Languaging and interactivity in the self-scaffolding space: How cognitive change happens in one coaching dialogue

Tracking the performance of a coach and her client conversing during a demo coaching session we find that languaging provides a cognitive space for the client’s problem determination and solution creation despite the cognitive complexity of the issues she languages about. We apply here qualitative methods (Peräkylä, Antaki, Vehviläinen and Leudar 2008), specifically microgenetic analysis. On a more general level, our study proves that languaging aids in the construction of self-scaffolding space in which cognitive change emerges. This is because languaging mediates mental processes, thought completion and brings cognitively complex ideas to the physical domain. We also find that sense-making is achieved through the integration of languaging and bodily actions.


Introduction
What underpins communication is sustained coordination with others, the world, and its dynamics (or events).Also, the source of human development can be found in the social (and in the cultural).Linell (2009) observes that human beings are constantly making sense of the physical and social worlds, other people, and themselves in direct and/or indirect interaction and interdependencies with others.Therefore, any possible cognitive and behavioural change will have its beginning in dialogue understood as a process characterised by clarity, openness, symmetry (equal distribution among participants), mutuality, harmony, rationality, and sincerity.Dialogue is also situated as a result of coordinative dynamics between two (or more) humans.What makes dialogue a territory for cognitive change in educational, therapeutic, or coaching processes is its two-fold structure involving the external element, usually referred to as 'communication', and the internal part where cognitive processes such as thinking, planning, imagining, remembering occur (cf.Linell 2019).These paired with the perception of the agent's physical and social environment constitute a complex system of external (speaking, words, sounds, etc.) and internal (thinking) activities between and inside human agents who in conversation develop their understanding.One such activity is languaging which mediates cognitively complex ideas (Swain 2006).
Languaging in a broad sense is an "activity in which physical wordings play a part" (Cowley and Vallee-Tourangeau 2013) and, therefore, it is contingent on interactivity or sense-saturated coordination (cf.Steffensen 2015) which arises as observers draw on multi-scalar dynamics.This is in line with Vygotsky's claims on the significance of language in the development of higher mental functions.As such, language becomes a naturally dialogical entity affording learning, cognition, and transformation.Evidence demonstrates (e.g.Swain and Lapkin 2011) that languaging fuels some therapeutic and coaching processes as it contributes to the client's cognitive and behavioral change.
In this text we address the following question: How does language and languaging mediate sense-making in a coaching conversation?By addressing this question we intend to capture those moments in linguistic interaction between two conversing humans which yield transformative effects for at least one of them.

Interpersonal synchrony in coaching interactions
The premise upon which coaching is based, is that there is no objective world.As such it rests on James' pragmatism and Watzlawick's acceptance of human vulnerability to the imperfections and distortions of perception and then interpretation (Watzlawick 1983).As a form of talk within a specific coach-asguide/counsellor framework, coaching draws heavily on methodology found in cognitive-behavioural psychotherapy.The interaction between participants is essentially oriented towards constructing a solution to the client's 'problem' or 'issue'.In integrative terms, it exemplifies a complex bio-psycho-social system in which each participant introduces his/her bio-mental sub-systems (e.g., cardiovascular, neural, etc.) that mutually influence the other as they engage in talk-in-interaction.From this perspective, how the two as system components coordinate is crucial for the effective functioning of each of them and the system as a whole.Evidence shows that interaction between humans in talk rests on participants' movement coordination (Abney et al. 2015), communicative behaviours (Louwerse et al. 2012), neural activity (Likens et al. 2014), physiology (Palumbo et al. 2016), and voices (Imel et al. 2014;Reich et al. 2014).
Coaching sessions as language-based collaborative communicative events provide a data-saturated context for investigating the characteristics of human interaction dynamics beyond ordinary daily talk.When two people work together towards a solution to a client's issue we, as observers, encounter numerous questions regarding the understanding of the potential functional benefits of their dialogical coordination.This is because in human interaction multiple timescales and types of behaviour merge (Davis et al. 2016, Steffensen and Pedersen 2014, Tilsen 2009).The coordination of bodily movements, gestures, gaze, vocalizations, wordings, etc. as elements of langua-ging all contribute in the same way to establishing a certain type of synchronic partnership in a coaching conversation.Conclusive confirmation can be found in studies on psychotherapy which find a link between coordinated body-work patterns, physiology and nonverbal forms of behaviour (Bryan et al. 2018, Bar-Kalifa et al. 2019) with a positive sense of collaboration between the counsellor and the client (Ramseyer and Tschacher 2014, 2016, Tschacher and Meier 2019) and with what Bandura refers to as self-efficacy (Ramseyer and Tschacher 2011).The question that can be posed then is that of how interaction and the resulting coordination in dialogue become possible (e.g., Cowley 1994, Linell 2009, Linell, Gustavsson and Jovonen 1988).

From language through languaging to change
Understanding what others are saying is the result of taking a language stance or sensitizing and, consequently, attuning ourselves to the utterances of others.This, among other things, helps us predict what people will do, think, and feel.This is the result of linking the experience of bodily coordination with wordings that are heard on those occasions when the other uses the constraints of a cultural tradition.Stance taking makes us-asagents into observers who construe and shape the lived environment while at the same time integrating what they perceive with what they do.This claim links very well with the one made by Maturana (1990) who states that when languaging we make observations and observations of observations in the process of learning through cognition.Through language conversing humans transform themselves communicatively as a result of perturbations experienced in a particular interaction.In Steffensen's terms, this might be referred to as interactivity or 'sense-saturated coordination' (Steffensen 2015).
In light of the above, the classical description of language via code-metaphor appears useless.Such notions as patterns, encoding, decoding, transmission, reception, etc. reduce language to a tool or a vehicle while pushing aside the significance of realtime interpersonal activities.In the long-standing tradition engendered by Maturana, Bateson, Mead, and others, language is a set of phenomena that occur between people rather than inside their heads.Such thinking about language entrains the postulate of ecological psychology and shifts our focus from asking what is in our heads to asking what our heads are in.In line with this, the heads of two interlocutors are definitely in a dialogue which is on the outside.Cowley (2011aCowley ( , 2019) ) and Thibault (2011), drawing on Love (2007), propose that language be seen in dual terms.However, rather than dividing it into form and content, they opt for observing how abstract text-like entities emerge as we think, feel, and act when communicating with each other.
In a similar vein, Kravchenko (2016) remarks that describing language by mainstream linguistics as an "autonomous system of signs devoid of any previous history" is burdened with a flaw.He proposes to abandon the structuralist maxim of synchronicity by orienting towards language as "a functional behavioral feature of humans as an emergent architecture which cannot be understood outside the domain of biological organization" (Kravchenko 2016: 102).If this is so, language occurs as a consequence of spontaneous speaker-environment interactions rather than by 'using' a set of arbitrary pre-existing rules.In this paradigm, linguistic units are conceived in the interactional space co-constructed by talking humans, not as regular and predictable objects (such as phonemes, morphemes, words, sentences, etc.).Language then is not a static, rule-oriented set of linguistic units and forms where meanings are secondary.Before them goes "a face-to-face routine activity in which wordings play a part" (Neumann and Cowley 2017: 180), or languaging.Instead of interpreting language as an innate faculty, it is, rather, a mode of social coaction, coregulation, and cooperation.On the one hand, languaging is "a first-order activity of making and interpreting linguistic signs, which in turn is a real-time, contextually determined process of investing behaviour or the products of behaviour (vocal, gestural or other) with semiotic significance" (Love 2004: 530).On the other hand, it can be defined as what people 'do' as they interact communicatively with themselves, with each other, and with the environment.Knowing how children acquire language (e.g.Love 2017) and drawing on Maturana (1970Maturana ( , 1978)), we prefer to think of language in terms of a human-specific and, as such, a biologically grounded interactional behaviour.Through language, humans interact in their consensual domain, by co-adaptation and coordination of individual activities.What we say depends to some degree on the way we perceive a particular situation, so linguistic interactions between individuals are meaningful if occurring in a consensual domain in which linguistic signs are perceptually and experientially grounded (Harris 1978).
The consequence of thinking about language primarily as an activity and secondarily as 'forms' is the rejection of it viewed as a code.However, to avoid simplifications and reductionist claims it is important to expand this picture.Observing talking humans we have to note three aspects of language: the (co-) activity itself, the products of this (co-) activity (gestures and sounds), and related phenomena, or wordings.These are understood by Cowley (2011a: 2) as "readily repeated aspects of vocalizations that, for speakers of a community, carry historically derived information".Summing up, the semiotic significance of any conversation is contingent on the speakers' artful combinations of wordings, gestures, and other aspects with vocal dynamics.According to this view, "language becomes a mode of coaction used in social life" (Cowley 2011a: 3).
Humans act linguistically (and they most often do it together), due to perceptual skills they have developed over time.Any activities people perform are only in part motivated by what they use, perceive, and conceptualise as wordings.The meaning we ascribe to wordings is not the process of hypothesising or making assumptions but the product of what Dennett (1969) labels as taking a physical or design stance.They link principles of physics or design to practical and cognitive skills that inform observations.Stance taking thus replaces hypothetical individual knowledge.Forms (or meanings) are not a priori but they arise as, using different timescales, we integrate our behavioural dynamics with the constraints of a particular system of language.Language appears then not only as a dialogical occurrence but is also a distributed and embodied entity contingent on numerous constraints (as in Harris 1996) that harness its expressive dynamics.Using this nomenclature we link embodiment to a range of behavioural contingencies.In languaging, people make use of local affordances while consequently enacting bodily dynamics.The wordings they use in the I-other/the world of interaction can only function when bound to what the 'I' knows.Because of that, language is well integrated with one's own perception, activity and feeling.When humans engage in talk, they "take a language stance by 'hearing' things in what others say", they treat speech "as if it consisted of verbal patterns".(Cowley 2011b) In talk-in-interaction individuals connect spontaneous and fast-paced acts of behaviour, such as mimesis, gaze-following, and gestures, and connect them with extended cultural processes (Neumann and Cowley 2017).They use their bodies to produce their own verbal images.Languaging (not 'using language') allows talking humans to establish a symbiotic system with the environment, part of which are other humans who engage in talk.
If, as in the Vygotskian sociocultural theory of mind, language mediates the development of higher mental processes, then languaging plays a paramount role in the cognitive functioning of each individual.A person's voluntary memory, attention, thinking paradigms, etc. originate in the ways he/she interacts with other individuals and the social world and its artifacts.Over time, these interactions undergo transformation and internalization with language and other semiotic tools entering as mediators of the interactions and internalizations.The external world with its objects (e.g.persons, animals, material things, natural phenomena, etc) controls mental processes.Then through languaging with others these mental processes are further guided by other individuals.As language becomes internalized, it is finally controlled by the person's cognitive processes.In Swain and Lapkin's words, "[a]lthough described as a developmental sequence-from object regulation to other regulation to self-regulation-the locus of control moves among them, depending on an individual's need for support from the environment to carry out the mental tasks at hand" (Swain and Lapkin 2011: 106).

Case study
The material we choose to analyse and discuss is a nearly fourminute opening fragment of a coaching demonstration given by Ailbhe, who is a Professional Certified Coach (PCC).Her coachee for this session is Julie and, since this is supposed to present some key techniques used in talking to a client, the conversation is managed in front of a group of trainees.We are aware that both this circumstance and the presence of the camera might have affected certain forms of behaviour on the parts of both Ailbhe and Julie.Nevertheless, we choose to ignore this element and focus entirely on the dialogue between the two participants.The coachee's issue is how to prepare for an exam which she is about to take to receive her coaching certification.
Our idea here will be (to employ the words of Garfinkel) to do some work "in the area of 'fact production' in-flight" (Garfinkel 1967: 79).In our analysis, we go beyond what the entire toolkit of Conversational Analysis offers intending to grasp the brief moments of interaction where languaging becomes the flywheel in the client's sense-making.The rationale behind this methodology is that a conversation does not take place inside each other's heads alternately, nor at the surface of our bodies in their overt behaviour; it is really in the region between the speakers that the conversation takes place (Barrett 1979).Therefore, rather than looking at what happens between the coach and the coachee from a turn-to-turn perspective, we adopt a microgenetic approach so as to observe the subtle cognitive-behavioural changes required, as it is such methods which yield high-density data.Microgenetic study allows for the observation of people in brief moments of such change and yields results inaccessible to CA.We intend to illuminate not only the turn-taking procedures and the speakers' behaviours while doing so but the surrounding short-lived transition moments.The initial two minutes and forty-five seconds of the conversation seem to be crucial for what happens in the bulk of the session (the remaining 18 minutes).Here the coach and the coachee are in the process of goal clarification for the meeting.As they are conversing they are sat facing each other with their hands on their laps.The space between them establishes the physical environment.The coach opens the first part of the conversation by defining the situation: In the beginning, we can see the two participants sitting in mirroring positions.As Ailbhe leans forward speaking, she also makes an inviting opening hand gesture which results in Judy reciprocating not only the leaning and settling in the chair but also the smile.Ailbhe takes charge of the dialogue by defining verbally the situation but then withdraws by merely confirming her listening with discrete sounds.At the same time, she invites Judy to enter the interaction by appropriate gesturing.Judy willingly joins in reciprocating the coach's body movements.In this way, they quickly become interlocked in a dialogic interactive relationship with their bodywork aligning with their lines.It seems that Judy was prepared for the question she hears and she understands the specificity of the conversation.This is what helps them move on in their conversational flow.The coach discretely affirms what the coachee says until the moment when the latter reaches a point of 'suspension' in her languaging about the issue that concerns her.It is also interesting to note Judy's work on the timeline as she employs her hands turning them around to illustrate returning to a past moment.By employing her hands she orients herself and her interlocutor to the changing temporal perspectives.Judy's bodywork helps her not only express herself more effectively but also reach a better understanding of what she is saying.We can observe her activating her hands in moments when she describes a situation.In contrast, when she comes to realise something important she does it inwardly.So the outward-inward bodywork vectors allow her to build a dialogue with herself with the assistance of her interlocutor.
Then she returns to the present and talks about her plans: At this point she begins to prepare the ground for a concluding thought, this time freezing her body and suspending her talk as if trying to 'hear' a revealing thought.Ailbhe attunes to Judy's dialogical behaviour by a subtly voiced "OK" and a gentle nod.Her eyes become focused on Judy and her neutral yet welcoming seated position (hand, head and back arrangement) add to the listening mode she presents here.The short moment of silence offers Judy a space in which she begins building her sense-making.From now onwards we will refer to such moments resulting from dialogical interaction as self-scaffolding space.Ailbhe evokes Judy's languaging by paraphrasing her words, which seems to bear paramount significance for this phase of the conversation as it becomes an invitation for Judy to continue discovering and constructing her message.This might mean that Ailbhe addressed an important aspect of what Judy realised in line 10 but did not manage to verbalise it.The sigh she makes on hearing the coach's words (lines 11 and 12) accompanied by her arms going up and eyes closing seems to be a preparation for the convincing and definitive "Yes" in the aftermath.Rather than provoking, pressing, or simply interviewing Judy., the coach offers her a lot of room for relating to her own words in reflexive self-reference.As Judy languages about the nature of her issue, she becomes both a participant and an observer of her sense-making.She gives vent to it in line 22 where she realises and clarifies her cognitive process by introducing space in her languaging.Wordings combined with gestures, gaze, and elements of the room when narrating about her thinking processes confirm the claim that language and cognition are distributed (Thibault 2011, Linell 2013, 2014, Cowley 2007, 2009, 2011a).Ailbhe again returns to what Judy said before making it the object of reference for the coachee's sense-making.The affective resonance on Julie's part contributes to their interaction in that both Judy and Ailbhe experience their interaction positively and build on this emotion.Her smiling on uttering specific phrases in lines 28, 34, and 40 (especially when saying 'my focus' in line 39) shows the ownership she feels of what they are both arriving at.At first glance, however, there is some relational and dialogical asymmetry that emerges here when the coach again begins to follow the client's line of thought.At a deeper level, however, their conversation is moving on towards a specific point, which makes it constructive.Each of the participants takes a different kind of responsibility here: the coachee for clarifying her goal for the session (and maybe for a longer time perspective) and the coach for maintaining the conversational flow by concentrating on and backtracking on the coachee's words.An example of such activity is in lines 29, 31, 33, 35, and 37.Here the coach draws on the coachee's words but accompanies them with her bodily work and intonation.Judy joins in and although only one of them is speaking both take part in this utterance by performing a synchronic gesture.In this way, they both resort to languaging to design the architecture of this conversation.

Figure 6
Coach-coachee synchrony In the last phase of this fragment, Ailbhe elicits explanations from Judy and hears an affirmation of her plan for the session.At the same time, she becomes again an active participant in the coachee's narrative and a prime designer of her self-scaffolding space.Judy is able to enter a sense-making process as a result of 'bouncing' from her own concepts and the expression presented to her by the coach.

J:
But I'm also hearing very clearly it is your focus 44 A: (2.0) Yes::: (.) Yes.

J:
•Ok• (.) .hhhSo with that being our focus= 46 J: =Hm:= 47 A: =it is (.) that you're saying it about what's getting in the way.
Throughout the conversation, by semi-silent responses, Ailbhe makes room for Judy's languaging and affirms her narrative.This conversational strategy brings a result in line 48 where Julie's prolonged inbreath is a probable marker of her final acceptance of the goal they are going to realise together in the remaining part of the session.

Discussion
The events registered and described above find their reflection in Linell's words: "situated interactions belong to sociocultural, situation transcending traditions, that is, practices that take place on different and longer timescales" (Linell 2009: 412).
From this vantage point we summarise the analysed fragment as follows: (1) Judy and Ailbhe's languaging prepares cognitive space for problem and goal determination; (2) Julie's vocalisation (a 'grunt') in line 10 is a case of situated interactional accomplishment and a cognitive pivot in her sense-making processes; (3) Ailbhe assumes the role of the conversation architect and Judy the role of a clarifier of her own sense-making experience; (4) by languaging about Julie's issue they mediate cognitively complex ideas; (5) the coach and coachee build conversational space through body synchrony and mutual attunement, presence and rapport while languaging; following Goleman (2007) Attunement is an Agendaless Presence; (6) the coachee builds her self-scaffolding space due to the coach's conversational prompts, e.g.: ok, yhm; (7) languaging makes the coachee's sense-making visible; when languaging, the coachee and the coach mediate cognitively complex ideas (e.g., Knouzi, Swain, Lapkin, Brooks, 2010;Swain, 2006;2010;Swain, Lapkin, Knouzi, Suzuki, and Brooks, 2009); (8) wordings, vocalisations, sighs, pauses, and hesitations are cases of situated interactional accomplishment; (9) the vocalisation in line 10 proves it that is inseparably linked and integrated with the body; (10) the sense-making space is generated by the coach's regulatory work -first discreet conversational presence then more directive questioning (also confirmatory questions); (11) languaging mediates the coachee's ability to clarify her goal and encapsulate it in specific words; (12) the talk about the drop is a case of languaging about languaging; (13) there is body synchrony in the coach-coachee's languaging -they talk together and they move together; we qualify this phenomenon as a case of attunement while languaging; (14) languaging allows presencing -bringing past and future to the now (Julie's gestures bring the past and the future to the present).
Let us elaborate on the points above.In the coaching conversation analysed above, the coach and the coachee take on situa-tion-specific roles and fulfil them and thus realise their contextual tasks.They do so by what Fusaroli calls "skilful intersubjective engagement" (Fusaroli et al. 2014).In the conversational flow of interactivity the coachee does not MAKE meanings, nor does she establish them.The coach establishes a dialogical space of problem-solving which allows the coachee to understand and capture the nature of the problem and, as a result, to come across with a solution.Both partners in interaction move along with a series of episodes of linguistic events by resorting to patterns of speech.More theoretically, unless the events are deemed "non-linguistic", they show that human language cannot be reduced to the "use" of verbal patterns.
How is it possible that they both become linguistically interlocked in this cognitive sense-making process?Steffensen (2015: 108) explains "Symbolic structures, including second-order language, have irreversibly changed the human ecology and the human coordinative dynamics; above all, they allow our own and other people's experiences to permeate our here and now activities."Concepts and their meanings emerge through dynamic interaction between human agents, shaping and transforming each other in interconnected systems.The mediating role of language is crucial for "the concept is not possible without the word" (Vygotsky 1987: 131).The interaction between the coach and the coachee proves that language is non-local but distributed across space and time (participants move within different time-scales and go 'beyond their brains' when talking) embodied as opposed to abstractly procedural (players use their voice and bodily dynamics) embedded in the sociality of the conversation, enacted (participants 'language', or move towards solutions in and through action) and dialogical (participants orient towards each other).Although the coachee's cognitive trajectory to a viable solution is "self-organized, unplanned, and on the edge of chaos" (Steffensen 2013: 195) it is rooted in interactivity, dialogicality, and languaging.
The dynamics of the interaction between coach and client paves the way to changes in the patterns of language, cognition, and emotion particularly on the part of the latter (e.g.Smith et al. 2009).Here is a confirmation of Shotter's claim that "in certain forms of talk, of speaking, 'things' are not just said to us, they are done to us" (Shotter 2016).If, indeed, speaking is "an agent in the production of meaning" (Smagorinsky 2001: 240), not merely a conveyor of thought, "the process of rendering thinking into speech is not simply a matter of memory retrieval, but a process through which thinking reaches a new level of articulation" (Smagorinsky 1998: 172-73).Independently of the context in which people talk to each other (whether in coaching, psychotherapy, education, or any other conversational occurrences), language, cognition and emotion provide an arena for interpersonal coordination (Butler 2011, Louwerse et al. 2012).

Conclusions
We conclude that as behaviour correlates with mental operations and emotive resonance in ways characteristic for each individual, various forms of interpersonal coordination become linked to different outcomes as, for example, in conversational dynamics (Abney et al. 2015, Fusaroli andTylén 2016) or clinical psychology (Crowell et al. 2017, Ramseyer andTschacher 2014).Coaching conversations provide a conducive communicative environment for the emergence of multiple patterns of coordination during particular sessions or as a result of a series of these.These coordinative alignments include such interactional modalities as vocalisations, bodily movements (and physiology, in general), or facial expressions.Similar to what Gelo and Salvatore (2016) observe in psychotherapy we find that to use their words, coaching brings results on many different levels due to the reciprocal interaction of the multiple factors mentioned above.Sense-making extends here as "events depend on interactivity or sense-saturated coordination that [...] grounds human cognition" (Cowley and Nash 2013: 187).
What happens in our case scenario confirms our preferred description of language.First of all, it is an activity or an experiential flow that is enacted, maintained, and changed by the real-time activity of participants (Love 2017: 3) and "the process of making meaning and shaping knowledge and experience through language" (Swain 2006: 89).As they engage in talk both the coach and the coachee build a form of self-scaffolding (each her own) to control and internalise their mental processes and thought completion.Then as each of them brings cognitively complex ideas to the physical domain through verbalisations, again they co-construct incrementally a dialogue taking the coachee to a moment of insight.The fragments discussed here also illustrate the claim that "time-dependent biographical, historical, and developmental processes […] are multidimensional and multidetermined" (Gelo and Salvatore 2016: 379) and work on multiple levels due to the different modalities (voice, gestures, gaze, posture, etc.) engaged in languaging.
Since language is a manner of flowing together in recurrent recursive interactions, as dialogue participants we change in our languaging because what we say, or what we hear, is not trivial.We say and we hear something and we are not the same afterwards.Our case study proves that people transform their thinking and behaviour according to their flow of languaging in a particular situation and under this situation.We see here how the coachee's behaviour evolves according to her structure and her interactions with the coach.The space of conversation that opens is a self-scaffolding space in which participants interact in language with various results.To open a self-scaffolding space in a coaching conversation means that although the conversants act of intent, they do not control what happens.This is because in a self-scaffolding space built on languaging human autonomy appears.When languaging we create objects, and we can observe them by employing the procedures of reflection.It transpires then that languaging in dialogical self-scaffolding space promotes reflection as it allows a person to respond to the circumstances in which he/she finds an object and looks at it.This person can then make a choice as to the direction of his/her future actions, move this way or that, and can be responsible for his/her own behaviour.

Figure 4
Figure 4 yes it's it's about: [2.0] how I go about that

Figure 5
Figure 5Judy works in space clarifying her goal