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Licensed Unlicensed Requires Authentication Published by De Gruyter Mouton November 7, 2014

Producing Shared Attention/Awareness in High School Tutoring

  • Jesse Pirini

    Jesse Pirini is a PhD Candidate at AUT University in Auckland, New Zealand, and a member of the Multimodal Research Centre. He is currently investigating high school tutoring, building on an earlier project into business coaching. Jesse’s research applies and develops multimodal research methods, with a view to improving tutoring outcomes at high school level and making theoretical and methodological contributions to social interaction research.

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From the journal Multimodal Communication

Abstract

During the activities of everyday life social actors always produce multiple simultaneous higher level actions. These necessarily operate at different levels of attention and awareness. Modal density is a methodological tool that can be used to analyse the attention/awareness of social actors in relation to higher level actions they produce, positioning actions in the foreground, midground and background of attention. Using modal density to analyse an opening and a closing in high school tutoring sessions, I show social actors transitioning into and out of producing the same higher level actions at the foreground of their attention/awareness. Through this analysis I identify two potentially unique aspects of one-to-one tutoring. Firstly I show one way that a tutor helps a student take on the practices of being a good student, and secondly I show the influence that students have over tutoring. I argue that movements into and out of a shared focus of attention are potentially useful sites for analysis of social interaction.

About the author

Jesse Pirini

Jesse Pirini is a PhD Candidate at AUT University in Auckland, New Zealand, and a member of the Multimodal Research Centre. He is currently investigating high school tutoring, building on an earlier project into business coaching. Jesse’s research applies and develops multimodal research methods, with a view to improving tutoring outcomes at high school level and making theoretical and methodological contributions to social interaction research.

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Published Online: 2014-11-7
Published in Print: 2014-11-1

©2014 by De Gruyter Mouton

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