Emergent complexities of understanding in bilingual workshops for children. Focus on instruction-giving sequences

This article examines the emergent complexities of understanding in bilingual workshops, and focuses on procedural instructions. The study participants were children from Finnish- and Swedish-speaking primary school classes, and their workshop facilitators. Our data comprised video-recordings of workshops in which the facilitators instructed various types of embodied activities in both Finnish and Swedish. Using conversation analysis, we demonstrate how the bilingual delivery of instructions complicates understanding, and analyze how the emergent trajectories of trouble are managed in the unfolding interaction. Our findings reveal that when instructions were delivered bilingually by two facilitators who translated each other’s instructive turns, the division of labor between them required seamless collaboration and was prone to sequential disruptions and complicated recipient design. In cases of emergent displays of trouble, the facilitators aimed to resume their collaborative project of bilingual instruction. When one facilitator alternated between both languages while delivering their instructions, the emergent display of trouble was solved by focusing on the embodied instructed activity. Our results suggest that although the aim of the bilingual instruction was to address issues of understanding, it also functioned as a source of trouble. Overall, the findings illustrate that in multilingual, multiparty educational contexts, monitoring the projects and receptivity of other participants is a complex task.