Sequence Facilitation: Grandparents Engineering Parent-Child Interactions in Video Calls

Completing a sequence of actions is a basic problem of social organization for participants. When a first pair-part is addressed to a not yet fully competent member, such as a young child, a third party can facilitate the completion of the sequence through diverse linguistic, embodied, and material practices. In this article, we examine such sequence facilitation in a perspicuous setting: grandparent-mediated video calls between migrant parents and their left-behind children in China. The analysis shows that the practices of sequence facilitation can have a retrospective or prospective orientation and involve not only linguistic practices, such as repeating the parent's first pair-part or formulating its action, but also embodied and material practices, such as positioning the camera or physically animating the child's body. The results shed light on the organization of adjacency pairs in adult-child interactions and the embodied and material circumstances of their production in video-mediated communication. The data were in the Chinese dialects of Sichuan and Guizhou.