Abstract
The article analyzes a variety of Koshik's (2002) Designedly Incomplete Utterances (DIU) as they are produced in whole-class, teacher-led instruction sequences held in 2 third-year groups in an Italian primary school. This device, one of whose basic pedagogic functions is to solicit displays of knowledge from students in the shape of utterance completion, is a recurrent feature of teacher–student interaction in this setting. The study focuses on one specific and locally managed use of the device, whereby the teacher's orientation to the pedagogic goals of the organization of interaction surfaces in features of talk. I found systematic features in the construction of what I call main-clause DIUs, which teachers recurrently use to cast students as learners, by treating their verbal behavior as providing evidence that some type of learning has occurred in prior talk. The findings provide grounds for a critique of the Initiation-Response-Evaluation model and for a characterization of questioning in instruction sequences, both of which account for the specific institutional relevancies of interaction in this setting.
Highlights
The analysis presented in this paper has centered on the characterization of one questioning device used in whole-class instruction sequences and demonstrating how parties reach consensus about the teaching/learning goal of the ongoing pedagogical activity as it surfaces in the organization of interaction
The phenomenon under examination is one sub-set of DIUs (Designedly Incomplete Utterances) deployed in main-clause utterances and designed to elicit completion in the shape of a repetition of words occurring in earlier talk
In contrast to other strategies used by teachers to facilitate students’ identification of the expected completion, the repetition format used in main-clause DIUs casts the information on which the device operates as newly acquired information while casting the students as having just learned the notion at hand
Summary
Classroom interaction has long been analysed as the setting where students’ participation is both organized and curtailed by means of the shared orientation of teachers and students to the three-part sequence (IRE or Initiation-Response-Evaluation). Since the first seminal studies on classroom interaction (Sinclair and Coulthard, 1975; Mehan, 1979), the so-called ‘ubiquity’ of the three-part model has been generally considered the template for instruction talk-in-interaction (McHoul 1978, Drew 1981; Lerner 1995; Nassaji and Wells 2000; Nystrand et al 2003; Hellerman 2003 and 2005). In order to indicate that a questioning is being accomplished, the open interrogative exploits syntax and the position of words in the sentence —the interrogative pronoun ‘quanti’ / ‘how many’ is deployed in the TCU initial position—, whereas the DIU uses prosody—mainly rising intonation and a type of delivery that can be described as ‘not-forthcoming talk’ These features of the DIU alert recipients that a request is made only when talk reaches the position where the item is due or is in the close vicinity of the missing item. The mechanism here functions according to the contrast between the syntactic non-completeness of the utterance precisely where the rise in pitch and the pause are produced (the pitch is emphasized by means of other co-present features of talk delivery, like sound stretching and harder pronunciation) These features convey a sense of ‘transient’ and ‘relative’ finality, as related to the item on which the DIU operates, alerting students that the focus is on that precise item. 41 accountable as ‘locally managed, partly-administrated, interactionally controlled and sensitive to recipient design’ (Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson, 1974)
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