Contiguous and non-contiguous instructed actions: Teaching-by-doing in cohort-organized whole-group and small-group classroom interactions

Abstract

This study investigates how instructional practices are temporally and multimodally organized in classroom interaction. While prior ethnomethodological conversation analytic (EMCA) research has examined how instructions are produced through talk, embodied demonstration, and material resources, less attention has been paid to how instruction shifts between distal, non-contiguous framing and immediate, contiguous procedural enactments. The data consist of 10 hours of video-recorded interaction from two settings: Swedish for Immigrants (SFI) language classrooms and STEM (mathematics/physics) courses in upper secondary education. Using EMCA, the data show how teachers and students collaboratively move between framing instructions and proceduring them through embodied, material, and spatially organized action. Instructional work unfolds along a continuum between non-contiguous instruction, where rules and principles are introduced in advance, and contiguous instruction, where instruction and enactment are laminated into the same interactional sequence. The findings demonstrate that instructional clarity is not achieved through instruction-giving alone, but through practices such as parsing, staging, and embodied directives, whereby teachers guide instruction-following through teaching-by-doing. By comparing whole-group and small-group interaction across language and STEM classrooms, the study clarifies how temporal sequencing and multimodality jointly produce instructional order and contributes to EMCA research on instruction in educational settings.