Multimodality Talk. From Learner to Professional: Transpositioning, Multimodality, and Critical Interactional Competence

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