Collaborative corrections with spelling control

The present study has explored how pairs of students deployed digital tools (spelling software) as resources in spontaneously occurring corrections of spelling errors. Drawing on the sociocultural theory of learning and ethnomethodological (Conversation Analytic) insights into social interaction, it has identified a range of consistent practices and uses of the spelling tools that were emergent in the everyday educational activities. As demonstrated, technology-assisted error corrections constituted a complex situation, where a number of socioculturally significant factors (goals of the task, properties of the software, and physical access to computer applications) shaped the trajectories of joint work. The present analysis shows in detail how the students approached the visually manifested language production errors by using two kinds of software resources, spelling lists, and a diagnostic tool. The inherent conceptual distinctions, characteristic of these tools, configured joint interpretative work and efforts to correct the errors in different ways. Recurrently, the students’ technology-based corrections were designed as autonomous, stepwise, locally improvised problem solutions, which were subsequently submitted for the evaluation of the diagnostic software. Overall, the study shows that the under-specification of the software’s instructions opened a space for the students’ creative engagement. The potentials of joint spelling software-assisted corrections for collaborative learning are discussed

Shepherding the child: embodied directive sequences in parent-child interactions

The present study explores how directives are constituted in and through situated verbal, bodily, and spatial practices. The foci are parental directives requesting routine family tasks to be carried out in an immediate situational context and necessitating the childs locomotion from one place to another (e.g., to take a bath, brush his/her teeth). As documented, such directive sequences were designed with what is here called parental shepherding moves, that is, "techniques of the body" (Mauss 1973 [1935]) that monitor the childs body for compliance. Body twist, a form of tactile intervention, was deployed to terminate the childs prior activity and initiate a relevant activity by perceptually reorienting the child in the lived architecture of the home. Tactile and non-tactile steering constituted means for monitoring and controlling the direction, pace, and route of the childs locomotion. Overall, these embodied directives served as multifunctional cultural tools that scaffolded the child into reflexive awareness of the dialogic and embodied characteristics of social action and accountability

Touch as social control: Haptic organization of attention in adult-child interactions

This study examines the interactional organization of sustained (temporally extended) control touch, deployed in adult child encounters in Swedish primary school and family settings. The detailed analysis shows that sustained touches are employed by adults to manage and monitor childrens participation, usually calling for appropriate displays of attention to particular activities. Sustained touch sets the evolving limits on the childs postural orientation and movements by establishing a sensorial, corporeal contact and is instrumental in arranging the childs bodily positioning into a particular participation framework. Retrospectively, it orients to the child recipients inattentiveness and inappropriate participation. Prospectively, it solicits and sustains the childs coordinated and attentive participation in activities that constitute a state of talk, e.g. interactionally big packages (Sacks, 1995), i.e., adults extended instructions or disciplining. In multi-tasking situations, sustained touch works to manage the multiple overlapping participation frameworks. The adult, already engaged in a talk-based activity, constrains the touch recipients conversational contribution, or puts it on hold, using sustained touch as a prosthetic resource to signal her/his prospective attention. In all, the interactional analysis of interpersonal touch shows how the situational conditions, social roles and relations inform and shape body behavior. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.Funding Agencies|Swedish Research Council</p

Human-to-human touch in institutional settings: A commentary

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Subversive compliance and embodiment in remedial interchanges

This study examines normativity of affect and the affective embeddedness of normativity, instantiated as verbal and embodied stances taken by the participants in adult-child remedial interchanges. The data are based on one year of video fieldwork in a first-grade class at a Swedish primary school. An ethnographically informed analysis of talk and multimodal action is adopted. The findings show that the childrens affective and normative transgressions provided discursive spaces for adult moral instructions and socialization. However, the childrens compliant responses were resistant and subversive. They were designed as embodied double-voiced acts that indexed incongruent affective and moral stances. The findings further revealed several ways of configuring embodied double-voiced responses. The children juxtaposed multiple modalities and exploited the expectations of what constitutes appropriate temporal duration, timing, and shape of nonverbal responses. They (i) combined up-scaled verbal and embodied hyperbolic rhetoric when the teachers talk required but minimal responses, and (ii) configured antithetical affect displays, e.g., crying and smiling, or overlaid bodily displays of moral emotion (sadness, seriousness, and smiling) with aligning but exaggerated gestures and movements. Subversive, embodied double-voiced responses simultaneously acquiesced with and deflected the responsibility and effectively derailed a successful closure of remedial interchange.Funding Agencies|Swedish Research CouncilSwedish Research Council [DNR 7422013-7626]</p