Ole hyvä (’please’) + imperative

Leader identity has traditionally been associated with hierarchical position (formal leadership). Yet, while there is an increasing tendency to regard leadership as a collective and distributed process, very little is known about the interplay of formal and informal leadership as in situ social practice within a hierarchical context. Using video-recordings of naturally occurring workplace interaction as data and arguing that insights from applied linguistics can be profitably employed to address such a lacuna, we use multimodal conversation analysis (CA) to show how ‘doing’ leadership is not limited to the formal leader. Rather, through talk, gaze, the use of space, artefacts and so on, it is negotiated in subtle ways which allow informal leadership to emerge in conjunction, and in this case in conflict, with formal leadership. We conclude this article by discussing the wider implications of these findings to both leadership theory and methodologies used to investigate the ‘just whatness’ of leadership.

Culture and society are produced through interactions between people, objects, and environments. Within these interactions it has become clear that the modes of spoken and written language are only some of a diverse range of modes involved in producing meaning and experience. As topics of study, the modes of spoken and written language have been joined by modes like gesture, gaze, composition, and layout. Multimodal discourse analysis names a range of approaches to studying social interaction and meaning as multimodal, that is, produced with and through multiple modes. However, multimodal discourse analysis is not about identifying and studying modes as isolated but rather about understanding the world as multimodal. This understanding is developed through theoretical and methodological developments. Three major theoretical bases are in use in multimodal discourse analysis: (a) Hallidayan systemic functional linguistics (SFL), underpinning a social semiotic and SFL approach; (b) mediated discourse analysis, underpinning a mediated action based approach; and (c) conversation analysis (CA), underpinning a turn-taking based approach. The simple idea of identifying modes beyond language belies the growing complexity of research in this area. The multimodal literature contains significantly different definitions of mode and different foci. For example, systemic functional approaches began by analyzing how meaning is embedded within images and artifacts, and these studies have been extended at times to include studies of interaction. Mediated discourse analysis focuses primarily on interaction and understands images and artifacts through how social actors interact with them, rather than seeking to decode possible meanings from the perspective of the analyst. Conversation analytic approaches also focus on interactions and only engage with images and artifacts as they appear in interaction. All three theoretical bases develop from studies of language. Researchers in CA still often argue that talk remains the most important mode, while social semiotics and mediated discourse analysis dispute this. Multimodal (inter)action analysis builds upon mediated discourse analysis but is the only approach designed specifically for the study of multimodal interaction and multimodal action. The ongoing development of frameworks within multimodal discourse analysis is indicative of intellectual diversity. For some scholars, this is a source of concern, and they attempt to unify multimodality, while for others it is desirable, especially for a research domain that offers applications to so many areas of social life. This bibliography explores central texts under the umbrella of multimodal discourse analysis in five domains: mediated discourse analysis, multimodal (inter)action analysis, social semiotics, systemic functional multimodal discourse analysis (SF-MDA), and conversation analytic style multimodality. A sixth area focusing on introductory texts begins the bibliography.

Telecollaboration in pre‐service teacher education promotes intercultural communicative competence and bridges knowledge and practice. Although a growing body of studies has addressed the affordances of telecollaboration for developing student‐teachers' (STs') competencies, research focusing on their knowledge of classroom interaction—and on multimodal aspects of classroom interaction in particular—is scarce. Using multimodal conversation analysis (MCA), we address this research gap by investigating the affordances of telecollaboration between STs in Sweden and Japan to notice multimodal aspects of language classroom interaction. The study comes from a “parallel‐course project” that aimed to design and conduct telecollaborative tasks within the context of two pre‐service English language teacher education courses in Sweden and Japan. The participants ( N = 12) met online and worked on video‐based tasks using authentic classroom videos. They were grouped to conduct four online sessions (202 min of screen recordings) for analyzing classroom videos and transcriptions. Using MCA, a collection of 51 cases where STs notice and discuss multimodal aspects of teaching was compiled. The findings show that this telecollaboration allowed the STs to notice multimodal aspects of language classroom interaction, including teachers' gestures, gaze, and facial expressions in Japanese and European contexts. We demonstrate that the tasks facilitate collaborative noticing, enactment, and functional description of pedagogical gestures. The tasks also allowed the STs to discuss similarities and differences between the pedagogical cultures, contributing to their awareness of classroom interactional competence. Our study addresses a methodological gap in telecollaboration research by employing MCA. Implications for telecollaboration and curricula in language teacher education, as well as for using conversation analysis as a research methodology, will be given.

Virtual exchange (VE) projects in pre-service language teacher education are increasingly being recognized as an innovative practice due to their affordances for providing teacher learning opportunities in technology-rich environments. This study aims to report these opportunities based on results from a VE project consisting of diverse teacher education activities, including lectures, webinars, asynchronous tasks, and synchronous video-mediated interactions. This project provides a medium for pre-service teachers to collaboratively design a lesson to be implemented in hybrid language learning environments. We specifically deal with the video-mediated interactions of the transnational groups of pre-service language teachers using multimodal conversation analysis (CA) as the research methodology and investigate VE phases to explore how their interactions become consequential for the final pedagogical design. The findings show that the pre-service teachers retrospectively orient to shared practices in the earlier phases of the VE project, and the deployment of retrospective orientation as an interactional resource creates interactional space for collaborative decision-making related to their pedagogical designs. We argue that tracking the video-mediated pedagogical interactions of the pre-service teachers using CA is a methodological innovation that allows researchers to collect interactional evidence for the emergent teacher learning opportunities. The findings bring new insights to the role of the technology-mediated settings (e.g. VEs and telecollaboration) in language learning, teaching, and teacher education and in bridging different cultures, curricula, and physical spaces.

In virtual reality (VR), participants may not always have hands, bodies, eyes, or even voices—using VR helmets and two controllers, participants control an avatar through virtual worlds that do not necessarily obey familiar laws of physics; moreover, the avatar’s bodily characteristics may not neatly match our bodies in the physical world. Despite these limitations and specificities, humans get things done through collaboration and the creative use of the environment. While multiuser interactive VR is attracting greater numbers of participants, there are currently few attempts to analyze the in situ interaction systematically. This paper proposes a video-analytic detail-oriented methodological framework for studying virtual reality interaction. Using multimodal conversation analysis, the paper investigates a nonverbal, embodied, two-person interaction: two players in a survival game strive to gesturally resolve a misunderstanding regarding an in-game mechanic—however, both of their microphones are turned off for the duration of play. The players’ inability to resort to complex language to resolve this issue results in a dense sequence of back-and-forth activity involving gestures, object manipulation, gaze, and body work. Most crucially, timing and modified repetitions of previously produced actions turn out to be the key to overcome both technical and communicative challenges. The paper analyzes these action sequences, demonstrates how they generate intended outcomes, and proposes a vocabulary to speak about these types of interaction more generally. The findings demonstrate the viability of multimodal analysis of VR interaction, shed light on unique challenges of analyzing interaction in virtual reality, and generate broader methodological insights about the study of nonverbal action.

The development of videoconferencing technology has enabled new modes of combining in-person and remote teaching. In this article, we investigate interactional practices in hybrid language classrooms that combine on-site and remote participation by way of telepresence technology. Telepresence robots are videoconferencing tools that can be remotely controlled and moved in the ‘local’ space during video-mediated interaction. In our video-based study, we investigate recordings from university-level foreign language classes (Finnish, German, Swedish and English) involving robot-mediated participants as part of an otherwise on-site classroom student cohort. We draw on multimodal conversation analysis (CA) and analyse a selection of data extracts with a focus on how participants use the robot’s mobility as an interactional resource in moments of transition between whole-class and group-based activities. The analysis explores how moving the robot enables the remote student to demonstrate competent participation and to contribute to the progression of the activity transition. We also analyse how teachers make sense of the remote students’ engagements by monitoring the positioning and movements of the robot, and how they individually support the remote students in moments that can potentially be interactionally challenging in hybrid environments. These findings expand CALL literature by demonstrating how telepresence robots can enhance the multimodal range of meaning-making resources of remote students within everyday classroom practices in hybrid language teaching. As practical implications, we outline some ways in which social interaction provides both a rich resource base for participants and a site in which many pedagogical questions relevant to hybrid education play out.

In group-to-group videoconferencing (VC), social actions are coordinated between participants in the physical and online environment, which raises the practical problem of how to manage the interactional space in a collaborative and inclusive manner. This can be particularly challenging for less experienced (i.e., novice) users of VC. The present study uses multimodal conversation analysis (CA) to investigate how university students, who speak English as a foreign language, organise their conduct in the moment-by-moment unfolding of VC. It focuses on moments that make additional interactional work to include the remote party salient, namely transitions regarding next-speaker selection and topic change. The analysis illustrates the reflexive use of different constellations of talk and screen-oriented behaviours as key for coordinating actions in the VC environment. The study has implications for educational research and practice, since it helps understand the interactional competence learners need to develop to succeed in environments of online collaborative work.

This study investigates the multimodal construction of blame attributions in peer interaction during digital tasks in English as a Foreign Language classrooms. Drawing on multimodal conversation analysis (CA), we examine how the force of blamings is manifested in and through the variety of resources used, and the role of digital devices in the emergence and resolution of blaming sequences. The analysis shows that children’s blame attributions can be bold and involve a lamination of several multimodal resources, often without an explicit verbal formulation. Additionally, participants may build on the actions of the digital application to allocate blame, using the affordances of the technology to avoid direct verbal attributions. The study thus elaborates on the sequential structure of blamings and highlights their context-bound and multimodal nature. It contributes to research on multimodality in technology-supported classroom interactions, shedding light on the merging of the embodied and the digital in action formation.

This study examines how farm workers working with cattle talk to and interact with these non-human animals. This study presents linguistic animal studies and multi-species pragmatics, and it is based on fieldwork, interviews, and video recordings from several types of Finnish dairy farms. This study concentrates especially on one facet of human-cattle interaction: how humans use dung pushers and other sticks when communicating with cows. Thus, it draws on the materiality of language. It is shown how objects, bodies, and spaces, as well as words and linguistic constructions, are meaningful in human-animal interaction. Videoed recordings are analysed with multimodal conversation analysis. It is shown how dung pushers and snow stakes are used when steering cows, making them stand up, and pointing at things. It is then shown how these objects become 'meaning-carriers' for humans and for cows. For example, the dung pusher acquires four different meaning qualities for the human participants in the cattle barns: floor-cleaner quality, shepherd's-crook quality, pointer quality, and weapon quality. The study examines how the cows' and humans' Umwelts, the subjective meaning universes of these species and their constituent individuals, influence interaction on farms and how and why the dung pusher becomes a semiotic resource.

Aim of the study Aim of the study was to examine how a woman diagnosed with borderline personality disorder (BPD) manages moments when her self is threatened during an initial couple-therapy consultation, using an interactional, multimodal perspective. Subject or material and methods We examined a video-recorded initial session with a heterosexual couple, sampled from a larger corpus of couple-therapy consultations in a medical setting. Using multimodal conversation analysis, three analysts repeatedly viewed and sequentially analyzed the interaction to identify “self-threatening sequences”, where the patient’s moral, epistemic, or relational self was challenged and then either repaired or further pursued by the participants. Results The analysis shows that self-threat is jointly produced and managed by patient, partner and therapist. The patient alternates between starkly self-pathologizing and self-defending formulations, using laughter, hesitations and embodied conduct (gaze, posture, self-touch) to regulate exposure and arousal. The partner’s categorizations and complaints variably escalate, renegotiate or close self-threatening trajectories, while the therapist’s questions and formulations selectively take up or soften different self-descriptions. Discussion Identity disturbance in BPD patients emerge here as context-dependent and interactionally accomplished rather than a fixed intrapsychic deficit. Conclusions The study illustrates how detailed analysis of couple-therapy interaction can illuminate how threats to self are produced, resisted and absorbed in real time in interaction dynamics with BPD patient, and suggests that therapists should attend not only to what is said about the self but also to who says it, in response to what, and with which embodied displays.

This article explores how laughter is used in hybrid meetings to negotiate the shared meeting space between local and remote participants. We compare two datasets from organizations that use Microsoft Teams for either video-mediated interaction or audio-only interaction. By drawing on multimodal conversation analysis, we show how meeting participants initiate laughter either at or with the remote participant, thus subtly moving between multiple interactional spaces and shaping the participation framework of the meeting. By making the remote participant’s behavior or lack thereof (i.e. silence) noticeable and laughable, the participants collectively work to re-establish the shared meeting space. The study thus contributes to the discussion of the implications of visibility (or lack thereof) in hybrid audio-only and video-mediated meetings.

Accumulating studies on teachers’ instructional immediacy consistently show a strong positive correlation with teaching effectiveness. To expand the research in a bilingual and cross-cultural context, the current study investigates the construction of instructional immediacy in a natural classroom setting by theoretically anchoring on translanguaging, which refers to the idea of promoting the integration of all linguistic and nonlinguistic resources to achieve effective pedagogy with multilingual speakers. We quantified the nonverbal facial expressions to compare the teacher’s endeavours in different language modes when constructing instructional immediacy, and we used Multimodal Conversation Analysis (MCA) to examine his endeavours. The results revealed language-specific facial expressions which are attributed to varied teaching purposes. We conclude that translanguaging can serve as an effective tool for fostering instructional immediacy in multilingual classrooms.

This study examines response cries produced by student spectators reacting to imagined pain in the setting of feminist self-defence classes. It investigates the vocal, verbal and embodied resources that constitute reactive displays to demonstrations and descriptions of physical techniques that can thwart attacks. It asks what the pain cries accomplish, considering their form and sequential organisation. Video-recordings of the classes were data. Drawing on discursive psychology and using multi-modal conversation analysis, the results detail how the conventionalised composition and positions of the cries make them mutually intelligible as reacting to a painful experience. They functioned to support the progression of the instructional activity that created a make-believe space where girls and women can resist violence. The findings confirm and extend what is known about the interactional environments and activities in which pain figures, further advancing the distinctive insights that an interactional approach brings. Data are in New Zealand English.

In courtroom interaction, the pervasive assumption that “seeing is believing” grants visual conduct, especially gazing behavior, a crucial role in shaping perceptions of testimonial credibility. While prior legal and psychological research has acknowledged that gaze may influence credibility judgments, little is known about how litigants themselves actively mobilize gaze as a rhetorical resource during direct evidential presentation, particularly within the interactional complexity of authentic trials. Drawing on multimodal conversation analysis, this study conducts a fine-grained examination of gazing behavior in coordination with co-occurring verbal and embodied resources. Based on video data from the 2022 Depp v. Heard defamation trial, the analysis identifies three functional gazing categories and integrates the Aristotelian rhetorical triad to illustrate how litigants strategically mobilize visual conduct to fulfill distinct persuasive objectives: evaluative gazing grounds logos to reinforce logical coherence; regulatory gazing projects ethos to display institutional legitimacy; affective gazing embodies pathos to solicit emotional empathy. These findings demonstrate that testimonial credibility is an interactional accomplishment constructed through the interplay of verbal accounts and embodied conduct. By foregrounding gaze as a multimodal rhetorical resource, this study contributes to multimodal discourse and legal rhetoric research by offering an empirically grounded framework for analyzing how credibility is visually enacted in courtroom testimony, with implications for both scholarly analysis and judicial credibility assessment practices.

The article analyzes the implementation of an online educational module and its impact on the organization of the classroom’s interaction order. The latter is institutionally constrained by the presence of a goal and the distribution of roles between teacher and students. The introduction of a digital learning platform adds a technological context to the institutional setting. The article considers technologies as possessing communicative affordances — opportunities for action made possible or delimited through their use. Technologies bring new interactive resources to the process of ed­ucation and can affect the organization of the classroom’s interaction order. Using multimodal conversation analysis, we analyzed video recordings of the telemediated interaction of Russia-based students and teachers within a gamified online educational module. We investigate a case in which a student’s correct answer is nevertheless corrected by the teacher. We dem­onstrate that the teacher initiates the correction because they are guided by the ordering of the game elements within the interface. Based on a detailed analysis of the teacher’s mouse movement in relation to ongoing turns-at-talk, we show that this orientation is sustained by all participants. The work contributes to classroom interaction studies and affordance theory and develops the methodology of multimodal transcription for mediated contexts. The primary result of the study is an empirical demonstration that the relevance of technological affordances for interactants is situation­ally produced, and that this process is associated with the interweaving of the institutional and technical context of interaction. The conclusion discusses the relationship between affordances and institutional norms.