Third turn position in teacher talk: Contingency and the work of teaching

Abstract

As part of the familiar three-turn sequence in pedagogical discourse, the third turn position in classroom talk is considered to play an important role in giving feedback on second turn answers produced by the students. The prior literature relies on functional categories to explain the relationship between teachers’ third turn moves and student learning and yet, their analyses often take for granted the local exigencies embedded in the three-turn sequence. In producing the third turn, classroom teachers come to terms with far more local and immediate contingencies than what is projected by blanket terms such as ‘evaluation,’ ‘feedback,’ or ‘follow-up.’ Following Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis, this paper examines and specifies the local contingencies that surround the teacher's third turn in order to bring into view the unforeseen range of the method of actions that teachers display. Based on 46 hours of ESL classroom interactions, several collections of talk exchanges are analyzed to demonstrate how the third turn carries out the contingent task of responding to and acting on the prior turns while moving interaction forward. It is in these procedural aspects of interaction that we find the practical enactment of the classroom teachers’ pedagogical work.