Reformulation as a strategy for managing ‘understanding uncertainty’ in office hour interactions between international teaching assistants and American college students

Abstract

This article provides a discourse analysis of problematic communication in office hour interactions between international teaching assistants and American college students. The goal of the article is to explicate what is termed here as ‘understanding uncertainty’, something which has received little attention in existing studies. The data under consideration consist of a number of dyadic interactions that naturally occurred during office hours. The data analyses revealed that the type of understanding uncertainty as defined here was displayed and managed in six types of reformulations. The findings suggest that reformulation may be used as an interactive strategy to achieve mutual understanding across linguistic and sociocultural boundaries in educational contexts.