Accomplishing classroom activity transitions with autistic children: A situated and multimodal approach to communicative competence

This paper explores how transitions between different conversational activities are accomplished in classroom interactions with autistic children. These transitions are pervasive phenomena in interaction that require participants to use both verbal and bodily behaviour to display their involvement with new partners and activities. Drawing on 60 hours of video recordings and employing a multimodal conversation-analytic approach, the study examines instances of transitions in which troubles arise. The analysis focuses on how autistic children deal with transitions and how their co-participants respond to their 'uncommon' use of bodily resources. We demonstrate co-participants' various practices with three examples ranging from upgraded directives, over mockery, to disregard. These practices create differential opportunities for the autistic children to display their communicative competence. This interactional perspective challenges deficit-oriented models of communicative behaviour and contributes to a more dynamic and co-constructive understanding of communicative competence.