individual
What campus are you from?
Daytona Beach
Authors' Class Standing
Alexandra Baltazar Hall, Graduate Student
Lead Presenter's Name
Alexandra Baltazar Hall
Faculty Mentor Name
Elizabeth Blickensderfer
Abstract
The literature on sport coaching has predominantly employed deductive and qualitative approaches to the study of pre-defined coach behaviours, and athlete self-reported perceptions of coaching communication. These methods overlook the inherently contextual and interactional nature of coaching, where the effective communication of sport-specific feedback and technical corrections are key to improving athletic ability. This study employs Discursive Psychology (DP) and Conversation Analysis (CA) to the inductive exploration of coaching interactions and practices in an indoor throws training environment, with a group of discus throwers. Audio-visual recordings of a training session were analysed using CA, and transcribed with Jefferson (2012) and Mondada (2018) methods. Three interactionally significant practices were identified: the organisation of the coaching sequence, the use of multimodality and prosodic shifts, and use of tag questions. These practices illustrate how the coach constructs and organises assessments, feedback and technical corrections to achieve shared understanding and negotiate epistemic authority with athletes. Findings critique the reductionist aspects of deductive research into coaching, and they support previous research using DP and CA in sport coaching contexts, especially within technical sports. This study advocates for future research using triangulation of methodologies, longitudinal CA, and the design of experiments based on interactional findings from DP and CA research.
Did this research project receive funding support from the Office of Undergraduate Research.
No
Discussing Discus: Exploring coaching interactions in a throws training environment
The literature on sport coaching has predominantly employed deductive and qualitative approaches to the study of pre-defined coach behaviours, and athlete self-reported perceptions of coaching communication. These methods overlook the inherently contextual and interactional nature of coaching, where the effective communication of sport-specific feedback and technical corrections are key to improving athletic ability. This study employs Discursive Psychology (DP) and Conversation Analysis (CA) to the inductive exploration of coaching interactions and practices in an indoor throws training environment, with a group of discus throwers. Audio-visual recordings of a training session were analysed using CA, and transcribed with Jefferson (2012) and Mondada (2018) methods. Three interactionally significant practices were identified: the organisation of the coaching sequence, the use of multimodality and prosodic shifts, and use of tag questions. These practices illustrate how the coach constructs and organises assessments, feedback and technical corrections to achieve shared understanding and negotiate epistemic authority with athletes. Findings critique the reductionist aspects of deductive research into coaching, and they support previous research using DP and CA in sport coaching contexts, especially within technical sports. This study advocates for future research using triangulation of methodologies, longitudinal CA, and the design of experiments based on interactional findings from DP and CA research.