Abstract

The talk introduces research done on goal-oriented multilingual encounters from the perspective of multimodal conversation analysis (CA). It starts with an overview on CA as a field of study and then moves on to presenting findings from authentic research conducted in two contexts: business meetings and multinational crisis management training. What is placed at the centre are situated social actions (e.g., talk, gestures, gaze, body movement) and their organization in time and space. More specifically, with a special focus on situations where the participants come from different linguacultural backgrounds, it is shown how situated practices contribute to the interactional processes relevant to goal-oriented encounters, such as the establishment of mutual understanding and agreement, decision-making and solving language-related troubles. Furthermore, awareness of the affordances and restrictions of the joint ‘interactional space’ is presented as part and parcel for the smooth unfolding of interaction, especially when there are multiple participants present and technologies are used to connect them. The aim is to thereby shed light on the complexities of multilingual multiparty encounters and increase understanding of the ways in which social actions and situated practices are produced and interpreted at fleeting moments in time which may become consequential for the progression of events. The talk concludes with implications for practice, offering also recommendations for organizations to utilize findings from conversation analytic research.

Bio

Tuire Oittinen (PhD) is a university lecturer and a researcher at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. Deploying the method of multimodal conversation analysis (CA), she has done an extensive amount of work on human social conduct (i.e., how people organize verbal and embodied actions) in both face-to-face and technology-mediated interaction. The studied contexts entail multinational crisis management training, business meetings and foreign language interactions in higher education. Oittinen is the co-editor of Ethnomethodological Conversation Analysis in Motion: Emerging Methods and New Technologies (2023) and is currently working on another co-edited volume on video-mediated second language interaction.