Syntactic and Prosodic Practices for Cohesion in Series of Three-Part Sequences in Classroom Talk

Abstract

Starting from the perspective that social order is locally coconstructed through talk-in-interaction, in this article, I investigate sequential, syntactic, and prosodic practices as locally instantiated interactive resources in the coconstruction of cohesive series of consecutive 3-part sequences of talk. Methods for analysis are drawn from conversation analysis and acoustic phonetics to present a holistic account of syntactic, prosodic, and written resources-a grammar of interaction (Ochs, Schegloff, & Thompson, 1996)-in the talk of participants in high school classrooms. This coordination of resources results in interactionally defined segments of activity.