This contribution focuses on a physiotherapy consultation in which the first author of the contribution is the patient and the second author is the physiotherapist. It features analysis of video excerpts in which (1) the physiotherapist instructs the patient how to do an exercise and (2) the patient turns the physiotherapist's instructions into a course of action while (3) the physiotherapist monitors, assesses, guides, and corrects the patient's instructed actions by deploying touch. The investigation draws on video-recordings and transcriptions of (...) the physiotherapist’s and the patient’s interaction during the exercise instructions, the authors’ experience of touching/being touched during these instructions, and their shared understandings as discussed during data-sessions devoted to select video-clips of exercise instructions. In a learning process, the instructor’s instructional corrections are critical: they provide learners with relevant specifications and explanations as to how instructed actions and/or remedial actions are to be accomplished. Whereas monitoring and touching the patient allows the physiotherapist to feel, assess, correct, and guide the patient’s instructed actions, being touched permits the patient to feel how the physiotherapist’s touch resonates beyond locally circumscribed body contact and adapt her movements accordingly. Our contribution thus reveals touching/being touched configurations that establish joint attention and action on extended sensoriality as forming constitutive parts of a dynamic sensorimotor process of inter- and intrabodily resonance, which is challenging to investigate. (shrink)

Employing conversation analysis, this article investigates instructions in lessons for guitar and Japanese calligraphy. In receiving an instruction, the students in the guitar lessons are expected to immediately follow the instruction. In contrast to the guitar lessons, the students in the calligraphy lessons are not institutionally expected to immediately follow the teacher’s instructions but to receive them. However, the students often gesticulate what they learned from and could make sense of the prior instruction upon completion of an instruction activity. I (...) call this phenomenon embodied solitary confirmation. By demonstrating the interactional procedure for this practice, this article respecifies reflection as an interactional phenomenon and elucidates an organization of multiactivity. (shrink)

The article deals with larger stretches of talk-in-interaction and argues in favor of a descriptive approach, which integrates the structural requirements of global organization, the special type of sequential orderliness within larger units as well as the genre-orientation of these units. Drawing on previous work in conversation analysis, discourse analysis and the sociological genre analysis, the article introduces GLOBE as an analytical tool which functionally links discourse units to conventionalized communicative purposes. GLOBE reconstructs the interactive achievement of genre-oriented discourse units (...) in a three-branch analysis of jobs, devices and forms. The analytical potential of GLOBE is demonstrated in the exemplary genre-contrastive analysis of a narrative, an explanative and an argumentative excerpt. On the basis of the analyses of the three genres, the overarching constitution of genre-oriented global units is then explicated. (shrink)

For people to contribute to discourse, they must do more than utter the right sentence at the right time. The basic requirement is that they add to their common ground in an orderly way. To do this, we argue, they try to establish for each utterance the mutual belief that the addressees have understood what the speaker meant well enough for current purposes. This is accomplished by the collective actions of the current contributor and his or her partners, and these (...) result in units of conversation called contributions. We present a model of contributions and show how it accounts for a variety of features of everyday conversations. (shrink)