Non-verbal Resources Research Articles

The therapeutic relationship in action: How therapists and clients co-manage relational disaffiliation

Over the past three decades a great deal of energy has been invested in examining the consequences of relational stresses and their repair. Less work has been done to examine how therapists and clients actually achieve re-affiliation through verbal and non-verbal resources, how such affiliation becomes vulnerable and at risk, and how therapists attempt to re-establish affiliative ties with the client—or fail to do so. We utilize the method of Conversation Analysis (CA) to examine clinical cases that involve extended episodes of disaffiliation. Clients with different styles of disaffiliation—confrontation and withdrawal—are compared. We show how disaffiliation is interactionally realized in different ways and how this is followed by more or less successful attempts at repair.

The multimodal representation of emotion in film: Integrating cognitive and semiotic approaches

This study provides a semiotic theorization of how emotion is represented in film to complement the cognitive approach, which focuses on how film elicits emotion from viewers. Drawing upon social semiotic theories and cognitive theories of emotion, we develop a multimodal framework in which filmic representation of emotion is seen as combinations of semiotic choices derived from cognitive components of emotion. The semiotic model is employed to investigate how emotive meaning is realized through verbal and nonverbal resources. At the discursive level of film, the choices available in the shot organization of eliciting condition and expression are examined. The paper demonstrates how the social semiotic approach, combined with cognitive theory of emotion structure, is able to provide a comprehensive theoretical account of how various film techniques represent emotion. It is also significant for the study of viewer emotion, which to a large degree stems from character emotion.

Mediações formativas para atividades didáticas com gêneros textuais

The aim of this study is to present a reflection on data distributed in three different sets: a) the didactic transposition of genres; b) the relationship among different instruments used by teachers with didactic sequence, teaching knowledge and capacities; c) the teaching action singular style in activity genre. Through the perspective of socialdiscursive interactionism (BRONCKART, 2008; SCHNEUWLY, 2009; DOLZ, 2009), we seek to recognize how the educational activity genre (FAITA, 2004) is subject action shaped in one specific educational context, as well as the ways the teacher style works in relation with sedimented gestures in professional environment. The premise that guides the reflection is that educators can be mobilizing verbal and non-verbal resources which cannot be neglected by the teacher educator, since they may bring implications with new teaching/learning tools.

Selective impairment of auditory selective attention under concurrent cognitive load.

Load theory predicts that concurrent cognitive load impairs selective attention. For visual stimuli, it has been shown that this impairment can be selective: Distraction was specifically increased when the stimulus material used in the cognitive load task matches that of the selective attention task. Here, we report four experiments that demonstrate such selective load effects for auditory selective attention. The effect of two different cognitive load tasks on two different auditory Stroop tasks was examined, and selective load effects were observed: Interference in a nonverbal-auditory Stroop task was increased under concurrent nonverbal-auditory cognitive load (compared with a no-load condition), but not under concurrent verbal-auditory cognitive load. By contrast, interference in a verbal-auditory Stroop task was increased under concurrent verbal-auditory cognitive load but not under nonverbal-auditory cognitive load. This double-dissociation pattern suggests the existence of different and separable verbal and nonverbal processing resources in the auditory domain.

Nonverbal aspects of turn taking in Mandarin Chinese interaction

This paper examines the nonverbal aspects of turn taking system in Mandarin Chinese talk-in-interaction. Based on the audio and video data collected from real conversational settings in Chinese universities, this project uses conversation analysis (CA) theory to analyze how university-educated Mandarin Chinese speakers utilize various nonverbal resources with reference to turn yielding, turn up-taking and turn maintaining strategies to achieve effective interpersonal communication . The research results show that the current speaking party (SP) and listening party (LP) use nonverbal tokens such as hand drop in yielding turns, gaze and touch in taking up turns, and non-gaze, thinking face and finger count in maintaining turns. Understanding of these nonverbal cues employed can help prospective intercultural communicators interact with Mandarin Chinese speakers more effectively and successfully.

Activity contracts and directives in everyday family politics

In theorizing on family life, children’s agency is a feature of a modern type of family, marked by free choice and inter-generational negotiations rather than parental authority. A video ethnography of Swedish everyday family life documents directive sequences and inter-generational negotiations, including what is here called activity contracts: agreements that form a type of inter-generational account work around target activities (e.g. cleaning one’s room). Within local family politics, contracts and revised contracts emerge as parts of such account work. The analyses focus on how contracts emerge within successive downgradings and upgradings of parental directives. Activity contracts regulate mutual rights and obligations, invoking family rule statements and local moral order, drawing on an array of verbal and nonverbal resources, ranging from parents’ mitigated requests and children’s time bargaining to nonverbal escape strategies and gentle shepherding.

“How Do the Apples Reproduce (Themselves)?” How Teacher Trainees Negotiate Language, Content, and Membership in a CLIL Science Education Classroom at a Multilingual University

This article discusses findings from ongoing research into plurilingual group work interaction in a Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) teacher training classroom at a university in Catalonia, Spain. We explore how participants make use of available verbal and non-verbal resources—for example, their multilingual verbal repertoires, posture, gesture, gaze—to collaboratively accomplish various activities and, specifically, to problematize linguistic and subject knowledge, to construct science teacher discourse, and to dynamically and simultaneously negotiate membership in immediate and “imagined” communities. Although the shift in European higher education toward teaching nonlanguage subjects through the medium of a foreign language would appear to favor monolingual practices and be detrimental to local languages, our data reveal that participants' plurilingual repertoires can act as a resource in classroom interaction, creating a favorable framework for performing a range of activities that would seem to enrich the collective learning process.

A DRAMATURGIA NA VIDA COTIDIANA: UMA PERSPECTIVA SOCIOLÓGICA

This article analyzes some of Erving Goffman’s statements in his book Thepresentation of Self in everyday life, whose project is to capture and to explainthe strategies that people use in order to pass of them a positive self-image, byverbal and mainly non-verbal resources. Goffman affirms that great part of thedaily behavior is similar to the actors in the stage, and the individuals and thegroups are constantly representing one another. Basing on two of the lettersthat compose the romance Les liaisons dangereuses, by Charderlos de Laclos,we will be trying to study the representations completely false to learn somethingregarding the ones who are entirely honest.

Multiple modalities in collaborative turn sequences

The article investigates resources used by parties in interaction to successfully complete each others’ utterances. Among the different ways in which recipients can demonstrate their understanding, collaborative completions are the most convincing since they display not only recipients’ understanding of the stance or the import of a turn-in-progress, but the minute analysis of the action itself. The article starts with a discussion of syntactic and action-sequential features of talk that can account for collaborative turn sequences and then focuses on other, non-verbal resources that may be made relevant at particular interactional junctures. An analysis of the several instances of collaborative completions illustrates the use of visually accessible features of the surround, gestural and postural conduct, and gaze direction in collaborative turn sequences. It is suggested that an interplay of these multiple modalities enables the participants to collaborate in co-constructing single syntactic units of talk. The electronic edition of this article includes audio-visual data.

Collaborative referencing between individuals with aphasia and routine communication partners.

H. H. Clark (1992) argues that successful referencing depends on speakers and listeners working together to establish shared perspectives on target objects. In his collaborative referencing model, he identifies 3 phases in the referencing process: initiation, refashioning, and acceptance. For referencing tasks, successful collaboration can be seen in the streamlining of referencing expressions and in the decrease of overt collaborative effort across trials. Although previous studies have shown that speakers with aphasia can be successful on referencing tasks, they have not examined how that success is achieved through the collaborative work of the partners. Using a referencing task adapted from H. H. Clark and D. Wilkes-Gibbs (1986), this study examined how 4 adults with moderate-to-severe aphasia collaborated with routine communication partners (spouses or children). Overall, these pairs completed the referencing task trials with 96% accuracy and displayed referencing processes that generally conformed to Clark's collaborative referencing model. Close analysis of the discourse of these interactions revealed patterns of collaboration that went beyond Clark's model-the pairs used diverse verbal and nonverbal resources, actively negotiated the task across trials, and layered their own personal goals and perspectives onto these interactions. This study highlights the plasticity of functional communication (the diversity of ways the pairs worked together to complete the same task) and points to the importance of understanding processes of tacit learning that take place in social interactions.

Dramatic discourse: Dialogue as interaction in plays By Vimala Herman (review)

384LANGUAGE, VOLUME 74, NUMBER 2 (1998) Hyatt, Harry Middleton (ed.) 1970-78. Hoodoo—conjuration—witchcraft—rootwork. Beliefs accepted by many Negroes and white persons. These being orally recorded among blacks and whites. 5 vols. Hannibal, MO: Elgin Hyatt Foundation. Krapp, George Philip. 1924. The English of the Negro. American Mercury 2.190-95. Rawick, George P. 1972-79. The American slave: A comprehensive autobiography. 10 vols. 1972. Supplement , series 1, 12 vols., 1977. Supplement, series 2, 10 vols., 1979. Westport, CT: Greenwood. Schneider, Edgar. 1989. American earlierBlack English: Morphological and syntactic variables. Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press. Viereck, Wolfgang. 1988. Invariant be in an unnoticed source of American Early Black English. American Speech 63.291-303. Department of English Duke University Box 90015 Durham, NC 27708-0015 [RonButters@aol.com] Dramatic discourse: Dialogue as interaction in plays. By Vimala Herman. London & New York: Routledge, 1995. Pp. x, 331. $69.95. Reviewed by Agnes Weiyun He, State University ofNew York, Stony Brook This book focuses on 'modern discourse frameworks for the different kinds ofillumination they offer with respect to the workings ofdramatic speech in plays' (17). It contains an introduction and five substantive chapters, each of which reviews literature in some approach to discourse studies and subsequently applies it to language use in dramatic texts. Designed to be 'inter-disciplinary' (17), this book is meant to be appreciated by readers interested in theories and applications (especially applications in dramatic contexts) alike. The introduction chapter states the purpose of the book, discusses such notions as dialogue, discourse, interaction, conversation and utterance, and situates drama in the context of social life but with its own specificities. It provides a contextual view of speech in drama which emphasizes that while dramatic discourse transforms written language to speech, it is more than recitation of the written texts, as it recreates situations jointly achieved by the participants and as it involves nonverbal resources. The introduction names the approaches to discourse which the rest of the book will survey and apply—ethnography of speaking, ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, Gricean pragmatics, speech act theory, politeness theory, and gender studies —but does not explain what problems or phenomena in dramatic discourse motivate the use of these approaches. The strongest chapter is Ch. 1 ('The ethnography of speaking'). It details Dell Hymes' SPEAKING model and the concept of speech event and uses these notions as tools to delineate the context of drama. It raises interesting questions such as how deixis anchors the participants within the spatiotemporal coordinates of speech events; how space and time are verbalized in drama to serve as two grammatical coordinates that ground speech; how setting integrates with participant framework as some contexts define the participant roles that are appropriate to them; how agency, liability, and distribution of participant roles are managed in drama; how fictional time and audience time are grammaticalized in/through drama; and more generally, how discourse/interaction and performance/reception mutually embed each other: These various issues are richly illustrated with works by both classical and contemporary dramatists. The goal of Ch. 2 ('Ethnomethodology and conversation analysis') and Ch. 3 ('Turn sequencing ') appears to be to summarize the major findings ofconversation analysis (CA) and to examine how some of the conversational structural mechanisms work in drama. Ch. 2 reviews literature and focuses on turn-taking; Ch. 3 concentrates on various sequence organizations. Compared with other chapters, the survey of literature in these two chapters is sketchy. Key concepts such as turns, turn-taking, and turn-constructional-units are explained not through the original CA REVIEWS385 work (e.g. Sacks et al. 1974 is conspicuously missing in the references) but largely via Levinson 1983. The value of these chapters lies in their attempt to apply a discourse approach which has so far been used in examining naturally occurring spoken data to an investigation ofpre-scripted, tidied-up language use in plays. It is useful here to make a distinction between language use in the performance of plays characterized by actual, recordable, transcribable, analyzable, moment-by-moment interaction and language use in the original play scripts which contain imagined, yet-to-be-vocalized, written dialogues without specification ofdetailed conversational features such as breathing, stress, pitch...