This case was recorded on December 1, 2020; it happens shortly after "Belka," the case analyzed in Chapter III of my dissertation and presented on this website.

To control the program and choose cards, Ivan used a gaming eyetracker, Tobii 4, coupled with a free mouse control app Optikey Mouse. The mouse control app appears as a black-and-white bar on top of the screen, with basic mouse functions on it.

The activity starts around 30 minutes [00:30:51] from the beginning of the class. The teacher asks Ivan to name the characteristic of sounds in the word "letters" [bukvy], choosing one of the three options: soft consonants (a green circle), hard consonants (blue circle) and vowels (red circle). The soft consonant is the palatalized version of the hard consonant. Tatiana also draws the “sound scheme” of a word on a white board with differently-colored markers. Characteristics of sounds are connected to the rules of Russian orthography (correct spelling of words), this is why the primary school program includes phonetic analysis.

Ivan’s answers are technically correct most of the time but the way Ivan uses the voicing function in this activity gets contested by Tatiana, as Ivan and Tatiana have different agendas to carry out through their actions. The teacher’s objective is to have Ivan both see and hear the phonetic “scheme” of the word - as it would have appeared in the entry field (and in sound) if Ivan had selected only one character for each letter-sound. Ivan uses all the available resources to resist the teacher’s agenda, favouring his way of doing the exercise - selecting and voicing the same letter-sounds multiple times - and supporting it with an argument he co-constructs with his mother.

This video is illustrative, since it shows the tactics Ivan uses to insist on his version of performing the exercise. Among them is recruiting his mother in this conversation and using multiple home signs in combination: A LOT (looking-up), OUTSIDE (looking out of the window to refer to an outside human or non-human animal), EAT / VOICE (to talk about food, or in this case to refer to the computer voice Zakhar that is currently playing).

These are used in addition to Ivan's home signs that we've seen so far, such as HEY (rising in chair or fixating his gaze on his mother to draw her attention), YES (rising in chair shortly after / with minimal gap / after a correct interpretation of his action was provided), NO (headshake).