Sequence organization in the instruction of embodied activities

Abstract

This study investigates how the instruction of embodied, ongoing activities and tasks is sequentially organized. The study is based on video recordings from various settings, including surgery, handicrafts, and driving. It builds on previous conversation analytic research on sequence organization and elaborates on notions such as adjacency pairs and retro-sequences. The study demonstrates that instructional interactions aimed at teaching and learning bodily and manual skills are organized in ways distinct from interactions where the focus of the activity can be achieved through talk alone. The actions of experts and novices are occasioned by and operate on ongoing, embodied, and visually accessible courses of action, constituting the performance of the task. Both instructors and novices analyse tasks and activities into component parts and orient towards the developing horizon of future steps. Instructions and the work of following them are responsive and indexical to the unfolding performance and to what needs to be done next. This results in sequence organizations that parallel but in significant respects differ from those found in talk-in-interaction.