Finger dialogue: The embodied accomplishment of learnables in instructing grammar on a worksheet

• Teaching grammar on a worksheet is jointly accomplished by the teacher and the learner.
• Learnables on the worksheet are foregrounded and accounted for by talk and bodily acts.
• Pointing gestures project, and reflexively change the specificity of the learnables.
• An instructed vision is achieved through acting upon those written objects.
• Instructed actions create a sustainable way of organizing knowledge through embodied actions.

This study is about embodied and endogenous grammar instruction on worksheets in teaching Swedish as a second language. It is demonstrated how an ‘awareness’ to produce a linguistic construct ‘grammatically correct’ is co-achieved by the teacher and the student. To see and understand the grammatical features of the words, an interactive instructional sequence is initiated by the teacher. This interactive scaffolding between the teacher and the student, to use meta-talk and to talk about abstract grammar, requires some concrete referents on a surface jointly attended to, and which are seen, pointed to and talked about. It is shown in detail how the interactional business of the interchange is dependent upon a constant integration of talk, gesture and orientation to the written grammatical construct on a sheet of paper. Teaching grammar is, thus, done through the objectification of quite abstract linguistic units and categories, and the transposition of the abstraction onto tangible and visible objects on the paper. Therefore, the result of the organization of order in instruction is a moment-by-moment sense-making, including accounting for how to understand a grammatical phrase, and the rationale behind the relations of the grammatical constructs, and, also, transforming the organization of knowledge. This study shows that foregrounding grammatical learnables on a paper are actualized by the mobilization of diverse semiotic resources resulting in seeing, understanding and reaching an instructed vision (cf. Goodwin, 1994) as the progressive achievement of observable and reportable embodied actions ( Garfinkel, 1967 and Garfinkel, 2002). Grammatical learnables are, therefore, the procedural outcome of the hands-on practices as mutually achieved embodied accomplishments.