28 Advances in spoken discourse analysis
V Pupil inform
Occasionally pupils offer information which they think is relevant, or interesting—
they usually receive an evaluation of its worth and often a comment as well.
Thus the structure is IF not I(R) as for teacher informs.
This example has been simplified by the omission of a repeat bound exchange,
which will be described below on pp. 30–3.
VI Check
At some time in most lessons teachers feel the need to discover how well
the children are getting on, whether they can follow what is going on,
whether they can hear. To do this they use a checking move which could be
regarded as a subcategory of elicit, except that feedback is not essential,
because these are real questions to which the teacher does not know the
answer. Any evaluation is an evaluation of an activity or state not the response.
Thus the structure is IR(F). A broken line between exchanges signifies that
the second is bound to the first.
Bound exchanges
Of the five types of bound exchange, four are bound to teacher elicits and
one to a teacher direct. As we said above, an exchange is bound either if
it has no initiating move, or if the initiating move it does have has no head,
but simply consists of nomination, prompt, or clue.