Children and parents playing together on a large tablet: Spatial configurations and participation frameworks

Online conferenceInternational audienceWe study French gaming interactions between children and their (grand)parents on a large tablet from a multimodal interactional perspective (Mondada 2016). The video data have been collected in 2016 and 2017, within an interdisciplinary project on intergenerational interactions including technical devices. The activity was mediated by a library staff member and it took place in a large room, where other freely accessible activities were also available. In this presentation, we focus on the temporally emergent dynamics of space configurations and participation frameworks with regard to the children and their (grand)parents – the mediator occupies a particular role (Baldauf-Quilliatre/Ursi in press). Several constraints are at work in these interactions: the presence of the large tablet, which is placed against a wall, the type of games (children's games), and the different height of the participants (small children and taller adults). With regard to these constraints, children and adults use a specific spatial formation (Kendon 1990), i.e. an arrangement in two rows, where adults occupy the position the furthest away from the screen, reducing their actions on the tactile surface. This not only allows children to reach the screen more easily, but also enables the adults to monitor their children, to signal targets in the virtual environment of the game as well as, by reconfiguring their body position, to operate a haptic control (Cekaite 2015) on children's bodies (Kern 2018). Moreover, they can act either as players, within a team together with their children, or as spectators, by encouraging and physically supporting children's accomplishments on the touchscreen (Baldauf-Quilliatre/Colón de Carvajal 2019; Baldauf-Quilliatre/Colón de Carvajal in press). In all cases, embodied and verbal actions are based on the unfolding of the game displayed on the screen (Mondada 2013). This multimodal interactional study leads us to shed light on the emergence of these positions and local identities in interaction. In other words, we analyse the sequential and spatial organisation of bodily resources in order to highlight various degrees of participants' involvement in the gaming activity. Their involvement concerns not only team strategies of searching for a single virtual object, among those that are hidden in the game's scenery, but also a variable positioning in relation to the overall temporality of the gaming activity, which can be unpacked into specific tasks (i.e. phases).----------------------------- REFERENCES ------------------------------BALDAUF-QUILLIATRE, Heike / COLÓN DE CARVAJAL, Isabel (2019). Encouragement in videogame interactions. Social Interaction. Video-Based Studies of Human Sociality, 2(2). [https://doi.org/10.7146/si.v2i2.118041]BALDAUF-QUILLIATRE, Heike / COLÓN DE CARVAJAL, Isabel (in press). Spectating: How non-players participate in videogaming. Journal für Medienlinguistik. [discussion paper accessible under the title ''Doing participation'' at http://dp.jfml.org/2020/opr-baldauf-quilliatre-colon-de-carvajal-doing-participation-non-players-participating-in-video-gaming/]BALDAUF-QUILLIATRE, Heike / URSI, Biagio (in press). Constructing local identities in multiparty interactions with tablets. A multimodal analysis of participation organisation in intergenerational screen-based interactions. In A. Brock, P. Schildhauer, J. Russels & M. Willenberg (eds.), Participation and identity. Frankfurt a.M.: Lang.CEKAITE, Asta (2015). The coordination of talk and touch in adults' directives to children: Touch and social control. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 48(2), 152-175.KENDON, Adam (1990). Conducting interaction: Patterns of behavior in focused encounters. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.KERN, Friederike (2018). Mastering the Body. Correcting bodily conduct in adult-child interaction. Research on Children and Social Interaction, 2(2), 213-234.MONDADA, Lorenza (2013). Coordinating mobile action in real time: the timely organisation of directives in video games. In P. Haddington, L. Mondada & M. Nevile (eds.), Interaction and mobility. Language and the body in motion. Berlin: De Gruyter, 300-342.MONDADA, Lorenza (2016). Challenges of multimodality: Language and the body in social interaction. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 20(3), p. 336-366