Kosketuksen lukutaitoa

Abstract

While orienting to teacher’s activities during classroom interaction, students are often involved in parallel activities such as interacting with their peers. In this article, we analyze peer-to-peer interactions in which students make use of touching as a method for constructing a new participation framework or renewing a declining one while simultaneously displaying orientation to teacher-led activities. The data for the study consists of naturally occurring classroom interaction in lower secondary schools. As the method for analysis, we use multimodal conversation analysis. In the analysis, we describe certain types of touches that function as conventionalized means of soliciting the addressee’s attention. In addition, we show that the shape and the intensity of the touch are affected by the physical location of the participants in relation to each other as well as the additional functions of the touch, such as requesting or teasing.