Presenter: Dr David Wei Dai and Dr Simin Ren, UCL Institute of Education

Date and time: 7 November 2025 12.00-1.30 pm (London time)

Place: Zoom (link will show on screen upon registration)

Please register via: https://forms.office.com/e/TgBhFdLdMU

[This session is not recorded due to ethical considerations]

Abstract

This paper examines how professional identity and communicative expertise emerge through multimodal transpositioning (Li & Lee, 2024): the adaptive reconfiguration of stance, role, and embodiment across professional contexts. Drawing on a 14-month longitudinal dataset of 21 recorded sessions tracking an English L2 physiotherapy trainee, the study integrates Conversation Analysis and Multimodal Analysis to trace Lisa’s transformation from a technically focused learner to a relationally adaptive practitioner. Analysis reveals that becoming professional involves not only verbal refinement but the orchestration of gaze, gesture, posture, material handling, and spatial orientation as semiotic resources for recipient design and epistemic stance management. Three developmental movements are identified: (1) from linguistic precision to adaptive recipient orientation; (2) from compensatory embodiment to strategic multimodal integration; and (3) from hierarchical deference to context-responsive negotiation. Across these transitions, transpositioning moments mark critical reorientations in how Lisa coordinates bodily, affective, and epistemic in response to evolving professional demands. The study conceptualises Critical Interactional Competence (CritIC) (Dai, Zhu & Chen, 2025) as a multimodal, ethically reflexive capacity to re-design communicative action and identity in response to situated contingencies. It argues that professionalism emerges not through verbal correctness but through multimodal, interactionally sustained responsiveness to ethical and relational contingencies

Keywords: Transpositioning; Multimodality; Critical Interactional Competence; Professional Communication

Bio

David Wei Dai is an Assistant Professor at UCL Institute of Education, University College London. His research examines the ability to interact (Interactional Competence) in a range of contexts ranging from language learning and teaching, professional communication, intercultural communication and human-AI interaction. He currently holds a British Academy/Leverhulme research grant. He is author of the Open Access monograph Assessing Interactional Competence (Peter Lang).

Simin Ren is a Postdoctoral Research Assistant on the CritiIC Network project at the International Centre for Intercultural Studies, and an Associate Lecturer (PASHE Programme) at the Institute of Education, University College London. She holds a PhD in Applied Linguistics, and her research interests span technology-mediated second language learning, computer-assisted language learning (CALL), human-AI interaction, (critical) interactional competence, multimodal conversation analysis, and membership categorisation analysis.