Title: "Staging, parsing and glossing: mobilizing body and objects for teaching and learning"

Abstract

In this presentation, I will focus on three multimodal practices commonly used for teaching purposes. Drawing on ethnomethodological conversation analysis, I present data from various settings, including language learning environments both in the wild and in classrooms, as well as other pedagogical contexts. I will discuss three identified practices in my data: staging, parsing, and glossing. Staging refers to how the scene is shaped for a particular type of activity, where participants, through bodily formations (Kendon, 1976, 1977) and embodied participation frameworks (Goffman, 1980; Goodwin, 2018), (re)arrange the environment (Majlesi et al., 2019) to accomplish the activity. Parsing is used by participants to deconstruct the activity into manageable subprojects or tasks for themselves (cf. recipient designs, Sacks, 1992). Parsing is often accompanied by embodied directives (Goodwin & Cekaite, 2018), which reflexively index parts of the environment as salient learnables (Majlesi, 2014). This indexing is done through an assemblage of embodied practices, often including gestures and talk, in terms of glossing (Garfinkel & Sacks, 1970), which involves categorizing and identifying parts of the scene as a particular form of knowledge, skill, or ways of telling and knowing.

Short Bio

Ali Reza Majlesi, PhD in Language and Culture, is an associate professor and senior lecturer at the Department of Education, Stockholm University, Sweden. His research focuses on social interaction within everyday and institutional contexts, involving individuals with diverse cognitive and communicative abilities, such as L2 talk, communication with people with communicative difficulties or human-computer/robot interactions. His interests lie in the exploration of embodied practices by and through which social activities are achieved. The domains of his research include communication, health, technologies, and professional practices