Abstract
This study examines how trainers at a Japanese insurance company use inscribed objects (insurance brochures) during roleplay training sessions to instruct novice agents in professional sales practices. Roleplay training is widely employed across professional settings to prepare novices for institutional interactions, yet studies have focused primarily on talk, leaving the use of objects largely unexplored. Using multimodal conversation analysis, this research addresses this gap by investigating how trainers instruct novice agents in the use of institutional objects through dual framing of roleplays. The analyses demonstrate how trainers simultaneously maintain two interactional frames: a roleplay frame where participants enact customer – agent categories through category – bound activities, and a training frame where trainer – trainee identities become relevant through instructional actions. The analysis reveals two key instructional actions accomplished through dual framing with brochures: assisting and correcting trainees’ roleplay performances. These findings contribute to institutional interaction studies by illuminating how professional competence with task – essential inscribed objects is instructed through dual framing that enables situated instruction tailored to trainees’ immediate performances without disrupting the sequential organization of roleplay interactions.
Appendix A: Transcription notations
Glossing conventions
- CP
-
Various forms of copula verb
- IP
-
Interactional particle
- LK
-
Nominal linking particle
- N
-
Nominalizer
- Q
-
Question particle
- QT
-
Quotative particle
- S
-
Subject particle
- TP
-
Topic particle
Special conventions for representing embodiment and textual objects
- +
-
Descriptions of embodied conducts
- GZ
-
Gaze
- B
-
Both
- L/R
-
Left/Right
- IF
-
Index Finger
- H
-
Hand
- w/
-
with
- twd
-
toward
- BRC
-
Insurance Brochure
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Research Articles
- Use of inscribed objects in roleplay training sessions at a Japanese insurance company
- Visual and multimodal literacies in secondary education in Spain: voices from English language teachers
- The marketization of higher education in China: a comparative multimodal genre analysis between top-public and international universities
- Sustainability as an element of corporate identity: multimodal analysis of an Italian coffee company’s website
- Communicating political achievements: a semiotic analysis of political posters in the linguistic landscape of Tanzania
- From aspiring to authentic engineers: prioritizing real people and real problems in engineering through service design methodology
- Whoosh! visual depictions of direction, speed, and temporality: a corpus analysis of motion events in global comics
- Sharing experience or selling service?: a multimodal critical discourse analysis of self-proclaimed Hong Kong female PhD student identity in Xiaohongshu (Little Red Book)
- Professors’ perception of body language in the aftermath of the Covid-19 online teaching period
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Research Articles
- Use of inscribed objects in roleplay training sessions at a Japanese insurance company
- Visual and multimodal literacies in secondary education in Spain: voices from English language teachers
- The marketization of higher education in China: a comparative multimodal genre analysis between top-public and international universities
- Sustainability as an element of corporate identity: multimodal analysis of an Italian coffee company’s website
- Communicating political achievements: a semiotic analysis of political posters in the linguistic landscape of Tanzania
- From aspiring to authentic engineers: prioritizing real people and real problems in engineering through service design methodology
- Whoosh! visual depictions of direction, speed, and temporality: a corpus analysis of motion events in global comics
- Sharing experience or selling service?: a multimodal critical discourse analysis of self-proclaimed Hong Kong female PhD student identity in Xiaohongshu (Little Red Book)
- Professors’ perception of body language in the aftermath of the Covid-19 online teaching period