Advances in Spoken Discourse Analysis

Inner and outer 163

OUTER AND INNER

In seeking to separate out the two uses of language, and thus to clarify this
two-level structure, I adopted the terms Outer and Inner, at the suggestion
of Sinclair (personal communication), later described in Sinclair and Brazil
(1982:23):

The ‘Outer’ structure is a mechanism for controlling and stimulating

utterances in the ‘Inner’ structure which gives formal practice in the

foreign language.

In other words, the Outer structure provides the framework of the lesson,
the language used to socialize, organize, explain and check, and generally
to enable the pedagogic activities to take place. In some classrooms, more
usually in countries where the target language is not the medium of instruction,
all or most of this Outer language is in the learners’ mother tongue.
The Inner language consists of the target forms of the language that the
teacher has selected as learning goals. These are generally phrases, clauses
or sentences, presented as target forms, quoted as examples, repeated and
drilled or otherwise practised by the class, often as discrete items, the sequence
of utterances bearing little or no resemblance to possible sequences in ‘normal’
discourse. Once they have been presented as target forms, no matter how
meaningful the original illustrative situation was, they are devoid of their
normal communicative value and are seen as samples of language. Widdowson
(1980) alludes to this Inner discourse as ‘pedagogically processed’ as opposed
to ‘natural’ language. (The Outer would be ‘natural’ in this sense.) It is
obvious that none of this Inner level language could be in L1. If you look
at Example 1 below you will see where the discourse switches from Outer
to Inner and back again.
The examples that follow are taken from a lesson based on a page of
pictures from Unit 17 of Kernel Lessons Intermediate (O’Neill et al. 1971).
The students are adults, all quite recently arrived in Britain from a variety
of countries in Africa, Europe and the Far East, and there is one married
couple from Eastern Europe. In the transcript, the students speaking are
referred to by the first letter of their name and the teacher by ‘T’. The first
example comes from the beginning of their second lesson of the morning.
The numbering of the exchanges follows the original numbering in the
transcript included in J.Willis (1981), so that cross reference can be made
easily. Also you can see clearly from the numbers where I have occasionally
omitted an exchange; this is to avoid undue repetition, unnecessary complications
or overlengthy examples.