Guiding or correcting? Distinguishing circumstantial contingencies and performance problems in instructor interventions

This study examines how the accountability of instructor interventions is interactionally established in smoke-diving simulation exercises. Drawing on video recordings of firefighters' training and adopting an ethnomethodological and conversation analytic approach, the analysis investigates how participants distinguish between interventions addressing circumstantial contingencies in the simulation environment and those addressing performance problems in trainees' embodied conduct. The findings show that interventions are not inherently instructional. Rather, their instructive character is achieved through their sequential positioning, linguistic design and participants' displayed understanding. When interventions are formulated as being occasioned by circumstantial contingencies, interventions are treated as guiding trainees around obstacles, without necessarily addressing competence. By contrast, interventions addressing performance problems render embodied conduct assessable through imperatives or by soliciting trainees to reflect about their conduct through questioning formats. When the rationale for the intervention is ambiguous, participants engage in repair and corrective work to establish the grounds and legitimacy of the interventions. By demonstrating how instructional relevance is locally constituted, the study contributes to research on instructional interaction and simulation-based training, highlighting how the intelligibility and instructive relevance of interventions emerge from situated interactional practices.