Collaborative actions in supervision meetings

In this chapter, we study face-to-face meetings between students and supervisors, where the focus of the meeting is supervision of academic writing. The aim of the study is to examine how students and supervisors in Sweden and Finland collaborate in order to improve the students’ texts and to discuss academic writing. Using conversation analysis, we study video-recorded, naturally occurring interactions. Our analysis shows that supervisors and students perform a variety of collaborative actions, initiated by both students and supervisors, such as co-construction of turns, recycling of co-participants’ turns, telling of second stories, and joint production of text units. The findings of the study highlight that participation roles in the institutional interactions studied are complex and dynamic, and that the combination of both the students’ subject expertise and the supervisors’ academic expertise enable mutual understanding of the texts and topics under discussion.