study extends ii boundaries of existing understandings on the temporality, sequentiality and systematicity of multimodal resources in talk-and-bodies-in-interaction. The thesis also contributes to interaction research in the particular context of student group work in higher education contexts, by providing a ‘screenshot’ of students’ academic lives as it unfolds ‘in flight’. Particularly, it reveals how students competently participate in multiparty group meetings (e.g., taking and allocating turns), co-construct the unfolding meeting procedures (e.g., roundtable update discussion), and jointly achieve the local interactional goals (e.g., sharing work progress, reaching an agreement). Acquiring such skills is, as it argues above, not only crucial for accomplishing the educational tasks, but also necessary for preparing university students to fulfill their future workplace expectations. The study therefore further informs the practices of university students and professional practitioners in multiparty meetings, and also draws on methodological implications for multimodal CA research

Detecting Low Rapport During Natural Interactions in Small Groups from Non-Verbal Behaviour

Rapport, the close and harmonious relationship in which interaction partners are "in sync" with each other, was shown to result in smoother social interactions, improved collaboration, and improved interpersonal outcomes. In this work, we are first to investigate automatic prediction of low rapport during natural interactions within small groups. This task is challenging given that rapport only manifests in subtle non-verbal signals that are, in addition, subject to influences of group dynamics as well as inter-personal idiosyncrasies. We record videos of unscripted discussions of three to four people using a multi-view camera system and microphones. We analyse a rich set of non-verbal signals for rapport detection, namely facial expressions, hand motion, gaze, speaker turns, and speech prosody. Using facial features, we can detect low rapport with an average precision of 0.7 (chance level at 0.25), while incorporating prior knowledge of participants' personalities can even achieve early prediction without a drop in performance. We further provide a detailed analysis of different feature sets and the amount of information contained in different temporal segments of the interactions.Comment: 12 pages, 6 figure

Achieving mutual engagement in ELT classroom interaction : a study of participation in the opening and closing practices of circle time

IPhD ThesisMost studies investigating classroom participation seek an answer for enquiries to such issues as whether students receive adequate opportunities to access interaction and, if so, in what capacity and in what roles. Recently, Conversation Analytic (CA) studies have contributed to the existing body of knowledge on classroom participation by addressing the question of how teachers and students organise such participation in L2 classrooms. However, most of these studies have approached participation in contexts where participation rights are established by the teacher and met by students. In contrast, this study is concerned more with the organisation of participation in EFL classrooms where such conditions do not apply. That is, in the context of this study, teachers need to perform additional interactional practices to encourage participation. The analyses in this study focus on the opening and closing practices of one recurring teacher-led activity in the data—Circle Time (CT). The data come from audiovisual recordings of teacher-student cohort interaction occurring in ‘Fundamental English Listening-Speaking’ (FELS) classes at a Thai university. To examine the organisation of participation, a collection of 30 examples of CT openings and 24 examples of CT closings were made and CA methodology was used in the analysis. CA procedures, including the organisation of sequence, of multimodalities, and of topic, were employed as analytic tools to explicate the classroom participation that participants jointly construct through their verbal behaviour and embodied actions. The findings demonstrate that dedicated openings are the norm for CT openings, and are formed from two action sequences: 1) locating topic for participation, and 2) establishing topic-as-action. The former manifests a clear framework of participation while the latter enhances the participants’ readiness to participate more actively. Regarding CT closings, a typical form of CT closing, termed here dedicated closings, comprise three sequences of action: 1) disengaging from interaction with individual students, 2) gradually bonding contributions and simultaneously connecting participants into one association, and 3) moving out of CT talk. Furthermore, a microanalysis of opening and closing actions illustrates that teachers employ a variety of extra interactional resources, including embodied conducts, turn-design and various techniques of topic development. ii These various types of interactional work are used to establish and maintain multiparty interaction and generate dynamic participation roles among the participants. By participating in CT dedicated opening and closing, students are observed to have more and more opportunities to establish mutual attention, negotiate mutual understanding, and, above all, develop interpersonal relations, or so-called rapport. These three components are evidently oriented to by experienced EFL teachers to achieve mutual engagement of students involved in teacher-led classroom interaction. The main contribution of the study is an enhanced understanding of how participation ‘gets done’ in a CT context where bidding for turns is normally not present. In addition, by using a micro-analytic approach, the study demonstrates how embodied mutual engagement is accomplished in ELT classroom interaction.Department of Foreign Languages, Faculty of Humanities, Kasetsart University, for granting me a partial scholarshi

A Formal and Functional Analysis of Gaze, Gestures, and Other Body Movements in a Contemporary Dance Improvisation Performance

UID/FIL/00183/2019 PTDC/FER‐FIL/28278/2017This study presents a microanalysis of what information performers “give” and “give off” to each other via their bodies during a contemporary dance improvisation. We compare what expert performers and non-performers (sufficiently trained to successfully perform) do with their bodies during a silent, multiparty improvisation exercise, in order to identify any differences and to provide insight into nonverbal communication in a less conventional setting. The coordinated collaboration of the participants (two groups of six) was examined in a frame-by-frame analysis focusing on all body movements, including gaze shifts as well as the formal and functional movement units produced in the head–face, upper-, and lower-body regions. The Methods section describes in detail the annotation process and inter-rater agreement. The results of this study indicate that expert performers during the improvisation are in “performance mode” and have embodied other social cognitive strategies and skills (e.g., endogenous orienting, gaze avoidance, greater motor control) that the non-performers do not have available. Expert performers avoid using intentional communication, relying on information to be inferentially communicated in order to coordinate collaboratively, with silence and stillness being construed as meaningful in that social practice and context. The information that expert performers produce is quantitatively less (i.e., producing fewer body movements) and qualitatively more inferential than intentional compared to a control group of non-performers, which affects the quality of the performance.publishersversionpublishe

Moving together: the organisation of non-verbal cues during multiparty conversation

PhDConversation is a collaborative activity. In face-to-face interactions interlocutors have mutual access to a shared space. This thesis aims to explore the shared space as a resource for coordinating conversation. As well demonstrated in studies of two-person conversations, interlocutors can coordinate their speech and non-verbal behaviour in ways that manage the unfolding conversation. However, when scaling up from two people to three people interacting, the coordination challenges that the interlocutors face increase. In particular speakers must manage multiple listeners. This thesis examines the use of interlocutors’ bodies in shared space to coordinate their multiparty dialogue. The approach exploits corpora of motion captured triadic interactions. The thesis first explores how interlocutors coordinate their speech and non-verbal behaviour. Inter-person relationships are examined and compared with artificially created triples who did not interact. Results demonstrate that interlocutors avoid speaking and gesturing over each other, but tend to nod together. Evidence is presented that the two recipients of an utterance have different patterns of head and hand movement, and that some of the regularities of movement are correlated with the task structure. The empirical section concludes by uncovering a class of coordination events, termed simultaneous engagement events, that are unique to multiparty dialogue. They are constructed using combinations of speaker head orientation and gesture orientation. The events coordinate multiple recipients of the dialogue and potentially arise as a result of the greater coordination challenges that interlocutors face. They are marked in requiring a mutually accessible shared space in order to be considered an effective interactional cue. The thesis provides quantitative evidence that interlocutors’ head and hand movements are organised by their dialogue state and the task responsibilities that the bear. It is argued that a shared interaction space becomes a more important interactional resource when conversations scale up to three people

Embodied Communicative Activity in Cooperative Conversational Interactions - studies in Visual Interaction Management

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The Role of Eye Gaze and Body Movements in Turn-Taking during a Contemporary Dance Improvisation

Abstract This paper intends to contribute to the multimodal turn-taking literature by presenting data collected in an improvisation session in the context of the performing arts and its qualiquantitative analysis, where the focus is on how gaze and the full body participate in the interaction. Five expert performers joined Portuguese contemporary choreographer, João Fiadeiro, in practicing his Real Time Composition Method during an improvisation session, which was recorded and annotated for this study. A micro-analysis of portions of the session was conducted using ELAN. We found that intersubjectivity was avoided during this performance, both in the performers' bodily movements and mutual gaze; we extrapolate that peripheral vision was chiefly deployed as a regulating strategy by these experts to coordinate turn-taking. A macro-analysis comparing the data with an analogous one obtained from NonPerformers provides the context for a discussion on multimodality and decision-making