194 Advances in spoken discourse analysis
would otherwise be the case. Once again it is necessary to consider the
context in which a low termination choice is made in order to establish its
precise significance. In the following extract, in response to each picture
prompt showing a person performing a particular action and the question
‘What did he/she do yesterday?’, the student produces ‘He slept’, ‘He
washed his face’, etc. in order to practise the simple form of the past tense
of various verbs.
28 T: //p WHAT did he do YESterday //
S1: //p he SLEPT //
T: //p SLEPT //p GOOD //
//o aFENdy //p WHAT did he do YESterday //
S2: //p he WASHed his FACE //
T: //p his FACE //o GOOD //
//p what did SHE do yesterday //
S3: //p she DRANK //
T: //p she DRANK //p WHAT //
S3: //p SEVen up //
T: //p she drank SEVen up //p GOOD //
//p WHAT did HE do yesterday //
S4: //p he MENded the CAR //
T: //o he MENded the CAR //o YES // (a)
//o but can ANybody think of aNOther word // (b)
//p beginning with R //
S5: //p rePAIRED // (c)
T: //p rePAIRED //p YES // (d)
//p husSEIN //o WHAT did he do YESterday // (e)
The first few initiations result in acceptable responses to which the teacher
provides feedback consisting of proclaimed repetitions or a proclaimed ‘good’.
At (a), however, the student produces the response ‘he mended the car’.
‘Mended’ is apparently not the verb the teacher wishes to elicit as she
opens an exchange at (b) intended to elicit ‘repaired’. Once this is achieved
(c), she gives a positive assessment (d), ending in low termination, and
continues with the drill (e). It is common in the corpus that such departures
from the drill, in order to elicit an acceptable response, to add information
or to provide a ‘model’ performance, are often closed by the selection of
low termination, marking them as in a sense separate from the main subject
of the discourse, the pattern drill.
The argument that a low termination choice represents a boundary in
the discourse gains further credibility when occurrences of two consecutive
low tone units, each having low termination, are investigated as, for
example, in: