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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 1226

Part of Session 108: Negotiating communicative practices in school (Other abstracts in this session)

Notes on 'reformulation': a teacher's practice in school interaction

Authors: Kapellidi, Charikleia
Submitted by: Kapellidi, Charikleia (Institute of Modern Greek Studies, Greece)

The ‘language of the classroom’ has been a prominent topic of academic research, since the recognition of its centrality in the processes of learning, and its value as evidence of how meanings get constructed. Language of schooling is directly associated with the enactment of the main educational roles in school interaction (teacher-students), which give rise to specific linguistic registers (Cazden, 1988). The focus of the present paper is on a teacher’s practice, linked to teacher-talk register and subsumed under the broad organization of repair.

From a conversation analytic point of view repair is a general sequential phenomenon, which deals with different sources of trouble in interaction (Schegloff, Jefferson, Sacks, 1977). Correction is the successful outcome of it, which can be arrived at from either self- or other-initiation. More specifically in classrooms, as McHoul (1990: 365) has already noted, other-correction is dispreferred over third-turn self-correction, even though other-initiation is the preferred means of starting a repair trajectory. Closely tied to the withholding of teacher’s correction is also the practice that will be of interest here. Known as ‘reformulation’ or ‘recast’ (cf. O’ Connor and Michaels, 1996; Lyster and Ranta, 1997) and mainly investigated in the framework of second language acquisition, the specific practice the teacher deploys consists in the repetition of what has been said in a way that exposes students to a different language repertoire. In many aspects, reformulation resembles correction, but it also differs from it, in that ‘correcting’ does not constitute the main interactional work and, therefore, does not disrupt the contiguity of talk.

The contribution of conversation analysis to the understanding of the above practice lies in the description of its specific features and its placement in the sequential organization of talk. Considering the particularities of the institutional character of interaction, as these are evidenced by participants’ conduct (e.g. turn-mediation), light is shed on the circumstances that account for reformulation’s occurrence. The data consists of seven transcribed hours from obligatory education in a school of Northern Greece. Finally and with respect to the specific linguistic register, some more general implications of reformulation’s deployment are sought, as for example its connection with the enforcement of valid ways of arguing.

References

Cazden, C. B. 1988. Classroom discourse: The language of teaching and learning. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Lyster, R. & Ranta, L. 1997. Corrective feedback and learner uptake: Negotiation of form in communicative classrooms. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 19: 37-66.

McHoul, A. 1990. The organization of repair in classroom talk. Language in society 19: 349-377.

O'Connor, M. C. & Michaels, S. 1996. Shifting participant frameworks: orchestrating thinking practices in group discussion. In D. Hicks (ed.), Discourse, learning and schooling (pp. 63-103). New York: Cambridge University Press.

Schegloff, E., Jefferson, G. and Sacks, H. 1977. The preference for self-correction in the organization of repair in conversation. Language 53: 361-82.