Becoming a cooperating pair: blind trainees learning to interact with their guide-dogs

Background There is a lack of studies investigating how visually impaired members are trained in interacting with their guide-dogs during urban mobility. This is a perspicuous setting for the investigation of the praxeological organization of visual impairment in everyday activities. Method This study analyses videorecorded training sessions in French in which trainers accompany blind people and their newly assigned guide-dogs in urban mobility exercises. The study adopts multimodal conversation analysis to investigate the organization of teaching/learning how to use vocal and non-vocal resources to interact with guide-dogs in specific ways for the practical purposes of prompting them to provide navigation assistance, rewarding them for doing a previous task correctly, and correcting them when not responding appropriately. Results Multimodal resources are differentially employed to implement distinct social actions: verbal cues are favored to get the dog to provide navigation assistance; touching is employed in combination with vocal resources to either reward the dog or correct his/her conduct. Two instructional configurations are identified: (1) the trainer instructs the trainee about what to tell the dog to do next by incorporating a verbal cue to be addressed to the dog; (2) the trainer instructs the trainee about what to do next to/with the dog. Discussion/Conclusion The pedagogical importance given to using vocal and embodied resources in specific ways for interacting with the guide-dog configures the latter as a participant to, and recipient of, social actions entailing both practical and affective aspects rather than as a mere aid to mobility.