‘I see you have an injury there’: Physician’s communicative practices fostering unaccompanied minors’ interactional agency in the history-taking phase of the medical visit

The presence of unaccompanied minors (hereafter UAM) in the Italian welfare and healthcare system represents an underexplored phenomenon despite its strong pedagogical implications. In this article, we report findings from an exploratory case study on medical visits involving an Italian physician, three UAM with low communicative competence in the language of the visit, and two professional educators in charge of them. We adopt a Conversation Analysis informed approach to illustrate the physician’s communicative practices fostering UAM’s interactional agency, in the history taking phase of the medical visit. We single out and analyze two interactional practices, “Making the patient speak with a few words” and “Making the body speak”, and the resources deployed by the physician to implement them (i.e. the use of yes/no questions, deixis, and pointing). In the conclusions, we advance that our findings are relevant for a pedagogically oriented approach to medical education: the communicative practices illustrated in this study can be adopted by the professionals involved in taking care of UAM in order to maximize their active participation in the medical interaction.