Maurice Nevile

Interaction and mobility : language and the body in motion

How do people use language, gestures and the materialenvironment around themfor interacting in mobile situations? Interaction and Mobility brings together international scholars who use video-recordings from real-life everyday settings to study how people interact in diverse mobile situations as part of activities such as walking, driving, flying, dancing and gaming. This book isvaluablefor anyone interested in multimodal interaction and mobility.

Integrity in the Airline Cockpit: Embodying Claims About Progress for the Conduct of an Approach Briefing

Toward the end of every airline flight, the pilots must prepare and agree on a plan for how the final stages of the flight-the descent, approach to the runway, and landing-will proceed, for what it is that they will do and know, as a crew, to bring their plane safely and unremarkably (all going well) to the ground. This plan emerges from a specific cockpit task called an approach briefing, which the pilots complete. In this article, I used transcriptions from video recordings of pilots at work on an actual scheduled passenger flight to examine in microdetail processes of talk-in-interaction as pilots conduct an approach briefing. My main interest is to show how the approach briefing emerges as talk and nontalk activities (e.g., writing, touching displays) are precisely coordinated to constitute a series of embodied claims, by the pilot leading the briefing, about his progress in conducting the various parts of the task. I suggest that this coordination is constitutive of work in the airline cockpit and most likely other sociotechnical work settings. In these settings, it is critical to perform and complete tasks and the talk and nontalk activities required for them in strict sequence, and so it is critical to ensure a kind of integrity in creating understandings of conduct in the trajectory of task-related actions. I suggest that the methods and findings of this article have a particular applied significance for commercial aviation, related research in aviation human factors, and accident investigation, particularly for the description and analysis of 2 key constructs: situation awareness and human error. In the article, I also present a new way for showing in transcriptions details of nontalk activities and their timing relative to talk.

The Embodied Turn in Research on Language and Social Interaction

I use the term the embodied turn to mean the point when interest in the body became established among researchers on language and social interaction, exploiting the greater ease of video recording. This review article tracks the growth of “embodiment” in over 400 articles published in Research on Language and Social Interaction from 1987 to 2013. I consider closely two areas where analysts have confronted challenges and how they have responded: settling on precise and analytically helpful terminology for the body, and transcribing and representing the body, particularly its temporality and manner.

Making sequentiality salient: and-prefacing in the talk of airline pilots

This article uses transcriptions from video recordings of airline pilots at work, on actual flights, to consider some locations and the interactional significance of a feature of routine talk in the airline cockpit: and-prefaced turns. As pilots’ work is formally organized for them as many discrete and ordered tasks, and-prefacing is a local means for maintaining an ongoing sense of their conduct of a flight as a whole. By and-prefacing their talk, pilots present some new talk or task as connected and relevantly next in a larger macro-sequence of work for their flight. And-prefacing is evidence of pilots’ orientation to a sense of sequence that can extend well beyond pairs of turns at talk and/or non-talk activities, or even a series of such paired sequences. It allows pilots to make salient the sequentiality of their work where the officially prescribed wordings they must use can leave this implicit.

Action in time: Ensuring timeliness for collaborative work in the airline cockpit

In the airline cockpit it is critical to say and do things at the appropriate time and in the appropriate order. When a pilot is responsible for initiating a next action but has not yet done so, the pilot not responsible can prompt or perform the action with talk that is prefaced with and. Rather than make conspicuous another’s possible lapse, and-prefaced talk presents the not-yet-initiated action as timely and merely occurring routinely next in sequence. And occurs in talk for monitoring another’s conduct and for maintaining accountability in the temporal organization of work by situating actions acceptably in time. This article points to the value of seeing grammatical forms as consequential for just how work gets done in particular settings, and especially for identifying local means of creating order for agenda-based activities. The article analyzes transcriptions of pilots interacting in the cockpit on actual scheduled passenger flights. (And, aviation, collaborative work, conversation analysis, ethnomethodology, institutional interaction, repair, sequential organization, temporal organization)

You Are Well Clear of Friendlies: Diagnostic Error and Cooperative Work in an Iraq War Friendly Fire Incident

This paper considers diagnostic error in cooperative work as a contributing factor for a military ‘friendly fire’ incident. It emphasises aspects of the moment-to-moment sequential organisation of interaction, and turn design, to explore the significance for the error of a loss of intersubjectivity and joint understanding. The paper uses as data the cockpit video recording from a US Air Force aircraft that fired on a British armoured vehicle convoy in March 2003, in the early days of the Iraq War. The analytic approach is grounded in concerns of ethnomethodology (EM) and conversation analysis (CA) for uncovering the language, practices and processes of reasoning by which people accomplish social actions, particularly for conducting cooperative work. The paper highlights the impact for the participants’ perception, understanding and action of varying forms of participation, for example as speaker, addressed recipient, or as potential overhearing non-addressed recipient, and relative to participants’ involvement in the task at hand, and to their possibilities for accessing relevant phenomena (i.e. the vehicles and their visible features). Diagnosis in cooperative work demands that participants act relative to one another’s diverse perspectives and representations of the scene and its objects and events. Diagnosis requires participants to manage situations of ambiguity and uncertainty, and to resolve apparent conflicts of understanding and perceptual evidence. The paper examines the social character of diagnostic work by showing how processes of cooperation can be vulnerable and ultimately go wrong, particularly when multiple participants are physically distributed and interaction is mediated by communication technologies such as radio.

Talking without overlap in the airline cockpit : Precision timing at work

Abstract This study examines temporal organization for interaction in a specific work setting: the airline cockpit. It is generally concerned with precise timing for turn taking as a feature of competent conduct in collaborative professional work, and for creating an acceptable orderly flow of talk for tasks. Specifically, it pursues an observation that moments of overlapping talk, when two or more parties talk simultaneously, are rare in cockpit interaction. Pilots are instructed in training not to speak simultaneously; however, cockpit talk is highly conducive to overlap. Mostly pilots know who will say what to whom, and when, because they are legally required to use scripted procedural wordings. The trajectories of turns are predictable and projectable, and therefore are vulnerable to terminal overlap, when a recipient starts talking just as a current speaker is completing a turn. This does not happen, because airline pilots precisely time next talk to start at the actual, not projected, end of current talk. Pilots allow talk to emerge complete. Pilots orient to the strictly sequential nature of their work to accomplish conflicting setting-specific demands for talk, in situ and in real time. The paper uses transcriptions from audio and video recordings of pilots on actual passenger flights.

A Conversation Analysis View of Communication as Jointly Accomplished Social Interaction: An Unsuccessful Proposal for a Social Visit

Conversation analysis (CA) focuses on the language, practices and competencies by which people accomplish social actions to create and understand ordinary social life. CA uses naturally occurring data, examining micro-detailed transcriptions from recordings of ordinary interactions. This paper highlights some principles, methods, and insights of CA. We consider a short segment of transcribed phone conversation in which one participant proposes a social visit to the other. We see just how the talk develops as it does, and examine the details of language-in-use that the participants themselves draw upon to construct and make sense of what it is they are doing, of what is going on. How does a ‘proposal’ for a social visit arise from a course of talk, and how is it fitted both to its recipient and to the moment it occurs? How is the proposal understood to be ‘unsuccessful’? We show how turns at talk always emerge and are understood within the rich sequential context of a developing trajectory of interaction that is jointly developed by participants. Linguists are well placed to study communication as naturally occurring talk, and such study can in turn inform linguistics by developing knowledge of the nature and use of language.