This article examines dyadic team work via video conferencing (inter)actions and explicates communicating and accepting knowledge, coordinating attention, and disagreeing. We demonstrate that such knowledge communication, which in the literature quite often is viewed as solely or primarily language-based is, is in fact always multimodal. Communicating knowledge, coordinating attention, and disagreeing are always performed through the interconnection of multiple modes from gaze and gesture, to posture and object handling, and may be produced with or without language. According to our findings presented here, the verbal acceptance of knowledge lags much behind the action that already demonstrated a participant's acceptance of another's knowledge. Language use also tells us little about the attention that a participant may pay, as being quiet might easily be misinterpreted as listening. Further, our findings show that language is never used alone in disagreements, rather, language may build an aggregate with other modes, and language may be super-ordinated or sub-ordinated to other modes in (inter)action. The article illustrates the complexity of everyday knowledge communication, which is relevant for educational and also particularly to organizational settings.
Researchers seeking to analyse how intersubjectivity is established and maintained face significant challenges. The purpose of this article is to provide theoretical/methodological tools that begin to address these challenges. I develop these tools by applying several concepts from multimodal (inter)action analysis to an excerpt taken from the beginning of a tutoring session, drawn from a wider data set of nine one-to-one tutoring sessions. Focusing on co-produced higher-level actions as an analytic site of intersubjectivity, I show that lower-level actions that co-constitute a higher-level action can be delineated into tiers of materiality. I identify three tiers of materiality: durable, adjustable and fleeting. I introduce the theoretical/methodological tool
During the activities of everyday life social actors always produce multiple simultaneous higher level actions. These necessarily operate at different levels of attention and awareness. Modal density is a methodological tool that can be used to analyse the attention/awareness of social actors in relation to higher level actions they produce, positioning actions in the foreground, midground and background of attention. Using modal density to analyse an opening and a closing in high school tutoring sessions, I show social actors transitioning into and out of producing the same higher level actions at the foreground of their attention/awareness. Through this analysis I identify two potentially unique aspects of one-to-one tutoring. Firstly I show one way that a tutor helps a student take on the practices of being a good student, and secondly I show the influence that students have over tutoring. I argue that movements into and out of a shared focus of attention are potentially useful sites for analysis of social interaction.
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