Dialogic Embodied Action: Using Gesture to Organize Sequence and Participation in Instructional Interaction

Abstract

Interactional analysts have long argued for the importance of tying techniques, which function to connect the current speaker's utterance to the actions of a previous speaker, in the organization of turns at talk (M. H. Goodwin, 1990; Sacks, 1992c). The organization of embodied actions through such dialogic tying, however, has received far less attention, a gap addressed by this article in its examination of one nonverbal tying technique: dialogic embodied action. In this phenomenon, coparticipants purposefully take up and selectively reproduce particular features of one another's gestures and instrumental actions. Drawing on data from instructional interactions at a bicycle-repair shop, the analysis demonstrates that focusing on the selectivity of such reproductions elucidates two functions of these dialogic actions: (a) to organize intersubjective engagement, facilitating coparticipants' enactment of aligned participant roles and (b) to structure sequential organization through actions that are visibly constituted as prior to other actions.

[Supplementary materials are available for this article. Go to the publisher's online edition of Research on Language and Social Interaction for the following free supplemental resource(s): video clips.]

Acknowledgments

A preliminary version of this analysis was presented at the Sixteenth Annual Conference on Language, Interaction, and Culture at the University of California, Los Angeles, on May 7, 2010, and several audience members made suggestions that helped to develop my analysis. Thanks to Mary Bucholtz, John Du Bois, Gene Lerner, Sandra Thompson, and the members of both the UC Santa Barbara Language and the Body Seminar and the Dialogic Syntax Working Group for their feedback. I also wish to thank the three anonymous reviewers as well as the editor. Any remaining failings are my own.

Notes

¹I have adapted these terms from Du Bois's (2007, in press) work on talk-in-interaction, where he makes use of the terms stance lead and stance follow to refer to sequential turns that are involved in stance taking.

²All names are pseudonyms, many of which were chosen by the participants themselves. All participants have given written consent for the publication of the materials in which they are included.

³As with any interaction, there were other interactional projects that were differentially attended to by the participants. I have discussed these in greater detail (Arnold, 2012).

⁴Frank does not pursue this additional framing offered by Bob, and this lack of uptake could be due to a combination of factors, including Frank's possible lack of familiarity with these terms, as well as Frank's possible understanding that Bob has mastered the lesson on contrastive curvatures and is ready to get back to the logistics of the repair.

⁵Dialogic syntax captures a phenomenon similar to that discussed in M. H. Goodwin's (1990) work on format tying in children's disputes, but analyzes the data with more of a focus on linguistic structure.

⁶The quasifeature analysis presented here is used for those gestural characteristics that are not readily captured with images. A notation of [+ feature] indicates that the gesture makes use of the feature named in the brackets, while [– feature] indicates an absence of this feature. These features emerged from analysis of the gesture, and their ad hoc nature reflects the participants' online interpretation of each other's embodied actions.

⁷As noted by Sacks (1992a), repetition in talk does not demonstrate understanding, but only claims it, as in the following example (p. 141).

A: Where are you staying?

B: Pacific Palisades.

A: Oh Pacific Palisades.

A's response claims to recognize the place that B has referred to, but does not demonstrate this understanding by rereferencing it in other words (Heritage, 2007). Thus it is important to note that, in this example of gestural matching, Kathleen is not simply repeating Toro's gesture exactly, but limits her matching gesture to those features of Toro's gesture that have been highlighted as salient. The diagraph is a valuable tool for use in such instances because it helps to reveal how the matched gesture functions interactionally.

⁸Nate's use of the first person plural as in vamos a jalarlo (“we're going to pull it”) could be seen as counterevidence to the claim that both participants are orienting to Pablo as the eventual performer of the task. However, despite the use of the plural, the task Nate describes is clearly a one-person job. Rather than literally indicating that both participants will be involved in the task, the form must thus be understood as a hortative that works to engage Pablo's participation. This analysis is supported by the fact that Nate's explanation is accompanied by gesture, rather than by performance of the task. Since Nate already knows which way to pull the tool, the use of instructional gesture is clearly targeted at the learner, Pablo, who is thus positioned as the one who will enact the task.

⁹The productively “ambiguous term” pre-sequence is traditionally used to describe sequences of actions that come before other sequences (Schegloff, 2007, p. 28). Like pre-sequences in talk, the embodied variety illustrated here also consists of a sequence. However, unlike pre-sequences in talk, which are oriented to as prior to an upcoming sequence, the embodied preparatory sequence is constituted as prior to an instrumental action or task. This nonverbal variety thus fulfills only one of the two senses in which pre-sequences are pre-sequences, and for this reason I have called the embodied type a preparatory sequence rather than a pre-sequence.

In addition to these definitional distinctions, the functions of pre-sequences in talk and embodied preparatory sequences also differ. Pre-sequences in interaction often open up a space for a coparticipant to terminate a problematic interactional project, such as an unwelcome invitation, before it has been made explicit, thus saving face for both participants (Schegloff, 2007). Embodied preparatory sequences, on the other hand, do not seem to serve this interactional function, since the participants have agreed on a specific course of action prior to undertaking the preparatory sequence. Thus, in Example 3, Nate describes the task to be undertaken and obtains Pablo's agreement with this project (lines 1 to 11). Once Pablo has confirmed this project, they begin the series of utterances that will be accompanied by the embodied preparatory sequence.

¹⁰I use this term in the sense suggested by Garfinkel (1967) and demonstrated by LeBaron and Koschmann (2003), wherein physical actions can become countable and overtly oriented to by participants.

¹¹Determining which way to turn the wrench to remove pedals is a common problem in bicycle repair because the pedal cranks are threaded differently on each side of the bike. Pedals become screwed down quite tightly once they have been used, so it is almost impossible to tell at first whether the wrenching is tightening or loosening the pedal. If too much force is used in the wrong direction, this can result in the stripping of the crank threads, which then necessitates their replacement.

¹²In these examples, participants seem to be orienting to handedness as an important gestural feature to match. Many of these supplementary hand actions function to make this matching handedness possible. Indeed, in the dialogic gesture seen in Example 4 (Figure 8), it is crucial that the gestural follows be produced with the same hand as the gestural leads if the mnemonic device being taught is to work. So, in reference to the pedal on the right side of the bicycle, the right hand needs to be used, whereas on the left side, the left hand must be used. Furthermore, in this example, the chirality of the hands is a crucial factor in allowing the mnemonic to function both for the right side pedal and for the left side pedal, which is reverse threaded. This means that, in the mnemonic example, the right hand must be turned counterclockwise, but the left hand must be turned clockwise to represent the direction the wrench is turned to remove the pedals. However, in either case, as long as the thumb of the relevant hand is correctly positioned to represent the pedal (away from the bike for “pedal off,” towards the bike for “pedal on”), then the mechanic need simply remember that the direction to turn involves moving the fingers toward the palm of the hand.

¹³Although the teacher–learner participant roles were generally taken up by volunteers and customers respectively, there were occasions when more experienced volunteer mechanics took it upon themselves to teach newer volunteers a particular repair strategy.