- To add them up precisely: 19 instances of professor-initial affirmations, 8 of
student-initial iconic repetitions/parallelism, 14 instances of professor-initial repetitive
parallelism, 2 instances of supportive professor backchannels, totaling 43 instances of
cohesive-supportive discursive devices in a sequence of 48 pair-parts. (Note that, of
course, some of the devices overlap within a single pair-part.) - This also occurs frequently within turns, as when the professor repeats a phrase
that a student has produced that is particularly apt (“He’s awarding them their expecta-
tions, okay, he’s awarding them their expectations”), or repeats a phrase he himself has
introduced (“ ‘in accordance with a real or apparent intention of the party against ().’ ‘Ac-
cordance with a real or apparent intention’ ”).
There is an interesting similarity between law professors’ efforts to provide a frame-
work for students’ legal narratives in these classrooms and the way that teachers in earlier
educational settings build a scaffolding so that students can learn and produce appropri-
ate narratives. Michaels, “Narrative Presentations.” The parallels we have found between
linguistic routines used here and those used in early education or language socialization
suggest that there are some powerful discursive tools in use to help reorient students’ lin-
guistic practices. - Matoesian, personal communication, 11/21/05.
- Transcript 7.7 provides some very nice examples of this: the professor begins with
an “all right” that marks off the doctrinal question that students are supposed to ask them-
selves. Note that the segment that is marked off here is simultaneously a chunk of discourse
(question-answer pair-part), a projected mental process (approaching the problem as
chunks of doctrine to be analyzed in Q/A form), and a section of the applicable legal doc-
trine (“benefit-detriment question”).
In his ensuing commentary, the professor urges the student (and the rest of the class
along with her) to quickly reach (epistemic and discursive) certainty by asking (and an-
swering at the same time) the question “right?” three times in succession. (This obviously
also contributes to poetic structure as well.) In each case, the student is urged to consider
and quickly reject tempting but legally incorrect lines of thought, and this small discourse
marker is urging agreement at the same time as it serves multiple other discursive and
pedagogical functions. - Matoesian suggests that these be thought of as epistemic stance instructions,
“bounding each instruction in a sequence but also conveying an aura of epistemic certainty
or authority to the proposition.” Matoesian, personal communication, 11/21/05. He notes
that to the degree that these function iconically with “an epistemologically and ontologically
privileged form of knowledge,” imparted through the professor’s legally framed discourse,
there is a subtle mirroring of linguistic and legal authority. Id. It would be interesting to
compare the patterning found in law school training with that in other forms of pedagogy
to discern more clearly the line separating authoritative features of professors’ discourse
generally from the features that might be more distinctive to legal training. - There is a marked disparity between the amounts of shorter dialogue found in
these classes and that found in two of the three modified Socratic classrooms (5% and 6%
in these two modified Socratic classes as compared with 13%, 22%, 42%, and 46% in the
short-exchange classes). The third modified Socratic classroom (Class #1) provides an
interesting exception: there 60% of the time was spent in focused dialogue, but 24% of the
time was spent in shorter exchanges. We classified it as a modified Socratic classroom
because the overall structure of individual classes in Class #1 was similar to that found in
the other modified Socratic classes, with only a few students serving as the key interlocu-
tors on any given day. However, the professor routinely paused to take questions from
numerous students at the end of the lengthy Socratic discussions. This contributed to a
256 Notes to Pages 149–155