Using conversation analysis, this study investigates how Japanese rehabilitation team members use their geographic knowledge to search for long-term care facilities for stroke survivors in multidisciplinary team interactions. The study uncovers the orderly use of decision rules during discharge planning activities by exploring the following two questions: What decision criteria are discursively used? In what order are the criteria handled through sequential operations? The data comprise 65 video-recorded rehabilitation team meetings and ethnographic information regarding local care facilities and patients’ residential (...) addresses. The analysis shows that the participants deal with decision criteria in an orderly manner. They identify the type of facility and location preferred by the patient’s family and search for a facility accordingly. Moreover, they routinely select facilities closer to the patients’ and their families’ homes. However, these rules are modified if the family’s choice is inappropriate, or when a facility in a different location is preferred by the family. The study contributes to the conversation analytic understanding of interprofessional decision making and prioritization through the analysis of orderly methods of search procedures interactively accomplished by participants in ongoing medical team interactions. (shrink)

This study takes an interest in instructions and instructed actions in the context of manual skills. The analysis focuses on a video recorded episode where a teacher demonstrates how to crochet chain stitches, requests a group of students to reproduce her actions, and then repeatedly corrects the attempts of one of the students. The initial request, and the students’ responses to it, could be seen as preliminary to the series of corrective sequences that come next: the request and the following (...) attempts make it possible for the teacher to launch instructional sequences specifically designed and addressed to the students who need further guidance. In the interaction between the teacher and the novice student, the reasoned character of the instructed actions is not explained so much as installed and tuned. The materiality of the project makes it possible for the two parties to methodically and meticulously adjust their actions in accordance with each other, and towards the gradual realization of the aimed-for results. In connection to this, a number of issues pertaining to the reproducibility and recognizability of manual skills are raised: how instructions-in-interaction orient towards the progression of the skill rather than the interaction itself; how attempts by and mistakes of the instructed party provide grounds for further instruction; and, consequently, how instructions in the form of corrections build on the instructor’s continuous assessments of the instructed actions. (shrink)

Drawing on a corpus of eight task-based interactions involving a map task ), this article seeks to focus on how speakers orient to directional terms in an interactional context, and in so doing, to add to features that can be deemed to characterize this speech exchange system. Analysis of the data using conversation analysis showed that features of the talk were confirmation and clarification checks, which provided an opportunity to check understanding and the accuracy of the instruction leading to a (...) correction, acknowledgement or further information; modulated repair and mitigated criticism, resulting in the maintenance of an affiliative stance towards the other speaker; and avoidance of problems that viewpoints or directional terms might cause. Problems with the directional terms in this corpus confirm prior research that the confusion between east and west, and left and right are the terms that cause problems for speakers. (shrink)