This study explores how manners of mediation, and the use of embodiment in interpreter-mediated conversation have an impact on tests of cognitive functioning in a dementia evaluation. By a detailed analysis of video recordings, we show how participants-an occupational therapist, an interpreter, and a patient-use embodied practices to make the tasks of a test of cognitive functioning intelligible, and how participants collaboratively put the instructions of the tasks into practice. We demonstrate that both instructions and instructed actions-and the whole procedure of accomplishing the tasks-are shaped co-operatively by embodied practices of all three participants involved in the test situation. Consequently, the accomplishment of the tasks should be viewed as the outcome of a collaborative achievement of instructed actions, rather than an individual product. The result of the study calls attention to issues concerning interpretations of, and the reliability of interpreter-mediated tests and their bearings for diagnostic procedures in dementia evaluations.
This study is about embodied and endogenous grammar instruction on worksheets in teaching Swedish as a second language. It is demonstrated how an 'awareness' to produce a linguistic construct 'grammatically correct' is co-achieved by the teacher and the student. To see and understand the grammatical features of the words, an interactive instructional sequence is initiated by the teacher. This interactive scaffolding between the teacher and the student, to use meta-talk and to talk about abstract grammar, requires some concrete referents on a surface jointly attended to, and which are seen, pointed to and talked about. It is shown in detail how the interactional business of the interchange is dependent upon a constant integration of talk, gesture and orientation to the written grammatical construct on a sheet of paper. Teaching grammar is, thus, done through the objectification of quite abstract linguistic units and categories, and the transposition of the abstraction onto tangible and visible objects on the paper. Therefore, the result of the organization of order in instruction is a moment-by-moment sense-making, including accounting 2 for how to understand a grammatical phrase, and the rationale behind the relations of the grammatical constructs, and, also, transforming the organization of knowledge. This study shows that foregrounding grammatical learnables on a paper are actualized by the mobilization of diverse semiotic resources resulting in seeing, understanding and reaching an instructed vision (cf. Goodwin, 1994) as the progressive achievement of observable and reportable embodied actions (Garfinkel, 1967(Garfinkel, , 2002.Grammatical learnables are, therefore, the procedural outcome of the hands-on practices as mutually achieved embodied accomplishments.
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