172 Advances in spoken discourse analysis
Other paralinguistic features also come into play during Boundary exchanges
(Kendon 1973). The teacher, who has been mostly leaning back in her chair
during the discussion, now inclines her body forward towards the class and
picks up the book which, during the discussion, has been lying to one side.
Intonation, too, plays an important part; there is low termination in exchange
(76) and high key at the beginning of (77).
Instances have also been noted of teachers regaining control by introducing
Follow-up moves of an evaluative nature, in situations like discussions where
students would expect at most an acknowledging type of Follow-up from
the teacher. For example, a ‘That’s right, good, well done’ ending a student-
to-student exchange on the Outer, had the effect of stopping the student
discussion fairly abruptly.
SOCOOP’S DILEMMA
One important question is: how can students tell whether the teacher’s Initiation
is intended as a Direct:verbal, i.e. a directive to use a particular form of the
target language in the response, or as an Elicit, i.e. a genuine question
which requires an informative, and normally truthful, answer? In other words,
should the response be on the Inner or the Outer?
There is a story of a very important British Council visitor being shown
round an impressive language laboratory in the Middle East. All the students
are practising in their booths, and the visitor, on being shown how the
teacher-console works, asks if she can listen in and talk to a student. So she
puts on the headphones, presses a button, and says to the student, ‘Hello,
do you enjoy working in the language lab?’ The response comes, ‘Hello, do
you enjoy working in the lang...er?’
So a short answer to the question above is, that sometimes students can’t
tell whether to answer on the Inner or the Outer. This apocryphal student
had been repeating things on the Inner for so long that he did not recognize
the visitor’s question as being Outer...
The following extract from my data is particularly revealing of the sort
of breakdowns that can occur when students are not sure of whether they
Example 5