The facilitator’s communicative actions to construct meetings in a semi-informal educational context

Abstract

The study examines how interactivity is constructed in the course of multi-person interaction in a semi-informal educational context. The audio-recordings of seven meetings of a female discussion club in Belarus and their transcripts serve as interactional data. The club was organized with a goal of providing a platform for females to engage in intellectual discussions in an informal setting. The study takes the communication design approach and uses discourse analysis. The analysis of the audio recordings and the transcripts is guided by the following question: how the participants’ use of linguistic and interactional resources contributes to the construction of a meeting. The particular attention is paid to the facilitator’s communicative actions to shape interaction and their local context.