Co-Operative Instruction in Music and Sports: Language(s), Body, and Objects

Abstract

As demonstrated by past ethnomethodological and conversation-analytic research, the interactional work of teaching is inherently embodied (Hall & Looney, 2019). This is particularly true for instruction in performance-based activities such as music and sports. Adopting the theoretical and methodological perspectives of multimodal conversation analysis (Mondada, 2019), this dissertation aims to explicate how participants locally organize the work of teaching and learning embodied skills (Ehmer & Brône, 2021) to produce, and sustain, the normative order of the setting (Garfinkel, 2002). To this end, the study examines corrections, instructions, and transitions within and across three activity contexts: taiko ensemble rehearsals, Muay Thai training, and jazz/blues band rehearsals.The key findings are as follows. First, correction and instruction are contingently managed through participants’ retrospective and prospective orientations. These differences in orientation help shape the local organization of the activity-at-hand, affording unique interactional practices such as choral chanting (Yagi, 2022). Second, instructional activities in performance-based settings involve the use of activity-specific objects (Nevile et al., 2014), some of which can impose material constraints on manual mobility (Yagi, 2023). Participants nevertheless manage to work around these constraints via embodied and contextually afforded practices (Yagi, 2021b). Finally, while vocalizations figure prominently in both music and sports, they differ in terms of conventionality, with some being subject to correction and contestation (Choe & Yagi, 2023; Yagi, 2022). Based on C. Goodwin’s (2018) theory of co-operative action, the discussion argues that members’ methods for teaching and correcting may have diversified within sedimented landscapes as single instances accumulate in interaction. From an ecological perspective, a practice adapts to its surrounding environment through each path it takes. Such accumulation of diversity may then equip participants with a refined repertoire of teaching practices, through which they can effectively teach the set of embodied skills that constitute the work of their community.