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Mode (in)sensitivity in the organisation of assistance: Recruitment practices across video-mediated and co-present craft workshops
Event details
Research on recruitment has described methods of obtaining assistance that range from requests and trouble reports to embodied displays of trouble (Kendrick & Drew, 2016), mostly in co-present interaction. In this paper, I compare recruitment in co-present and video-mediated craft workshops conducted in English, to examine whether the practices through which students recruit assistance remain constant across modes of instruction. I draw on 400 recruitment cases from eight workshops, sampled from a corpus of 22, and combine conversation analysis with statistical analysis.
The analysis suggests that recruitment methods are sensitive to the mode of instruction, whereas the provision of assistance is not. Students in video-mediated workshops used significantly fewer task queries and trouble queries, yet the frequency of assistance-oriented responses did not differ significantly between the two modes of instruction.
I account for this pattern through two mechanisms. The first an affordance of the mode of interaction, which I call ambient availability. In co-present workshops, the instructor’s movement, orientation and proximity make their readiness to assist publicly visible, and these displays occasion the students’ queries, whereas on video the instructor cannot display availability in these ways. The second, which I call temporal binding, is a constraint at the level of the activity. In follow-along formats, where the instructor demonstrates while the students perform the craftwork, few slots open for sequence-initiating actions, and students instead display trouble through embodied conduct. Because such displays do not make assistance conditionally relevant, the demonstration can continue, and the instructor can choose whether and when to assist.
By showing how the mode of interaction and instructional format shape students’ methods of obtaining assistance, I extend conversation analytic work on recruitment with an affordance of co-presence and a constraint at the level of the activity.
Publication: Kendrick, K. H., & Drew, P. (2016). Recruitment: Offers, Requests, and the Organization of Assistance in Interaction. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 49(1), 1–19.
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Dr Rosario Neyra
Rosario Neyra completed her PhD in Language and Communication at the University of York in 2026. Her thesis, Assistance in craft workshops: recruitment, identity and multimodality, examined how students in adult craft workshops make trouble visible and how instructors come to assist them, in both co-present and video-mediated workshops. Her research combines conversation analysis with statistical modelling to test how recruitment practices are distributed across cases. The first paper from her PhD, How students get help: Institutional identities as a resource for recruitment, appeared in the Journal of Pragmatics in 2025. She is currently a postdoctoral researcher with XR Stories, where, in partnership with North Yorkshire Council, she investigates how creative programmes articulate their value and what barriers participants face in attending.