Turn design and the organization of participation in instructional activities

Abstract

Talk in interaction is the prevailing form of instructional activity. To understand and improve second language literacy instruction, an appreciation of the interactional practices in which reading and writing are embedded is necessary. In this article I examine one aspect of these practices: speaker turn design. I focus on the uses of incomplete turn‐constructional units in structuring subsequent participation. First, I describe several ways teachers design their turns at talk and show how these furnish differing opportunities for subsequent participation by students. Next, I show how the task of producing written answers as complete stand‐alone sentences can be carried out as an utterance‐completion task in which turn design plays a key organizing part. Finally, I show how this form of sequential organization can be used as an analytic resource in diagnosing a problem one group of students encounters in writing the answer to a story question.