Gearing up to a New Activity: How Teachers use Object Adjustments 
to Manage the Attention of Children with Autism

Abstract

Children with autism have characteristic difficulties with joint attention. In educational settings, this can present a challenge when directing a child's attention to new objects and activities. Drawing on videotaped interactions between teachers and two children with autism recorded in Finland, we use conversation analysis to examine how teachers manage such transitions during one-to-one teaching. We show how adjusting material objects can be used to manage the child's engagement and how these adjustments can escalate into more conspicuous actions so as to direct the child's attention. Rather than examining participants’ use of communicational objects, we are instead concerned with practices that use task-related objects. We thereby offer an empirically grounded account of the interactional practices involved in achieving joint attention through the objects themselves.

Keywords::

• Conversation analysis
• Autism
• Objects
• Eye gaze
• Joint attention
• Disengagement

Acknowledgements

We are very grateful for the participants for allowing us to record and analyze their interactions, and we thank the families and the school of “Anna” and “Liisa” for their participation. We also thank Paul Dickerson for his contributions to the research project, and Ann 
Sutton, Mike Clarke, and two anonymous reviewers for very helpful comments. We also thank Professor Doug 
Maynard for a great discussion at the 10th IIEMCA conference in Fribourg.

Declaration of interest: The authors report no conflicts of interest. The authors alone are responsible for the content and writing of the paper.

The work reported here is a part of Doctoral 
thesis by the first author, funded by University of 
Roehampton, London. The paper was presented at the tenth conference of the International Institute for Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis, 
University of Fribourg, Fribourg, Switzerland, July 10–14, 2011.