Interaction & Training

The research groupe Interaction & Training is led by Prof. Laurent Filliettaz.

Research Fields

The research team Interaction & Training focuses on the relations existing between educational processes and collective situated activities. It takes it as a core idea that social interactions are a particularly relevant domain of analysis to study learning processes, mechanisms of development and training, whether discussing vocational or professional education and training.

Among the multiple research lines which can be taken to address the relation between «training » and « interaction», the team’s research program focuses centrally on the study of the role played by language and discourse in educational processes. Language is taken to be both a tool for coordinating action and a key resource for individuals to act upon their environment, to align to others, or share knowledge in the training situation.

Methodological orientations used in the research program are mainly drawn from various trends in sociolinguistics (discourse analysis, ethnography of communication, interactional sociolinguistics, conversation analysis, multimodal discourse analysis). Methodological steps include the construction of empirical data documenting work and training practices (including the collection of audio-video recordings, written documents, interviews, etc.) and the detailed analysis of the data to address questions pertaining to the field of education: in what ways do collective activities contribute to make knowledge visible and accessible in discourse? What are the links between local situated actions, biographical trajectories and socio-historical processes? What role does language play in facilitating the understanding of the meaning of actions, situations, and more generally for training and learning processes?