Taking the next step in a collaborative project: A multimodal analysis of verbal and embodied actions at the computer

This dissertation studies salient ways in which pairs of university students collaborative work on and achieve their projects at the computer. It focuses on the linguistic and embodied practices employed by participants to effectively carry out their work in a collaborative context, and particularly on tasks requiring the use of the computer.

Three practices are studied: the production of proposals, the use of physical and digital pointings at the screen, and the phases unfolding between information-searching, for example reading a Wiki page, to typing in a slide. The findings demonstrate, first, that participants use different linguistic formats and embodied actions to display whether their proposals put forward immediate actions, about to be carried out right away if the proposals are accepted by the recipients, or remote ones. Second, the findings demonstrate that the sequences of talk following pointings at the screen unfold in ways which are different from most common forms of pointings.

Moreover, the findings shed light on digital pointings, pointings done with the mouse cursor, and demonstrate how the mouse cursor is used as a tool not only to navigate the computer, but also to produce intelligible communicative actions. And third, the findings show that participants go through recurring phases between information-searching and typing. These phases are steps necessarily following each other and ultimately leading to typing. The analyses also study typing-in-interaction, and put forward the intricate interweaving of talk and typing.