188 Advances in spoken discourse analysis
this word in his response; in other words, it is marked as unacceptable. A
similar result is achieved with selection of p+ tone in:
12 S: //o GREEdy TOM //o is GO to EAT //
T: //p+ is GO //
S: //o is GOing to EAT //
p+ tone, Brazil (1985:148) suggests, may be selected in order to mark
matter as new to both hearer and speaker. By indicating that ‘go’ is also
‘new’ to himself, the teacher marks the word as an unexpected choice: that
is, not the one he was hoping to elicit and, therefore, inappropriate in this
context. Choice of r tone is illustrated in:
13 S: //p she PLAYed FOOTball //
T: //r HE //
where the feedback might be glossed as ‘not she, but he’. The r tone
carries the implication that this is something the student knew already. By
selecting it the teacher indicates that he perhaps sees ‘he’ as a slip rather
than an error in need of correction. Unlike in previous examples, no further
response is required from the student in order for the exchange to be
complete.
From these illustrations it can be suggested that while it is the
incompleteness of the quotation in such feedback that results in a further
response from the student, it is tone selection that provides an indication
of where the error was located in the response. r+ and p+ tone focus on
the word in which the error occurs, leaving the student to correct it,
while r tone focuses on the corrected word. However, o tone, by far the
most common tone selection for such items in the corpus, leaves more
for the student to consider, locating the error only as occurring somewhere
after the repeated section.
Withholding of assessment
The second possibility to be considered is feedback giving neither positive
nor negative assessment: that is, in which assessment is withheld. In the
corpus this withholding of assessment is normally achieved by selection of
o tone as, for example in:
14 T: //r+ HOW did they GO to the JUNgle //p HOW //
S1: //p they WENT by BUS //
T: //o by BUS //o AND //o BY //
S2: //p VAN //
T: //o VAN //o and BY //
S3: //p TRUCK //