Inner and outer 175for example, by adding the word ‘really’ to the question, and changing
the stress.
Thirdly, the structure and length of the Initiating move itself is revealing,
and likely to make students pay more attention to form.
The structure of the typical Initiating move in Teacher Elicit exchanges
in my data is very simple, consisting of head act elicit followed by a verbal
or non-verbal nomination. However, the structure of Initiating moves in
DVXs is often far more complex, see exchange (6) in Example 1, which has
six acts, and exchange (34) in Example 6, which consists of five acts:
starter, NV, nominate, starter, direct, clue. The reason for this is clear. At
the beginning of a new transaction, for a DV Initiation to be successful, the
language needs to be modelled, students need to know who speaks to whom,
and attention is drawn to visual aids or book cues. As the transaction progresses,
DV Initiations tend to get simpler because students already know the basic
requirements.
Fourthly, paralinguistic features, intonation and kinesics can give a lot of
clues. If a teacher says something slowly and deliberately, it is likely to be
Inner. This often involves a teacher breaking an utterance up into more tone
units than would be usual in normal conversation, and using a different
stress pattern. I quote an example from exchange (5) (layout as in Brazil et
al. 1980, whose discourse intonation system I have used throughout):
// WOULD you MIND // NOT LOOKing // at the WRITing //In most real-life situations this would be one, at the most two, tone units.
(If it were three, it would be very rude!) And also, here, a complete pitch
sequence happens in the one sentence, starting on high key, going to mid
key, and ending in low termination, which seems to give it the status of a
title or an announcement. Most students would recognize this as something
out of the ordinary, and to be taken account of as Inner.
The whole exchange actually slots into Example 1 on page 164. I omitted
it originally because it is an example of a move which seemed to have a
dual role: it seemed to act both on the Outer, as a directive, to stop the
students looking at the writing, and on the Inner, as a sample of the language
structure that is going to be taught later.
As the teacher actually said this, she leant much further forward towards
the class, used a large hand gesture, and looked very pointedly at each
student, as if to say, ‘Take note!’. She had to repeat the same words a
second time so as to include all the class in her gaze while she was speaking.
It was an obvious change from Outer to Inner, but still retaining a relevant
message—a rare occurrence.
FOCUS SWITCHES: FROM OUTER TO INNER AND BACK AGAIN
We have already seen in Examples 1 and 4 how a teacher will go from
Outer to Inner. In Examples 2 and 6, however, we see the students going