‘Go on keep going’: The instruction of sustained embodied activities

Abstract

This study investigates the instruction of sustained embodied activities, that is, activities that require a continuous, sustained embodied effort. The context is horse-riding lessons. Riding instructors are shown to teach sustained embodied activities in orientation to four temporalities. Most fundamentally, they co-construct these activities as an ongoing and continuing timeline, for example, by giving action-continuing directives and by projecting continuation prosodically. In addition, instructors attend to the temporal organization of individual component actions of the activity. They situate actions in the past, present, or future along the timeline of the sustained activity; they co-construct the duration of individual actions as flexible; and they orient to individual actions as brief and transient. The analysis reveals practices that do not initiate or respond to specific actions but that accompany an activity as such, treating progression itself as a target for instruction and calling into question the often-assumed sequential adjacency of action pairs.