Inclusive third-turn repeats: managing or constraining students’ epistemic status?

Abstract

ABSTRACT This study examines classroom teachers’ third-turn repeats marked with the Japanese epistemic stance marker ‘ne.’ The author conducted multimodal conversation analysis on video recordings of English-language classrooms in Japanese secondary schools. The analysis focused on the teachers’ gaze direction during their third-turn repeat, which was marked with the epistemic stance marker. ‘Ne’ marks the sharedness of the repeated item between the speaker and the hearer. By treating the repeated item as shared with the recipient and changing the recipient from the student who answered to the other students who did not answer, the teachers treat the repeated item as also having been available to those who did not answer. Teachers are thus including non-respondent students in the knowing party. The author terms such practice as ‘inclusive third-turn repeat’, which teachers canonically deploy as an inclusive practice in classroom interaction. Depicting how this practice establishes a common knowledge status of the students, the study highlights classroom teachers’ pieces of work towards the goal of co-production of knowledge.