Treating student contributions as displays of understanding in group supervision

The analyses this paper reports come from ongoing research into the interactive establishment of local social order in a university setting. Our data are from a collection of video recordings of a particular sort of activity in the setting, namely ‘group supervision’. We are interested in a particular set of interactive phenomena, namely how students’ contributions can be treated as displays of understanding. We track the occurrence of such displays and their sequential context and amongst several co-participants; attempt to distinguish varieties of understanding displays; and attempt to demonstrate the analytic relevance of the talk’s embeddedness within a particular sort of institutional activity. That understanding can be managed collectively in this setting is a significant finding in the study.