Mobilizing assistance through complaints in digital skills courses for adults

Abstract

Within a rapidly digitalizing society, it is important to understand how the learning and teaching of digital skills play out in situ, especially among the elderly, an often marginalized user group. This paper will focus on elderly participants engaged in the process of learning digital skills in adult education courses. In video recordings from adult education centres in Finland and Germany, we explore how students mobilize their teachers’ assistance upon encountering a problem with their mobile devices (smartphones, laptops or tablets). Prior research on social interaction has shown that assistance can be recruited through a variety of verbal and embodied formats. In this specific educational setting, participants can use complaints about their digital skills or the mobile devices in order to obtain help. Utilizing multimodal conversation analysis, we will explore two basic sequence types involving students’ complaints, discuss their cross-linguistic characteristics, and reflect on their link to this educational setting and digital devices.