Pentti Haddington

United Nations military observers’ (UNMOs’) work is visual and interactional. Their task is to determine as a team whether military activity they see in a crisis area constitutes or may lead to a v...

All of us regularly participate in or, even more often, overhear interactional events in which other parties seem to act and understand each other without problems, whereas we cannot figure out wha...

Demonstrating a sports technique to students presents coaches and teachers a practical challenge: How to communicate a multi-phased and fleeting movement of the body effectively and in a manner which also makes clear the temporal relation of the individual phases of the movement? By using video-based methods and video recordings collected in budo sports training, this paper illustrates how teachers parse a complicated and fast-paced technique into individual steps by resorting to talk and embodied means. Furthermore, we examine how the teachers can move back and forth between these steps with an interactional practice we call ‘return-practice’. By employing this practice, the teachers provide additional information regarding particular steps, highlight the simultaneous nature of particular body movements, demonstrate alternative ways of performing the technique, and illustrate the consequences of the incorrect performance of these steps. The linguistic design of the ‘return-practice’ is shown to differ in the above four functions.