Doing Attending in Multi-Party Dinner Settings

In social interaction research, so-called “listeners” are known for being active co-participants of the interaction through several engagement displays, labeled as feedback, backchannel, or listener responses. Enriched by our account of interactions in French and French Sign Language, we suggest using the term ‘doing attending’ so as to not restrict this practice to a single modality and highlight its functional and interactional nature. Our analyses of video-recorded interactions during family dinners held at home, further demonstrate how such multimodal displays may not always be characterized by ‘dynamic’ forms, and are deeply shaped by polyadicity as well as co-activity and material affordances, in both languages.