Embodying epistemic responsibility
The interplay of gaze and stance-taking in children’s collaborative reasoning
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/rcsi.37391Keywords:
collaborative reasoning, gaze, epistemic stance, epistemic responsibility, intercorporeal participation frameworkAbstract
The study explores how children deploy gaze and embodied epistemic stance displays to establish a mutual epistemic responsibility when dealing with potentially controversial questions. Drawing on video recordings of 24 peer interactions involving children aged 9-12 years, the sequential and multimodal analysis describes the practices that construct intercorporeal participation frameworks for collaborative reasoning. Findings demonstrate that children coordinate gaze and multimodal displays of epistemic stance to mobilize co-participants' attention toward their position, while at the same time subjecting it to negotiation. Furthermore, children recruit the current speaker's gaze to issue a friendly challenge to his/her pre-determined stance. When the mutual epistemic responsibility was at stake, children occasioned a recalibration of stance displays at the earliest possible place. The children's embodied participation frameworks thus reflect their orientation to knowledge as being socially constructed.
References
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Bateman, A. & Roberts, P. (2018). Morality at play: Pretend play in five-year-old children. Research on Children and Social Interaction, 2(2).
Bavelas, J., Gerwing, J. & Healing, S. (2014). Including facial gestures in gesture-speech ensembles. In M. Seyfeddinipur & M. Gullberg (eds), From Gesture in Conversation to Visible Action as Utterance (pp. 15–34). Philadelphia, PA: Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/z.188.02bav
Bergmann, J. (1998). Introduction: Morality in discourse. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 31(3–4), 279–294. https://doi.org/10.1080/08351813.1998.9683594
Björk-Willen, P. (2018). Learning to apologize: Moral socialization as an interactional practice in preschool. Research on Children and Social Interaction, 2(2).
Cekaite, A. (2014). Tattling and dispute resolution: Moral order, emotions and embodiment in the teacher-mediated disputes of young second language learners. In S. Danby & M. Theobald (eds), Disputes in Everyday Life (pp. 165–191). Bingley: Emerald.
Cekaite, A. (2016). Emotional stances and interactional competence: Learning to calibrate disagreements, objections, and refusals. In M. Prior & G. Kasper (eds), Emotion in Multilingual Interaction (pp. 131–152). Philadelphia: Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.266.06cek
Church, A. (2009). Preference Organisation and Peer Disputes: How Young Children Resolve Conflict. London: Routledge.
Corsaro, W. & Rizzo, T. (1990). Disputes in the peer culture of American and Italian nursery-school children. In A. Grimshaw (eds), Conflict Talk: Sociolinguistic Investigations of Arguments in Conversations (pp. 21–66). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Coulter, J. (1990). Elementary Properties of Argument Sequences. In G. Psathas (ed.), Interaction Competence (pp. 181–204). Washington, DC: University Press of America.
Couper-Kuhlen, E. & Selting, M. (2018). Interactional Linguistics: Studying Language in Social Interaction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Danby, S. & Theobald, M. (eds). (2014). Disputes in Everyday Life: Social and Moral Orders of Children and Young People. Bingley: Emerald.
Domberg, A., Köymen, B. & Tomasello, M. (2017). Children’s reasoning with peers in cooperative and competitive contexts. The British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 36(1), 1–14.
Ehlich, K. (2014). Argumentieren als sprachliche Ressource des diskursiven Lernens. In A. Hornung, G. Carobbio & D. Sorrentino (eds), Diskursive und textuelle Strukturen in der Hochschuldidaktik (pp. 41–54). Münster: Waxmann.
Evaldsson, A.-C. (2007). Accounting for friendship: Moral ordering and category membership in girls’ relational talk. Research on Language and Interaction, 40(4), 377–404. https://doi.org/10.1080/08351810701471377
Garcia-Mila, M., Gilabert, S., Erduran, S. & Felton, M. (2013). The effect of argumentative task goal on the quality of argumentative discourse. Science Education, 97(4), 497–523. https://doi.org/10.1002/sce.21057
Gardner, R. (2001). When Listeners Talk: Response Tokens and Listener Stance. Amsterdam: Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.92
Goffman, E. (1959). The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Doubleday Anchor.
Goodwin, C. (2003). The body in action. In J. Coupland & R. Gwyn (eds), Discourse, the Body and Identity (pp. 19–42). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403918543_2
Goodwin, C. (2007). Participation, stance and affect in the organization of activities. Discourse & Society, 18(1), 53–73. https://doi.org/10.1177/0957926507069457
Goodwin, M. H. (1982). Processes of dispute management among urban black children. American Ethnologist, 9(1), 76–96. https://doi.org/10.1525/ae.1982.9.1.02a00050
Goodwin, M. H. & Cekaite, A. (2013). Calibration in directive/response sequences in family interaction. Journal of Pragmatics, 46(1), 122–138. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2012.07.008
Goodwin, M. H. &. Goodwin, C. (1986). Gesture and coparticipation in the activity of searching for a word. Semiotica, 62(1–2), 51–75.
Goodwin, M. H. & Kyratzis, A. (2007). Children socializing children: Practices for negotiating the social order among peers. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 40(4), 279–289. https://doi.org/10.1080/08351810701471260
Haddington, P. (2006). The organization of gaze and assessments as resources for stancetaking. Text & Talk, 26(3), 281–328. https://doi.org/10.1515/TEXT.2006.012
Hauser, S. & Luginbühl, M. (2017). Wenn Kinder argumentieren – Grundlagen und erste Befunde einer Studie zur mündlichen Argumentationskompetenz von Schulkindern. In I. Meißner & E. Wyss (eds), Begründen, Erklären, Argumentieren (pp. 89–106). Tübingen: Stauffenburg.
Heller, V. (2014). Discursive practices in family dinner talk and classroom discourse: A contextual comparison. Learning, Culture and Social Interaction, 3(2), 134–145. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lcsi.2014.02.001
Heller, V. (2017). Managing knowledge claims in classroom discourse: The public construction of a homogeneous epistemic status. Classroom Discourse, 8(2), 156–174. https://doi.org/10.1080/19463014.2017.1328699
Heritage, J. (2012). The epistemic engine: Sequence organization and territories of knowledge. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 45(1), 30–52. https://doi.org/10.1080/08351813.2012.646685
Heritage, J. & Raymond, G. (2005). The terms of agreement: Indexing epistemic authority and subordination in talk-in-interaction. Social Psychology Quarterly, 68(1), 15–38. https://doi.org/10.1177/019027250506800103
Holm Kvist, M. (2018). Children’s crying in play conflicts: A locus for moral and emotional socialization. Research on Children and Social Interaction, 2(2).
Iwasaki, S. (2015). Collaboratively organized stancetaking in Japanese: Sharing and negotiating stance within the turn constructional unit. Journal of Pragmatics, 83, 104–119. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2015.04.007
Kärkkäinen, E. (2003). Epistemic Stance in English Conversation: A Description of its Interactional Functions, with a Focus on I Think. Amsterdam: Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.115
Kendon, A. (1967). Some functions of gaze-direction in social interaction. Acta Psychologica, 26, 22–63. https://doi.org/10.1016/0001-6918(67)90005-4
Kendon, A. (1985). Behavioural foundation for the process of frame attunement in face-to-face interaction. In G. P. Ginsburg (ed.), Discovery Strategies in the Psychology of Action (pp. 229–253). London: Academic Press.
Kendon, A. (2004). Gesture: Visible Action as Utterance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511807572
Kendrick, K. H. & Holler, J. (2017). Gaze direction signals response preference in conversation. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 50(1), 12–32. https://doi.org/10.1080/08351813.2017.1262120
Krantz, M., George, S. W. & Hursh, K. (1983). Gaze and mutual gaze of preschool children in conversation. Journal of Psychology, 113(1), 9–15. https://doi.org/10.1080/00223980.1983.9923549
Lerner, G. H. (2004). Collaborative turn sequences. In G. H. Lerner (ed.), Conversation Analysis: Studies from the First Generation (pp. 225–256). Amsterdam: Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.125.12ler
Luckmann, T. (1986). Grundformen der gesellschaftlichen Vermittlung des Wissens: Kommunikative Gattungen. Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie, 27, 191–211. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-322-91077-6_10
Maynard, D. W. (1985). How children start arguments. Language in Society, 14(1), 1–30. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0047404500010915
Morek, M. (2015). Dissensbearbeitung unter Gleichaltrigen – (k)ein Kontext für den Erwerb. Mitteilungen des Deutschen Germanistenverbandes, 62(1), 34–46. https://doi.org/10.14220/mdge.2015.62.1.34
Müller, C. (2004). Forms and uses of the palm up open hand: A case of a gesture family? In C. Müller & R. Posner (eds), The Semantics and Pragmatics of Everyday Gestures (pp. 233–256). Berlin: Weidler.
Peräkylä, A. & Ruusovuori, J. (2006). Facial expression in an assessment. In H. Knoblauch & B. Schnettler (eds), Video Analysis: Methodology and Methods (pp. 127–142). Frankfurt: Lang.
Pittner, K. (2007). Common ground in interaction: The functions of medial doch. In A. Fetzer & K. Fischer (eds), Lexical Markers of Common Grounds (pp. 67–87). Boston: Elsevier.
Pomerantz, A. (1980). Telling my side: ‘Limited access’ as a ‘fishing’ device. Sociological Inquiry, 50(3–4), 186–198. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-682X.1980.tb00020.x
Pontecorvo, C. & Fasulo, A. (1997). Learning to argue in family shared discourse: The reconstruction of past events. In L. Resnick (ed), Discourse, Tools, and Reasoning: Essays on Situated Cognition (pp. 406–442). Berlin: Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-03362-3_18
Quasthoff, U., Heller, V. & Morek, M. (2017). On the sequential organization and genre-orientation of discourse units in interaction: An analytic framework. Discourse Studies, 19(1), 84–110. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461445616683596
Rossano, F. (2012). Gaze Behavior in Face-to-Face Interaction. Nijmegen: Radboud Repository.
Schütz, A. (1953). Common-sense and scientific interpretation of human action. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 14(1), 1–38. https://doi.org/10.2307/2104013
Selting, M. et al. (2011). A system for transcribing talk-in-interaction: GAT 2. Translated and adapted for English by E. Couper-Kuhlen & D. Barth-Weingarten. Gesprächsforschung, 12, 1–51.
Sidnell, J. (2012). ‘Who knows best?’: Evidentiality and epistemic asymmetry in conversation. Pragmatics and Society, 3(2), 294–320. https://doi.org/10.1075/ps.3.2.08sid
Sterponi, L. (2009). Accountability in family discourse. Childhood, 16(4), 441–459. https://doi.org/10.1177/0907568209343269
Stevanovic, M. (2012). Establishing joint decisions in a dyad. Discourse Studies, 14(6), 779–803. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461445612456654
Stivers, T., Mondada, L. & Steensig, J. (2011). The Morality of Knowledge in Conversation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511921674
Streeck, J. (2009). Gesturecraft: The Manu-facture of Meaning. Philadelphia, PA: Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/gs.2
Zadunaisky Ehrlich, S. & Blum-Kulka, S. (2014). ‘Now I said that Danny becomes Danny again’: A multifaceted view of kindergarten children’s peer argumentative discourse. In A. Cekaite, S. Blum-Kulka, V. Grøver & E. Teubal (eds), Children’s Peer Talk: Learning from Each Other (pp. 23–41). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139084536.005
Auer, P. (2017). Gaze, addressee selection and turn-taking in three-party interaction. Interaction and Linguistic Structures, 60, 1–32.
Bateman, A. & Roberts, P. (2018). Morality at play: Pretend play in five-year-old children. Research on Children and Social Interaction, 2(2).
Bavelas, J., Gerwing, J. & Healing, S. (2014). Including facial gestures in gesture-speech ensembles. In M. Seyfeddinipur & M. Gullberg (eds), From Gesture in Conversation to Visible Action as Utterance (pp. 15–34). Philadelphia, PA: Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/z.188.02bav
Bergmann, J. (1998). Introduction: Morality in discourse. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 31(3–4), 279–294. https://doi.org/10.1080/08351813.1998.9683594
Björk-Willen, P. (2018). Learning to apologize: Moral socialization as an interactional practice in preschool. Research on Children and Social Interaction, 2(2).
Cekaite, A. (2014). Tattling and dispute resolution: Moral order, emotions and embodiment in the teacher-mediated disputes of young second language learners. In S. Danby & M. Theobald (eds), Disputes in Everyday Life (pp. 165–191). Bingley: Emerald.
Cekaite, A. (2016). Emotional stances and interactional competence: Learning to calibrate disagreements, objections, and refusals. In M. Prior & G. Kasper (eds), Emotion in Multilingual Interaction (pp. 131–152). Philadelphia: Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.266.06cek
Church, A. (2009). Preference Organisation and Peer Disputes: How Young Children Resolve Conflict. London: Routledge.
Corsaro, W. & Rizzo, T. (1990). Disputes in the peer culture of American and Italian nursery-school children. In A. Grimshaw (eds), Conflict Talk: Sociolinguistic Investigations of Arguments in Conversations (pp. 21–66). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Coulter, J. (1990). Elementary Properties of Argument Sequences. In G. Psathas (ed.), Interaction Competence (pp. 181–204). Washington, DC: University Press of America.
Couper-Kuhlen, E. & Selting, M. (2018). Interactional Linguistics: Studying Language in Social Interaction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Danby, S. & Theobald, M. (eds). (2014). Disputes in Everyday Life: Social and Moral Orders of Children and Young People. Bingley: Emerald.
Domberg, A., Köymen, B. & Tomasello, M. (2017). Children’s reasoning with peers in cooperative and competitive contexts. The British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 36(1), 1–14.
Ehlich, K. (2014). Argumentieren als sprachliche Ressource des diskursiven Lernens. In A. Hornung, G. Carobbio & D. Sorrentino (eds), Diskursive und textuelle Strukturen in der Hochschuldidaktik (pp. 41–54). Münster: Waxmann.
Evaldsson, A.-C. (2007). Accounting for friendship: Moral ordering and category membership in girls’ relational talk. Research on Language and Interaction, 40(4), 377–404. https://doi.org/10.1080/08351810701471377
Garcia-Mila, M., Gilabert, S., Erduran, S. & Felton, M. (2013). The effect of argumentative task goal on the quality of argumentative discourse. Science Education, 97(4), 497–523. https://doi.org/10.1002/sce.21057
Gardner, R. (2001). When Listeners Talk: Response Tokens and Listener Stance. Amsterdam: Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.92
Goffman, E. (1959). The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Doubleday Anchor.
Goodwin, C. (2003). The body in action. In J. Coupland & R. Gwyn (eds), Discourse, the Body and Identity (pp. 19–42). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403918543_2
Goodwin, C. (2007). Participation, stance and affect in the organization of activities. Discourse & Society, 18(1), 53–73. https://doi.org/10.1177/0957926507069457
Goodwin, M. H. (1982). Processes of dispute management among urban black children. American Ethnologist, 9(1), 76–96. https://doi.org/10.1525/ae.1982.9.1.02a00050
Goodwin, M. H. & Cekaite, A. (2013). Calibration in directive/response sequences in family interaction. Journal of Pragmatics, 46(1), 122–138. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2012.07.008
Goodwin, M. H. &. Goodwin, C. (1986). Gesture and coparticipation in the activity of searching for a word. Semiotica, 62(1–2), 51–75.
Goodwin, M. H. & Kyratzis, A. (2007). Children socializing children: Practices for negotiating the social order among peers. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 40(4), 279–289. https://doi.org/10.1080/08351810701471260
Haddington, P. (2006). The organization of gaze and assessments as resources for stancetaking. Text & Talk, 26(3), 281–328. https://doi.org/10.1515/TEXT.2006.012
Hauser, S. & Luginbühl, M. (2017). Wenn Kinder argumentieren – Grundlagen und erste Befunde einer Studie zur mündlichen Argumentationskompetenz von Schulkindern. In I. Meißner & E. Wyss (eds), Begründen, Erklären, Argumentieren (pp. 89–106). Tübingen: Stauffenburg.
Heller, V. (2014). Discursive practices in family dinner talk and classroom discourse: A contextual comparison. Learning, Culture and Social Interaction, 3(2), 134–145. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lcsi.2014.02.001
Heller, V. (2017). Managing knowledge claims in classroom discourse: The public construction of a homogeneous epistemic status. Classroom Discourse, 8(2), 156–174. https://doi.org/10.1080/19463014.2017.1328699
Heritage, J. (2012). The epistemic engine: Sequence organization and territories of knowledge. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 45(1), 30–52. https://doi.org/10.1080/08351813.2012.646685
Heritage, J. & Raymond, G. (2005). The terms of agreement: Indexing epistemic authority and subordination in talk-in-interaction. Social Psychology Quarterly, 68(1), 15–38. https://doi.org/10.1177/019027250506800103
Holm Kvist, M. (2018). Children’s crying in play conflicts: A locus for moral and emotional socialization. Research on Children and Social Interaction, 2(2).
Iwasaki, S. (2015). Collaboratively organized stancetaking in Japanese: Sharing and negotiating stance within the turn constructional unit. Journal of Pragmatics, 83, 104–119. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2015.04.007
Kärkkäinen, E. (2003). Epistemic Stance in English Conversation: A Description of its Interactional Functions, with a Focus on I Think. Amsterdam: Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.115
Kendon, A. (1967). Some functions of gaze-direction in social interaction. Acta Psychologica, 26, 22–63. https://doi.org/10.1016/0001-6918(67)90005-4
Kendon, A. (1985). Behavioural foundation for the process of frame attunement in face-to-face interaction. In G. P. Ginsburg (ed.), Discovery Strategies in the Psychology of Action (pp. 229–253). London: Academic Press.
Kendon, A. (2004). Gesture: Visible Action as Utterance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511807572
Kendrick, K. H. & Holler, J. (2017). Gaze direction signals response preference in conversation. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 50(1), 12–32. https://doi.org/10.1080/08351813.2017.1262120
Krantz, M., George, S. W. & Hursh, K. (1983). Gaze and mutual gaze of preschool children in conversation. Journal of Psychology, 113(1), 9–15. https://doi.org/10.1080/00223980.1983.9923549
Lerner, G. H. (2004). Collaborative turn sequences. In G. H. Lerner (ed.), Conversation Analysis: Studies from the First Generation (pp. 225–256). Amsterdam: Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.125.12ler
Luckmann, T. (1986). Grundformen der gesellschaftlichen Vermittlung des Wissens: Kommunikative Gattungen. Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie, 27, 191–211. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-322-91077-6_10
Maynard, D. W. (1985). How children start arguments. Language in Society, 14(1), 1–30. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0047404500010915
Morek, M. (2015). Dissensbearbeitung unter Gleichaltrigen – (k)ein Kontext für den Erwerb. Mitteilungen des Deutschen Germanistenverbandes, 62(1), 34–46. https://doi.org/10.14220/mdge.2015.62.1.34
Müller, C. (2004). Forms and uses of the palm up open hand: A case of a gesture family? In C. Müller & R. Posner (eds), The Semantics and Pragmatics of Everyday Gestures (pp. 233–256). Berlin: Weidler.
Peräkylä, A. & Ruusovuori, J. (2006). Facial expression in an assessment. In H. Knoblauch & B. Schnettler (eds), Video Analysis: Methodology and Methods (pp. 127–142). Frankfurt: Lang.
Pittner, K. (2007). Common ground in interaction: The functions of medial doch. In A. Fetzer & K. Fischer (eds), Lexical Markers of Common Grounds (pp. 67–87). Boston: Elsevier.
Pomerantz, A. (1980). Telling my side: ‘Limited access’ as a ‘fishing’ device. Sociological Inquiry, 50(3–4), 186–198. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-682X.1980.tb00020.x
Pontecorvo, C. & Fasulo, A. (1997). Learning to argue in family shared discourse: The reconstruction of past events. In L. Resnick (ed), Discourse, Tools, and Reasoning: Essays on Situated Cognition (pp. 406–442). Berlin: Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-03362-3_18
Quasthoff, U., Heller, V. & Morek, M. (2017). On the sequential organization and genre-orientation of discourse units in interaction: An analytic framework. Discourse Studies, 19(1), 84–110. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461445616683596
Rossano, F. (2012). Gaze Behavior in Face-to-Face Interaction. Nijmegen: Radboud Repository.
Schütz, A. (1953). Common-sense and scientific interpretation of human action. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 14(1), 1–38. https://doi.org/10.2307/2104013
Selting, M. et al. (2011). A system for transcribing talk-in-interaction: GAT 2. Translated and adapted for English by E. Couper-Kuhlen & D. Barth-Weingarten. Gesprächsforschung, 12, 1–51.
Sidnell, J. (2012). ‘Who knows best?’: Evidentiality and epistemic asymmetry in conversation. Pragmatics and Society, 3(2), 294–320. https://doi.org/10.1075/ps.3.2.08sid
Sterponi, L. (2009). Accountability in family discourse. Childhood, 16(4), 441–459. https://doi.org/10.1177/0907568209343269
Stevanovic, M. (2012). Establishing joint decisions in a dyad. Discourse Studies, 14(6), 779–803. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461445612456654
Stivers, T., Mondada, L. & Steensig, J. (2011). The Morality of Knowledge in Conversation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511921674
Streeck, J. (2009). Gesturecraft: The Manu-facture of Meaning. Philadelphia, PA: Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/gs.2
Zadunaisky Ehrlich, S. & Blum-Kulka, S. (2014). ‘Now I said that Danny becomes Danny again’: A multifaceted view of kindergarten children’s peer argumentative discourse. In A. Cekaite, S. Blum-Kulka, V. Grøver & E. Teubal (eds), Children’s Peer Talk: Learning from Each Other (pp. 23–41). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139084536.005
Published
2018-12-03
Issue
Section
Articles
How to Cite
Heller, V. (2018). Embodying epistemic responsibility: The interplay of gaze and stance-taking in children’s collaborative reasoning. Research on Children and Social Interaction, 2(2), 262-285. https://doi.org/10.1558/rcsi.37391
