162 Difference
that [the grocery store] was out of, and she
wanted, what did she call it //rain checks//
86 Unidentified male student: //rain check//
87 Gwen: //sure, you can get a
rain check //--
(85) Anna: --for all these twenty-five, and she
got rain checks.
88 Prof.: That’s why I waited. Now what is- is this a
complaint, or a question, or what now? [[89 class
laughter]].Ten different identified students participated in this exchange, along with several
unidentified students (and the entire class, at times).^30 As the class moves further
into this discussion, we see a breakdown of the strict pair-part structure that gen-
erally dominates in these classrooms (including this one); the professor-student
pairing of question-answer is interrupted when students respond directly to one
another. In turns 67–68, for example, Alicia and Dirk coproduce an account of a
story from the newspaper; note the cohesion produced across multiple speakers
through parallelism as both students and the professor in three successive turns
repeat “never had a problem.” After the professor reads the exact wording of the
ad, one student begins to express disgust with the story (“that’s bull- ”) and is in-
terrupted by another student who disagrees, “It says ‘to win.’ It says ‘to win.’ Not
‘you will get.’” Two students again chime in to help Anna produce her narrative
when she has trouble remembering the word for “rain check.” In turns 61–63, we
see an exchange more typical of informal conversation: the professor pauses in the
middle of her comment to respond to an expression on one student’s face: “You’re-
Gwen’s looking at me and she’s saying, ‘Well, I would have.’ ” This rendition of a
perceived response in the form of (fictional) reported speech brings the professor
into a less formal discursive space with the student; the student, somewhat startled,
responds, “Well, I don’t know- ”, perhaps a signal that she is reacting to the blur-
ring of genre boundaries. The professor induces laughter from the class a number
of times, and the overall informality of the class produces a speech setting that
permits the following exchange (toward the end of the class) to seem less harsh
than it otherwise might have:
Transcript 7.12 [6/20/18]Prof.: [... omit beginning of .27 turn... ] Now I really will dismiss you if you can
answerthis question. What’s the difference between an offer and a
promise?
John: Well, I think (). Your offer gives the offeree the power to accept. You don’t
have the promise until the offeree has accepted the offer.
Prof.: Wrong.
John: Oh.
Prof.: Close, close.
John: I spent all night working on that one. [[class laughter]]