This paper examines how experts and novices align their bodies to facilitate mutual monitoring and coordinated action in skill learning. Through a multimodal analysis of videotaped interaction in a variety of instructional settings, this paper explores participant frameworks used to synchronize enactments of novices with those of experts.
This paper examines how experts and novices align their bodies to facilitate mutual monitoring and coordinated action in skill learning. Through a multimodal analysis of videotaped interaction in a variety of instructional settings (e.g., a pottery studio, piano practice sessions, socialization into cooking), this paper explores the concept of X-Frames; participant frameworks in which experts and novices interactively align the work of their hands to 1) optimize comparison, and 2) closely synchronize enactments of a skill component. The term X-Frame derives from how the gazes of the expert and novice cross to monitor and compare their adjacent manual work in these frameworks. The multimodal analysis will reveal that in instructional contexts involving manual skills, experts and novices orient to creating tight frameworks facilitative to mutual monitoring and highly coordinated action. Analysis will show how these X-Frames serve 1) as a substrate (Goodwin, 2013, 2018) on which to perform indexical work that highlights points of articulation, and 2) an interactional resource that can be employed in subsequent moments of instruction through gestural, lexical, and syntactic tying (e.g., Dubois, 2014 ; Goodwin, 1990; Hayashi, 2005). It is argued that experts and novices construct an architecture for intercorporeality by carefully synchronizing their handiwork in X-Frames. Brief comparisons will be made to other studies on instruction involving videotaped data to suggest the ubiquity of X-Frames in human interaction. Theoretically, X-frames in instructional settings—as a specification on Kendon’s (1990 ) F-formations and Tomasello’s (1995) notion of joint attention—are proposed as a participation framework uniquely suitable to the transmission of embodied cultural knowledge. Methodologically, X-Frames are posited as an analytical tool for identifying and examining moments in videotaped interaction in which the professional vision (Goodwin, 1994) and embodied practices of experts are made publicly available to novices, and thus researchers.
