Sequence Facilitation: Grandparents Engineering Parent–Child Interactions in Video Calls

ABSTRACT

Completing a sequence of actions is a basic problem of social organization for participants. When a first pair-part is addressed to a not yet fully competent member, such as a young child, a third party can facilitate the completion of the sequence through diverse linguistic, embodied, and material practices. In this article, we examine such sequence facilitation in a perspicuous setting: grandparent-mediated video calls between migrant parents and their left-behind children in China. The analysis shows that the practices of sequence facilitation can have a retrospective or prospective orientation and involve not only linguistic practices, such as repeating the parent’s first pair-part or formulating its action, but also embodied and material practices, such as positioning the camera or physically animating the child’s body. The results shed light on the organization of adjacency pairs in adult–child interactions and the embodied and material circumstances of their production in video-mediated communication. The data were in the Chinese dialects of Sichuan and Guizhou.

Acknowledgments

We appreciate the participants for making this study possible. We thank the editor and three anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful and constructive feedback on an earlier version of this article. The first author would like to acknowledge Global Scholarship for Research Excellence for allowing her to work with Kobin H. Kendrick at the University of York for six months during her PhD journey.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ In our collection, we found that most cases (n = 133) were related to facilitating SPPs and relatively fewer (n = 97) were oriented toward the FPP produced by parents. This distribution of cases seems to be meaningful in the sense that the main objective of sequence facilitation was to get a response from the child.

Additional information

Funding

The first author disclosed receipt of the financial support from Shanghai Philosophy and Social Science Youth Foundation [No. 2021EXW002]. The second author disclosed receipt of the support from the Research Grants Council of the Hong Kong SAR [Project No. CUHK 14600218].