INTRODUCTION
Insights gained from the analysis of natural conversation are now
commonplace in classroom discourse studies. Classrooms are, of course,
sites of natural, or informal, or desultory conversation. By most
lights, however, they also constitute more or less formal,
institutional, and professional occasions. Interest in how classrooms
do the work of teaching and learning has led to the development of a
substantial literature of classroom discourse studies whose findings
are diverse and own no single program (cf. Green &
Wallat 1981, Gumperz 1982, Michaels 1981, Cook-Gumperz
1986, Erickson 1986, Cazden 1988, Van Lier 1988,
Lemke 1995, Wells 1996,
Luke & Freebody 1997). But central among
them has been the regularity of the three-turn sequence of direct
instruction. The sequence shows the organization of “questions
with known answers,” and it begins with the observation that
teachers (and others charged with the instruction of novices) often ask
questions whose answers they already know.1
In classrooms, the “question with known answer” typically
shows a sequential organization of three turns: the teacher's
initiation in first turn (routinely a question), a student's reply
in next turn, and remarks on the adequacy or correctness of the reply
in the teacher's third turn. The sequence has been explored in an
extensive corpus of studies in the past 30 years (e.g., Bellack et al. 1966, Sinclair
& Coulthard 1975, McHoul 1978,
Mehan 1979, Michaels
1981, Heap 1985, Cazden 1988, Wells 1993,
Macbeth 2000; see also Goffman 1969 on “information games,”
and Searle 1969 on “exam
questions”). Often described as a sequence of
Initiation-Reply-Evaluation, or IRE, it is organized by the
understanding that teachers routinely know the answers to their
questions, and that this is understood by everyone else in the room,
whether those others know the answers or not. The question with known
answer is a deeply familiar and pervasive way of organizing
instructional sequences in classrooms, and it delivers the last word,
and sequence closure, to the teacher.2
Though analyses of these familiar instructional sequences
were once considered a promising moment in classroom studies, offering
revealing descriptions of how classrooms do their work (cf. Bruner 1986, Erickson
1986, Cazden 1988, Newman et al. 1989), more recent discourses on
power, hegemony, and cultural study in the classroom have been
decidedly less appreciative (cf. Fairclough
1995, Guiterrez et al. 1995, Gee 1996, Luke & Freebody
1997). Centrally, they take a critical view of the power
relations implicit in this kind of instruction (as in how teachers
would have first and last words, for example). This paper does not
engage those issues and disputes. (See Macbeth
2003, and the exchanges between Wetherell and Schegloff 1998, and Billig and
Schegloff 1999.) Nor does it understand studies of the
sequential organization of classroom instruction as recommending how
teachers should teach. Rather, they have been studies of how teachers
and students routinely conduct their lessons to acquit the canonical
tasks of instructing novices and producing and assessing knowledge and
competence in the room.
What these direct instructional sequences yield, and what they are
posed to yield, is something like accountably correct answers, and, by
implication, knowledge and competence. How “answers” fit
with “knowledge” and then with “competence” is
a large question, and the slippage has not gone unnoticed in the
literature. Studies of “situated cognition” and
“authentic practices” that trade on the differences between
“knowing that” and “knowing how” (Ryle 1984) have raised the question of just what
correct answers can tell us about student learning (e.g., Lave 1984; Bloome et al.
1989; Brown et al. 1989; Resnick et al. 1991; Chaiklin
& Lave 1993; Kirshner & Whitson
1997). And Rogoff 1990 reminds us that
classrooms are themselves local cultures of knowledge production,
honoring and honing some kinds of knowledge and competence and not
others. These topics are, however, beyond the scope of this article.
Acknowledging the unavoidable provincialism of classroom contexts as
well as their pervasiveness in the lives of students and teachers,
producing “correct answers,” and thus
“correction,” is nonetheless a prevailing task and
orientation in the practical life of classrooms, for students and
teachers alike.
That observation leads to the following more or less technical
interest: Insofar as finding and/or building correct replies to
teachers' questions about classroom lessons is a deeply familiar
task, we can expect that there are organizational resources for doing
it, including resources for fixing replies when
“correctness” is not found. Studies of classroom discourse
have thus taken interest in what those organizations and resources are
and how they work, and how we routinely find them played out in the
practiced production of the three-turn sequence.
THE RELEVANCE OF STUDIES OF NATURAL
CONVERSATION
Analyses of the three-turn sequence of direct instruction have
substantially relied on prior work in the analysis of natural
conversation, and especially the sequential organization of adjacently
placed turns. By Mehan's (1979) account,
the IRE sequence is assembled as two consecutive adjacency pairs
– the Question:Answer turns and the Answer:Evaluation turns
– and each pair shows the regularities of placement and
“tying” (Sacks 1992) found in the
adjacency structures of natural conversation. Mehan's work was an
early and widely read introduction to classroom studies of the
conversation analytic (CA) program of Sacks,
Schegloff & Jefferson 1974 and their colleagues and
students.
The relevance of studies of natural conversation for classroom
studies is more extensive still. Studies of natural conversation have
detailed multiple organizational domains. Included among organizations
of turn-taking and adjacency are organizations of, for example, turn
construction, sequence organization, party structure, preference
organization, and also conversational repair. As Heap 1982 convincingly shows in his penetrating
critique of earlier classroom interaction studies that relied on
pre-coded action categories, the organizational domains of conversation
are both heterogeneous and concurrent. There is, for example, no
production of adjacently paired turns that shows only the order of
adjacency, and to understand the production of any actual utterance,
pair, or sequence implicates the full range of the finely ordered work
of competent speakers.
THE RELEVANCE OF REPAIR FOR CORRECTION
I have made this point about the coincident organizations of
conversation to preface a consideration of one of the most direct
treatments of the sequential order of classroom correction to date:
McHoul 1990. In this study, McHoul takes up
the findings on “repair” in natural conversation reported
by Schegloff et al. 1977, and produces a complex
and detailed comparative analysis of correction in classrooms, to address
the question: In what ways are the organizations of classroom correction
sequences continuous with and/or different from repair in
conversation? (See also Drew 1981, and Weeks 1985.) This work complements McHoul's
prior and highly instructive treatment (1978) of
classroom turn-taking organizations vis-à-vis turn-taking in natural
conversation. In both studies, he finds significant continuities and also
differences between classrooms and conversations, and in the more recent
study, published in this journal, he finds organizations of classroom
correction that are at some distance from those of repair in natural
conversation.
I want to critically examine McHoul's comparative findings and
then to present some of my own. Foreshadowing my argument, it may be
that conversational repair and classroom correction are better
understood as distinctive, even “co-operating”
organizations (see Pomerantz 1978), and thus
poor candidates for comparative analysis. Though correction may be a
kind of repair in natural conversation, in classrooms these actions
share a different category relationship: Correction in classrooms is an
identifying task and achievement of classroom teaching. As is true of
all discursive practical action, repair is then omnirelevant to it,
having to do with the first achievements of common understanding that
classroom lessons – and their correction sequences – rely
upon and reflexively display. But as the argument unfolds, their
differences may not only be relevant for our understanding of repair
and correction sequences in classrooms. What we find there may offer
grounds for rethinking the relation of correction to repair in natural
conversation more generally.
I want to begin with a general review of the repair structures found
in natural conversation, with the aim of locating McHoul's classroom
correction sequences within the “repair space” analyzed and
described by Schegloff, Sacks & Jefferson
1977 (hereafter SS&J). The analytic distinctions, findings, and
arguments of SS&J, and of McHoul as well, are too detailed and
nuanced for comprehensive review here. The organizations of repair they
describe, with respect to both conversational organization and the work
that conversational repair achieves, are too rich for a summary account
(a sense of the richness can be found in Jefferson 1972, 1974, 1987, and Schegloff 1979,
1987, 1992). Instead, my
tack will be to present a sketch of conversational repair organization that
is fitted to McHoul's discussion, and then turn to a summary of
McHoul's comparative findings, using them to develop further the
first literature of repair. I then make the case, via an analysis of
some different classroom materials, that correction and repair in
classroom lessons may be usefully different things. I then turn to the
larger question of the relation of correction to repair, conceptually
and organizationally.
ORGANIZATIONS OF REPAIR IN NATURAL
CONVERSATION: SELF AND OTHER, INITIATION AND REPAIR
“Repair” in conversation refers to the fixing of a piece
of talk, either in the course of its production or in subsequent turns.
Reparative sequences begin with a “repairable” or
“trouble-source” turn. Routinely, these are troubles in
producing the turn or in hearing or understanding it, and the
recognition of a troublesome turn and its subsequent repair may be
undertaken by either party. As a course of action, repair shows both a
sequential organization, or “trajectory,” and an
organization of the parties to achieve it. A repair is first
“initiated,” meaning roughly that a repairable is
discovered and/or recognized as a repairable, and then it
is “repaired,” routinely – but not only – by
its replacement. Embedded within the canonical two-party organization
of self and other, repair may be initiated by either self or other, and
“done” by self or other as well, yielding a four-cell grid
of possibilities: self-or-other initiation, and self-or-other
repair.
Within these organizational possibilities, SS&J report from their
extensive corpus a regular sequential “repair space” or
“trajectory” wherein the work of conversational repair is
routinely done. They identify a remarkably local, textured, and
temporal organization of “opportunities” for the initiation
of repair, consisting of four positions across three turns. That is, we
can find a repair's initiation in
- the same or “trouble-source” turn whose production
yields the repairable;
- in the turn transition between the trouble source turn and its
next;
- in next turn; or
- in third turn.
Centrally, SS&J report a decided “preference” for
self-initiation and self-repair, a preference that shows itself across
the organization of the three-turn trajectory as a decisive skewing
toward self-initiation and repair (though frequencies are only a first,
presenting evidence for this structure of preference).
The sense of “preference” arises in part from how it is
that when we examine the opportunities for the initiation of repair
across these positions, in all but the third position (next turn) we
routinely find the initiation performed by the speaker who produced the
troublesome turn (self-initiation). Further, self-initiation just as
routinely yields self-repair. Moreover, when we do find
other-initiations (routinely in next turn), we overwhelmingly find
self-repair in turns subsequent to it. In this sense, repair in natural
conversation shows a structural preference for self-initiation
and self-repair, evidenced in the very order of the repair
space and in how the parties to the talk articulate it. This preference
structure is central in McHoul's treatment of classroom correction
sequences, insofar as the outstanding variance he finds there is the
prevalence of other – (i.e., teacher) initiation rather than
self-initiation. We will see momentarily how this works in his
materials.3
The larger notion of
“preference” is a delicate one, having to do with how
alternative next-turn possibilities are differently produced and
realized (rather than with the vernacular sense of what an individual
might “prefer”). Thus, a request, for example, can receive
a consent (more likely, an offer) or a demur in next turn, just as an
assessment (e.g., It's a lovely day) might receive
agreement or disagreement. But offers and demurs, and agreements and
disagreements are differently produced: Offers and agreements tend to
be produced “on time,” i.e. within unmarked intra-turn
durations, whereas demurs and disagreements tend to be marked in their
production, most commonly by a delay in their onset (and in other ways
too; see SS&J 1977, Heritage
1984, Levinson 1983 on markedness, Pomerantz 1984, and Lerner
1996 for extensive discussions). “Preference” is
then a production account of how the sequential order of conversation
– and thus meaningful action – is produced.
Alongside these technical findings about repair in natural
conversation is a larger conceptual understanding of what the work of
repair could be, and to what ends – what troubles – the
parties could be oriented in producing its regular trajectories. Three
contextualizing remarks are useful for understanding studies of
conversational repair and the classroom observations to follow.
First, repair is oriented to the achievement of common understanding,
an achievement first evidenced on any actual occasion of conversational
interaction by the production of an appropriate next turn, on time
(Moerman & Sacks 1988). The
“understanding” referred to here is not so much a propositional
object – as in speech act theory (Searle 1969)
– as a local-interactional one, as in understanding a prior turn in
the projectable course of its construction for what kind of turn it is,
what work it is doing, what it calls for next, what understanding it
evidences of prior turns, and so on. Although this work is exquisitely
local, as we consider how understanding could be filled in on actual
occasions, we come to appreciate how local orders of interaction
assemble practical horizons of sense and meaning – and thus of
order and structure – that are more global still. It is difficult
to imagine a more foundational orientation, and problematic, for the
“routine grounds of everyday life” (Garfinkel 1967). (See Schegloff's
1992 extensive discussion of repair as the most local organization
for assuring the recurrence of intersubjectivity-in-conversation.)
Second, as SS&J observe, though repair can entail correction,
correction is a lesser domain both conceptually and empirically.
Correction premises “error,” yet studies of repair
routinely find repairs where no accountable “error” can be
heard, and also find accountable errors that are not corrected. In this
strong sense, repair constitutes a domain of conversation's
organization, oriented as it is to the achievement of common
understanding, wherein nothing escapes potential relevance:
The term ‘correction’ is commonly understood to
refer to the replacement of an ‘error’ or
‘mistake’ by what is ‘correct’. The phenomena
we are addressing, however, are neither contingent upon error, nor
limited to replacement…. Accordingly, we will refer to
‘repair’ rather than ‘correction’ in order to
capture the more general domain of occurrences…. It appears that
nothing is, in principle, excludable from the class
‘repairable’. (Schegloff et al.
1977:363)4
Not only is the class of
repairables indefinite, repair seems to systematically co-occur within an
array of other conversational tasks and organizations, and can even be
usefully regarded as a kind of “tracer” for taking note of what
other work the parties may be doing. For example, turns that initiate a
change of topic, or begin in overlap of an ongoing turn, are routinely
produced with a repair in turn-initial position (Schegloff
1987), just as repairs can show an orientation to the interactional
delicacies of person reference or account construction (Jefferson 1974). Schegloff 1987b
sums up these “sources of misunderstanding” as problems of
reference and sequential implicativeness. Thus, though their technical
organizations are remarkably regular, their practical occasions are difficult
to encompass.
As for correction, Jefferson 1974
characterizes two of its major domains as “production
errors,” or errors in the production of a coherent utterance, and
“interactional errors,” or errors in speaking
“appropriately,” given the parties and occasion of the
exchange. (See also Jefferson 1987 on
“exposed and embedded” correction.)
Further, as SS&J observe:
When the hearing/understanding of a turn is adequate to
the production of a correction by ‘other’, it is adequate
to allow production of a sequentially appropriate next turn. Under the
circumstance, the turn's recipient (‘other’) should
produce the next turn, not the correction (and, overwhelmingly, that is
what is done). Therein lies another basis for the empirical paucity of
other-corrections: those who could do them do a sequentially appropriate
next turn instead. (1977:378)
Finally, SS&J report anecdotal evidence of a context of parties
and occasion that runs counter to their findings for a strong, robust
preference for self-initiation and self-repair. It pertains to talk
between children and adults, and especially parents and children:
We want to note one apparent exception to the highly
constrained occurrence of other-correction…. The exception is
most apparent in the domain of adult-child interaction, in particular
parent-child interaction; but it may well be more generally relevant to
the not-yet-competent in some domain without respect to age. There,
other-correction seems to be not as infrequent, and appears to be one
vehicle for socialization. If that is so, then it appears that
other-correction is not so much an alternative to self-correction in
conversation in general, but rather a device for dealing with those who
are still learning or being taught to operate with a system which
requires, for its routine operation, that they be adequate
self-monitors and self-correctors as a condition of competence. It is,
in that sense, only a transitional usage, whose superseding by self-correction
is continuously awaited. (1977:380)
This passage is central to McHoul's treatment of classroom
discourse as a setting wherein we routinely find an “apparent
exception to the highly constrained occurrence of
other-correction” (McHoul 1990:350).
For students of the literature, this review of the organization of
repair in natural conversation, though incomplete, should be
recognizable. It offers a first reading of the conversational domain
that figures centrally in McHoul's analysis of classroom
correction sequences.
CLASSROOM CORRECTION
McHoul 1990 brings multiple interests to a
complex analysis of classroom correction sequences. My treatment of it
will, again, address only the central tendencies and findings. As
suggested above, the summary finding by SS&J on conversational
repair is that there is a decisive preference for self-initiation and
an even more robust preference for self-repair, and it is in these
terms of preference structure (and trajectory) that McHoul finds a
different organization for classroom correction.
McHoul's analysis begins with SS&J's observations about
adult-child interaction: “Schegloff et al. (1977:380) suspected there to be a skewing toward
other-correction in adult-child interaction and, the classroom being one
site where adults and children talk, it should be examined for the predicted
skewing” (1990:350). He goes on to examine a
corpus of materials recorded in Australian high school classrooms to see
whether a “relaxation of the usual preference for
self-correction [is] borne out by actual materials”
(1990:350, original emphasis). And something like
that is indeed borne out in his materials, in a nuanced way. To summarize
McHoul's findings: As we find in natural conversation, classroom
correction also shows a preference for self-correction, though a less robust
one. But unlike natural conversation, classroom correction is routinely
other- (or teacher-) initiated:
As Schegloff et al. (1977:376) stated:
“other-initiations overwhelmingly yield self-corrections,”
and this is the case for both ‘natural’ conversation and
classroom talk, with the proviso that in the latter case,
other-initiation is a far more prevalent phenomenon tha[n] in
the former. (1990:366)5
The differences are not limited to other-initiation:
“Other-correction – consisting almost entirely of teachers
correcting students' talk – occurs more readily in the classroom
than it does, according to Schegloff et al., in everyday conversation, where
it is a quite rare occurrence” (1990:351).
See Weeks 1985 for similar
findings.
This is the central difference – a prevalence of other-
(teacher-) initiation – that McHoul finds between repair in
natural conversation and correction in classrooms, though his materials
show other variances as well. Perhaps most surprising is the paucity of
self-initiation yielding self-repair. It is a finding cited early on in
the analysis, and though surprising in its own right, it may be
especially relevant for understanding McHoul's larger
treatment.6
In natural conversation,
self-initiations and repairs routinely have to do with the commonplace
hitches, disfluencies and “word searches” that we find in
our own talk and that of others; for example:
It is difficult to imagine any naturally produced discourse so largely
relieved of these kinds of self-initiations and self-repairs as McHoul
reports (see his frequencies, below). But as will be seen, this order of
repair is not the order of correction he has in mind.
Embedded in
his discussion of the relative infrequency of self-initiated self-repair is
a fairly radical inversion of the orienting sensibility that we find in
the analysis of conversational repair. Programmatically, whereas in
conversational studies
repair is the prevailing domain, to
which
correction is the lesser domain or “restricted
case,” in McHoul's analysis the asymmetry is inverted.
Specifically, not only are self-initiated, self-repairs relatively rare
in his classrooms; when we find them, “these are often restricted
to cases where the repairable or ‘trouble source’ is other
than an
error in the strictest sense” (
1990:353; original emphasis). Thus, “error in the
strictest sense” – and therefore the correction of errors –
becomes the “unrestricted” case in his treatment of classroom
correction.
Yet such a version of error correction is precisely what SS&J
have set aside as a useful way of thinking about the range and order of
conversational repair. It is central to McHoul's reading of the
prior literature, as he acknowledges in the first footnote to his text,
and it is a first instruction for our reading of McHoul's analysis
and findings: It is an interest in “correction,” or
“correcting informational errors” (1990:374), that leads the comparative analysis of his
classroom materials.7
The footnoted
acknowledgment is equivocal. While he allows that “‘repair’
and ‘correction’ cannot be used synonymously,” and that
there may be a “qualitative distinction between the two terms,”
he concludes with a wry question as to his own (and SS&J's)
deployment of the terms: “The terminology may still be in need of
correction, or is it repair?” (1990:376, n.1).
As a practical matter, however, his analysis elides the question and proceeds
with a treatment of classroom repair as correction.
“What interests me most is a particular kind of repair sequence where
teachers use the strategy of indicating unacceptable student answers without
providing direct corrections as such” (
1990:350). McHoul is thus treating repair-in-the-classroom
not as a matter of the produced coherence of classroom discourse – that
is, not as an orientation to the achievements of common understanding –
but rather as the discursive production of classroom lessons and correct
replies within them. Only with this reading in view can we begin to see into
his materials and the organizations he finds for them. However, whether
these are organizations of repair, and of a kind that can usefully
yield the comparative analysis he intends, or whether instead we have a
misaligned comparison, turns on how this rewriting of the
“restricted case” plays out in his analyses.
R-E-C SEQUENCES
The inversion of the restricted case follows from McHoul's
interest in sequences of direct instruction. This is indeed where we
find classroom correction sequences, though not only there.8
McHoul sees the relevance of correction in
non-lesson sequences as well, as in corrections of pronunciation or
violations of turn-taking rules (1990:372). Even
there, however, a focus on correction leads to a search for errors: “In
every case of second-turn other-initiation, both within my classroom corpus
and the Schegloff conversational corpus, it is error replacement as such
that is in the offing” (1990:374). Yet the
replacement of a word or the “error” of a turn taken “out
of turn,” for example, would seem to be very different objects from the
error (and correction) of a calculation or the recitation of a historical
date. Neither repair nor replacement, nor correction for that matter,
necessarily premises error in the strictest sense. (See Jefferson 1974 on “embedded correction”
for further examples of the difference.)
And this is perhaps
the central instruction we must bring to our reading of McHoul's
comparative analysis: that he is treating classroom correction as a
constituent organization of direct instruction. He finds his correction
sequences in the work of expanded IRE sequences wherein a
student's reply has failed and is corrected (or correction is
initiated) in a subsequent turn by the teacher. Recall that the
normative IRE sequence shows three turns: a first question by the
teacher whose answer she knows, a student's reply in next turn,
and third-turn remarks by the teacher on the adequacy of the reply.
Recall, as well, that any regular sequential organization can present
itself in its “simplest” form, yet can on any actual
occasion show expansion to an “nth” turn (where in
the production of expansions we sometimes see an orientation to the
more parsimonious form). Thus, IRE sequences may in fact consist of
many more than three turns, or two speakers, yet in every case the
sequence will come to completion when a positive evaluation in
third-turn position has been produced. Mehan 1978, 1979 speaks of
sequence completion as a matter of achieving “symmetry”
between the student's reply and the teacher's assessment of
it.
In this light, we can see that the classroom correction sequences
that McHoul examines are those in which a student's reply fails to
receive a positive or accepting assessment in the teacher's third
turn, and a correction-initiation produces sequence expansion. Rather
than the third turn yielding sequence closure, we find third turns as
teacher initiations, and student (or teacher) corrections in fourth or
subsequent turns. Schematically, these correction sequences look
something like the following:
In this way, McHoul locates what can be called a ‘R-E-C’
sequence, and it is within such environments that he compares the
organization of classroom correction sequences with prior findings on
conversational repair. The analytic distinction between initiation and
correction is preserved, as is the attention to party structure (now
“student” and “teacher” rather than
“self” and “other”) and trajectory. By slightly
annotating the columnar display, we can see how these organizational
features play out in classroom corrections:
9 As with every such device, the
display unavoidably treats the sequence as a post hoc formulation. But
(failed) answers, like questions, are themselves products of interactional
work, as different than “a common intersection of overlapping
sets” (Garfinkel 1967:30). What the
representation cannot show, and what this formulation of
“correction” tends to take for granted, is the course and
contingency of what indeed constitutes questions and answers. Those
contingencies are addressed in the materials presented below.
In general terms, this is the organization of correction in classroom
lessons that McHoul considers, and this is where he finds variances
with findings for repair in natural conversation. This also clarifies
the five correction trajectories and their frequencies that he
identifies in classroom correction sequences.
The trajectories of classroom correction, or the “correction
space,” are one of the findings at variance with repair in
conversation. The trajectories in classrooms are more extensive and
extendible: “We can now see that the conversational convention
restricting the repair space to a maximum length of three turns is
sometimes altered in classrooms” (1990:366;
but see Schegloff 1992 on fourth-position
trajectories in natural conversation). Of the five trajectories that McHoul
identifies, his interest focuses on two of them (labeled 4a and 4b in his
text):
“Next turn” here is next to a student's reply, and
it maps onto the teacher's third turn of the three-turn sequence
of direct instruction. (“Third turn” here would then be the
fourth turn of the sequence.)
Given the alternative trajectories for self and other initiation of
correction, a full 74% of McHoul's correction sequences show
teacher-initiation. This is the striking preponderance of
“other-initiations” that he finds (alongside the relative
infrequency of same-turn self-corrections: 26% combined for students
and teachers), a recurrence that nonetheless preserves an orientation
to self-correction in subsequent turns (55% of his sequences show
student-corrections in next turn to teacher-initiations; 19% yield
teacher-corrections). He writes:
In light of this observation, we can offer an initial
summary of the preferential organization of repair in classrooms.
Other-correction can occur without difficulty, but self-correction is a
much more routine and observable phenomenon, and … is frequently
undertaken by students following initiation by teachers. (1990:353)
A final point in this review of McHoul's comparative analysis,
before I proceed to an analysis of some different classroom materials,
has to do with how these findings articulate with the
“preference” structures found in conversational repair. In
the technical sense intended, “preference” refers not only
to something like “tendencies in the aggregate” but to the
in situ production of sequential organization. Preference is
then a production account of members' orientations, available to
them (and to us) in the developing particulars of their talk.
In the literature, the “markedness” of preference refers
to the temporal and sequential organizations whereby preferred and
dispreferred next turns are produced (e.g., as in next turns to
compliments, assessments, or bids to tell stories). As a practical
matter, these organizations have to do with the timeliness of next
turns. Given a preference for self-initiation and repair, on hearing a
trouble-source turn, recipients routinely “withhold” an
other-initiation in next turn, at once extending and co-producing
turn-transitional space as a next opportunity for self-initiation by
the speaker who produced the trouble. In this rough sense,
“preferred” next turns are produced “on time,”
and “dispreferred” next turns (e.g., other-initiations) are
produced with a slight pause, gap, or delay.
Continuing the comparison, McHoul regularly finds such
“withholding” of the teacher's next turn to a
student's reply that is correction-relevant, though he means a
withholding of the teacher's correction:
Teacher-corrections are routinely withheld, and in the markedness of
their delays, by this account, we see a structural
“preference” for student-correction.
The picture is complicated, however, by an allied finding that
teacher-initiations are not delayed in McHoul's
classroom correction sequences. Given how preference works in natural
conversation, if there were a preference for student-initiation of
correction in classrooms, we might expect a delay in the production of
teacher correction-initiations as well. “Yet, the overwhelming
evidence is that in cases where teaches do other-initiation, this delay
feature is frequently absent from them” (1990:
362).
Thus, McHoul's teachers tend to produce their
correction-initiations immediately, sometimes even overlapping the
trouble-source answer, and he finds in this regularity a preference
organization that may be distinctive to classroom lessons: “a
dispreference in classrooms for post-transition gapped delays
of other-initiation” (1990:363, original
emphasis). More simply, and holding aside how one would characterize a
preference structure from such turn productions, teachers tend not to delay
their next-turn correction-initiations.
One has to consult McHoul's materials to see just what this
organization looks like. But if, indeed, we find that
teacher-initiations are not delayed, then we have lost a major kind of
evidence for the preference for student-correction that McHoul
nonetheless finds. He works out the puzzle by setting aside the
production of correction-initiations as constitutive of the larger
preference for student correction, and attending instead to the
production of the correction per se. It is in the production not of the
initiation but rather of its projectable correction that we find the
markedness of preference:
Consequently, the withhold does not function identically in
informal conversation and classroom talk. In classrooms, it tends to
mean a withholding of other-corrections following
other-initiations [that are themselves not withheld].
Deferring the actual correction, as we have noticed, can be realized as
a recycling of other initiations. (1990:363,
original emphasis)
According to this understanding, (recycled) teacher-initiations
themselves are treated as “forms of withhold” which enact a
preference for student correction by delaying the teacher-correction
they project. On this point, the divergence from findings for
conversational repair is perhaps most vivid. In conversation,
other-initiation itself displays – in the order of its production
across the trajectory – the larger structure of preference. Here,
however, teacher-initiations show the markedness of a preference
structure, but not in their own production. Rather, they are the thing
done in lieu of the temporal withholding that pushes
teacher-correction further into the correction space of the sequence.
In this way, the preference structure McHoul finds exempts the
production of teacher-initiations from the field in which the
preference for student-correction is nonetheless displayed.10
The picture is further complicated when we
consider that “withholding” is not the only way in which
preference is displayed in the production of dispreferred next turns.
“Modulations” are also a recurrent feature of
other-initiations, meaning how an initiation may be produced with
qualifications or hearable uncertainty (see SS&J
1977:378). The complication is that McHoul finds modulations in
teacher-initiations too: “That other-correction is dispreferred in
the classroom is shown by the fact that even other-initiations
… are often done tentatively. This same phenomenon is addressed by
Schegloff et al. as ‘modulations’” (1991:367; original emphasis). If so, then it seems that
we do indeed find an orientation to the preference for student-correction in
the production of teacher-initiations. McHoul reconciles his discussion of
teacher-initiations by treating modulated teacher-initiations as modulations
not on behalf of a preference for student-correction, but rather as evidence
of a dispreference for teacher-correction: “Here, we can read
modulation as a method of putting off other-corrections as
such” (1990:368, original
emphasis).
It's a complex picture, and if there is a “knot” in
McHoul's analysis of the preference organization of classroom
correction sequences, it may be this: The treatment of his correction
sequences yields an analysis of dispreference – a
dispreference for teacher correction – as the organizing
preference structure. But it is only by a logic of the “excluded
middle” that we can claim, at the same time, evidence of a
preference for student-correction. The latter preference structure
– as a matter not of logics or frequencies, but of actual,
interactional productions across the correction space, and specifically
in the production of teacher-initiations – is difficult to find
in the materials. Instead, we tend to find a student-corrections in
next turn to the “on-time” production of
teacher-initiations. But this would be a weak version of
“preference,” restricted as it is to a single turn position
within the REC sequence.
Such a finding is, of course, admissible: that whereas the preference
for self-repair in conversation is recursive across the repair space,
the preference for student-correction in classrooms is more episodic
than recursive. But the difference may be more substantial than it
appears. The play of dispreference in the analysis is mindful of the
inversion of “correction” and “repair” with
which it begins. For studies of repair in natural conversation, repair
is the organizing conceptualization, and preference the production
description, to which correction and dispreference are cognate and
derivative. These relationships, however, are inverted in McHoul's
treatment of classroom correction, where dispreference organizes the
evidence for preference, and correction organizes the repair space.
Though the difference may seem only technical, or evidence of a
significantly different organization for classroom discourse, it may
also be troubling for the cogency of the comparative treatment, both
conceptually and technically.
AN ALTERNATIVE ANALYSIS
This discussion does not exhaust McHoul's treatment of classroom
correction, which is detailed and disciplined. But rather than continue
the review, I want to proceed in a different fashion, and offer an
analysis of some different materials, recorded in a fourth-grade
classroom in San Francisco, California. Two things should be carefully
noted at the outset. First, McHoul's materials are Australian, and
there is no reason not to expect production differences across settings
and cultures even within “same” institutions. Second, there
may be even less reason to expect continuities across grade levels, and
every reason to expect differences. Teaching in the early grades
– teaching those who genuinely do not know their lessons –
may be substantially different from teaching in the later grades (cf.
Macbeth 2000, Peterson
1952).
Thus, my materials need not be read as a “counter” to
McHoul's. At the same time, however, they are intended to show a
different kind of analysis of the relevance of repair for classroom
lessons. We will see that the organizations of repair we find in these
materials return us to an appreciation of the first tasks and
contingencies of common understanding. To those tasks and
contingencies, classroom lessons, complete with questions, answers, and
errors in the strict sense, are deeply indebted, in that what
constitutes questions, answers, and sequences of them are themselves
interactional achievements, showing analyzable – and contingent
– productions in their course. The alternative analysis returns
to common understanding as the first organizational problematic on the
scene, to which classroom correction owes its familiar course and
outcome – accountably correct answers. It thus begins with an
understanding of the organizations of direct instruction (including the
work of correction sequences), on the one hand, and of repair, on the
other, as distinctive – and concurrent – organizational
domains, and thus poor candidates for comparative analysis.
THE MATERIALS
The school is in a working-class district of San Francisco and
receives children from the neighborhood and children bused in from
other neighborhoods. The students are African, Asian, and Hispanic
American, many of them immigrant, nonnative speakers of English. In
many ways, the school exemplifies the diversity we find in many urban
American schools, and it enjoys a highly professional and dedicated
staff of teachers, many of whom are bilingual. The school has received
recognition from the local district and the state for its work with
these students, their parents, and the wider community.
The materials below were recorded in a fourth-grade language arts
class that was reviewing workbook assignments on the uses of
punctuation. Individual students are nominated by the teacher to handle
each next problem, and their task is twofold: to read a passage from
the text, and to identify the correct punctuation for it. Each problem
is produced as two consecutive IRE sequences: first the reading, and
then questions and answers about its punctuation. The transcript begins
with problem 9, so the class has already completed the first eight
problems and has developed something of a local format for talking
through each one. We will examine problems 9 and 11.
To review this sequence in terms of our interest in the relevance of
repair for classroom lessons, three further observations on the
organization of IRE sequences are helpful. The first is that classroom
lessons are organizations not only of discourse, but also of parties
and party structure (cf. McHoul 1978, Payne & Hustler 1980, Heap
1990, and Macbeth 1991 on classroom
party organization). Payne & Hustler 1980
offer an especially instructive analysis of how classrooms assemble the
practical, organizational identity of the cohort or “the
class” from the gaggle of children that enters the room, and how
the “occasion relevant identities” of the teacher and the
class are reflexive to the order of the room.
The second observation tells us something about how this cohort
organization organizes the discursive production of lessons.
Specifically, when we examine the turn-transitional environment between
a teacher's question to a single student and the student's
reply, we routinely find a delay in the production of the
student's turn, without competition from other, non-nominated
members of the cohort. McHoul 1978 speaks of
this as a period of “due consideration,” and teachers and
students mark it as such; delays in students' next turns are
specifically unremarkable. Yet the temporal parameters of such delays
are themselves delicate sites of order and meaning construction, so
that a delay that continues opens the field to other hearings; for
example, has the student heard the question, or is she able to answer
it? These turn-transitional durations are known by all parties well
enough that we commonly find “pre-positioned” remarks by
the nominated student that are not themselves answers but indicate that
she has indeed heard the question as hers to answer, and that she is
engaged in formulating a reply that will be forthcoming.
The third observation pertains directly to corrections, or
assessments of the adequacy of student replies, and their
turn-transitional environments. In my materials (Macbeth 2000), the second turn transition of the
canonical IRE sequence – that between the student's reply
and the teacher's third-turn remarks – also shows a regular
orientation to the production of delays. Briefly, students orient to
delays in teacher's third turns much as conversationalists orient
to delays in the production of second turns to adjacently paired turns
(as in assessments, requests, or offers): Delays in next-turn
production work as virtual harbingers of dispreferred next turns, and
are heard that way (cf. Jefferson 1974; Sacks & Schegloff 1979; Pomerantz 1978, 1984; Davidson 1984; Sacks
1987). This is also true in classrooms. Delayed teacher's
third turns – whether they prove to be corrections,
correction-initiations, or something else – are heard as
projectable for negative evaluations, and this organizes a way of
hearing the adequacy of a reply that has no need for knowing, in some
propositional way, what the correct reply would be. Rather,
“correctness” can be seen and heard in these temporal
durations. It permits a way of hearing the adequacy of replies publicly
and observationally, in the temporal parameters of the production of
the teacher's third turn, where the production of public knowledge
and understanding is perhaps the standing task and achievement of
classroom instruction.
The first relevance of these observations to our transcript is to
make sense of the duration of line 3. Having been nominated in last
position of the teacher's turn of line 2, Jason delays and begins
his reading in line 4.11
As McHoul 1978 observes, the play of party structure
is alive in the production of teacher first turns: Until the question
has been assigned to some one of them, each member of the cohort has a
strong warrant to listen to the turn-so-far, since the question may
become hers. Thus, though certainly not always, student nominations are
routinely placed in last position to the teacher's initiating
turn.
Apparently it is a fitful reading, the last part of which cannot be
heard (at least by the transcriber), though we can be sure that Jason
heard it. But it was apparently not heard by the teacher either, who,
following the duration of line 5, completes the “missing
part” himself, to which Jason repeats the completion in line 7,
and to that the teacher latches his third-position assessment and
repeats their joint reply. (The latching of third-turn evaluations is a
common placement of strong, positive evaluations in my materials.)
As for the “kind” of reparative sequence we have here,
lines 4–7 appear to be a “production” repair in
Jefferson's (1974) discussion, whose
object is the practical production of the reading, as the second turn
to the sequence.12
See Weeks 1985 for an analysis of classroom correction
working from materials similar to these: a spate of round-robin reading
in the early grades where teachers “invite,”
“guide,” and “complete” corrections of the
students' readings, while preserving a preference for student
correction (as we see here; in some useful sense, Jason corrects his
reading in line 7). As does McHoul, Weeks builds a comparison between
the regularities, trajectories, and preference structures of
conversational repair and classroom correction.
Only when a
reply is in hand would we have the relevance of correction in the
strict sense, and the sequence reminds us that answers themselves are
contingent productions, for which the analysis of repair, rather than
correction, may show its relevance first.
We can also see, in the particulars of line 5, that repair is not the
only organization operating here. We find in the duration of line 5, a
1-second pause, concurrent orientations to repair and to the
IRE sequence that is underway. In brief, Jason, hearing his own
completion in line 4, is waiting for third-position remarks from the
teacher (and hearing the delay of those remarks, we might imagine he is
feeling a pulse of anxiety as well). But the teacher, not hearing the
end of the reading, is awaiting its completion; we could say line 5 is,
for him, a delay across normal turn-transition space to give current
speaker further opportunity to self-repair and complete the reading
(the production repair mentioned above). Both student and teacher are
then “withholding” next turns, but via orientations to
different sequential organizations, and in this way the duration of
line 5 is collaboratively built.
In line 9, the teacher continues with a direct question and next
initiation about the punctuation. Jason evidently knows this is his
question to answer, and he starts up in overlap at the teacher's
first possible completion. Something of a duet then sets in, with a
round of latchings whereby Jason and the teacher parse the question
into embedded sequences: The first is answered and assessed in lines 10
through 12, and the an:d of line 12 works as a
virtual next question (where positive evaluations are also evidenced by
repeating the answer, and by the production of next questions). The
latches across lines 12 through 14 mark both Jason's “on
task” engagement and a positive assessment by the teacher.
Line 14 initiates a next embedded IRE sequence, addressed to the same
problem and student. The 2.0-second pause of line 15, collaboratively
produced by all the parties in the room, strikes me as part of the
business of “due consideration,” albeit a long one. It may
suggest uncertainty, as does Jason's very soft answer in line 16,
after which we find the 1.5-second duration of line 17. The teacher
then begins line 18 as a repeat of the question of line 14, initiates
its repair (duz it go-) and goes on to repair the indexical
it.
Then we get the even more marked duration of line 19 (3.5 seconds).
The pauses of lines 17 and 19 are especially relevant to our interest
in the work of repair in the sequence.
The pause of line 17 (1.5 seconds) looks similar to that in line 5: a
duration built by asymmetrical hearings of their exchange, yielding
orientations to different sequential organizations. For Jason, who
surely heard his answer, next-turn evaluative remarks by the teacher
are in order (whose delay is projectable for a negative or
“dispreferred” evaluation). Yet the teacher is speaking in
line 18 as though his question of line 14 had not been heard or
understood. In this light, the duration across lines 15–17 looks
like a substantial “withhold” which ends when he poses the
question again and repairs it, displaying in the repair his analysis of
Jason's problem in hearing or understanding. Line 18 then shows a
repair in next turn – a repair of his question – but in
third position to his first-turn initiation of line 14 and the
opportunity for reply that the withholding across lines 15–17
affords.
The intersection of these concurrent organizations of repair and
instruction is then immediately produced again in line 19, and its
substantial duration of 3.5 seconds. For Jason, line 19 may be evidence
of a genuine interpretive problem: Routinely, question-repeats are also
heard as marks of a failed answer. Yet having produced his answer the
first time in line 16, and having offered the only correct answer he
knows, what other answer can he give? But for the teacher, who
figures that Jason has only now heard and/or understood the
question in line 14, the repaired question of line 18 recycles the
positional structure of the IRE sequence. For him, line 19 is then
hearably a prolonged yet “due” delay – due to a
question that has evidently been difficult for the student to field.
The contingencies and orientations of their respective hearings are
then brought into alignment when Jason proceeds with uncertainty again
and repeats his answer in line 20. The teacher then rejoins with an
“on time” and explicit positive evaluation, and sequence
closure, in line 21.13
To my hearing, the
teacher's Okay? in line 21 is both a question and a
change in the structure of his address. It seems to be addressed to
everyone in the room as an “understanding check” produced
at sequence closure, for which the duration of 22 would be an
opportunity for questions, if there were any.
What can be seen across this lesson problem is that the organization
of repair and the work of producing IRE sequences – including the
orientation to assessments in third position – are concurrent
rather than same organizations, and further that the work of repair is
in no sense restricted to the work of assessment and/or correction.
To the contrary, repair is implicated in the interactional work across
the sequence, in an abiding orientation to the problematics of common
understanding, especially with respect to the interactional production
of questions and answers.14
See Lee 2001 for a careful analysis of the
collaborative construction of the sense of questions in undergraduate
ESL classrooms.
Reparative organizations are relevant
throughout the production of IRE sequences, and the next
sequence of the same lesson shows more of their cross-cutting
organizations, especially with respect to the production of correct
replies.
In line 49, the teacher selects Latesia in last position to the turn
and offers her the first phrase of the reading passage (Joey
said...). Following a pause, Latesia repeats the phrase, pauses
(0.5), and then restarts and completes the reading in line 51. We can
say that she assembles an ample space of “due
consideration,” built in part of a recycled turn-beginning.
In line 52, the teacher latches his third-turn assessment of her
reading and produces the first “real” question: Okay,
where duz tha quotation marks go. In
53, another student speaks up, and Latesia starts up in overlap and (re)claims
the turn with school? We can note a couple of things about her
answer. First, it is “try marked” with the uncertainty of a
questioning intonation that shows her orientation to the correctness or
adequacy of her reply. Second, following the trailing duration (0.5),
Latesia initiates a self-correction in line 55 (no wai-), and the
sequence so far looks very much like a correction-relevant sequence, anchored
to her reply as the trouble-source turn.
Though tempting, it is inconclusive at best to say that Latesia hears
in the trailing 0.5-second duration of line 54 – very nearly a
normal turn-transition duration – the markedness of a delayed
next turn by the teacher, and therefore initiates a correction of her
answer. We may be on safer ground to say that she is oriented to the
adequacy of her reply, has doubts about it, and initiates its
correction within turn-transitional space. If so, then the correction
sequence so far looks quite normal alongside findings for the
trajectory of repair. As a practical matter, however, the
teacher's latching next turn (line 56) takes the turn resources
for doing the correction that her self-initiation projects. But we can
further note that No wai- is not only a correction initiation. It
is an initiation that is itself repair-initiated in the cutoff,
but not repaired, and we again seem to be witnessing an orientation to
two co-occurring organizational domains: classroom correction, and
repair.15
Insofar as an initiation promises
the action it initiates, and if the speaker has not found that projectable
action, initiating repair of the initiation is a practical way to
“stop” a sequence whose completion cannot be produced. We see
it again in line 62, and in the particulars of these turns, the coincident
organizations of repair and correction are especially visible in the
production of a same utterance. Corrections themselves can be occasions of
trouble and candidates for repair.
In the teacher's latching turn of line 56, he amends
Latesia's answer and accepts it, thus accepting an answer that she
herself suspected. In doing so, he accepts as Latesia's first
answer what has been the second “item” in the local format
of their answering. (The format of the answering has been to locate the
first quotation mark first, the last quotation mark next, and its
relation to sentence punctuation last.) His turn continues on to
complete the last part of the answer (about the period), and to ask
(again) for the first part: an' whut about tha- tha
beginning.
This next question in lines 56–57 (and what about the
beginning) recycles the IRE organization. There is a due delay in
line 58, and Latesia answers in 59 with Joey, which is the
beginning of the reading passage but not of its dialogue. Third-turn
remarks by the teacher are then in order, but we hear instead the pause
of line 60. Produced and oriented to from within the organization of
direct instructional sequences, such delays are projectable for a
dispreferred evaluation in next turn, and the teacher does indeed say
No in line 61 (a teacher's correction-initiation, in
McHoul's treatment). To this, Latesia latches a
correction-initiation but no correction. Instead, and again, the
initiation is itself repair-initiated in the cutoff: I
mea-. Both the repair and correction trajectories are thus still
alive, and another student offers an answer in line 63, David.
His answer is both correct and “ignored.” More to our interest,
it is produced and placed in an orderly and attentive manner: It does the
correction that Latesia initiates in line 62, in next turn.16
As an impression, such cohort-produced other-corrections
in next turn to a self-initiation are not uncommon in classrooms, and
may be understood as simultaneous orientations to correction and party
structure. They may also be a useful place for furthering an interest
in the organization of classroom correction sequences.
The duration of line 64 (2.0 seconds) is a nice puzzle in terms of
its construction: How it may be part of a repair and
correction space that would afford (and show a preference for)
Latesia's self-repair and correction in next turn, how both (and
all) students may be listening for the markedness of turn transition
and party structure, and how the teacher may be co-producing whatever
it is that the students might be listening for.
In line 65, we hear a next question and the initiation of a next
embedded IRE sequence. Though there is no named address, we can hear
its tie to the teacher's question of lines 56–57, and
apparently the class hears it that way too. Following the 1.5-second
pause of line 66, Latesia takes it as her question without competition
for the turn and answers it (or does the reading it calls for), and the
teacher overlaps in line 68 with a positive evaluation, having heard
just enough of her reading to formulate the (known) answer. We can say
that rather than finding the answer, Latesia has been led to produce
it, and following his evaluation, the teacher tells the class how the
punctuation rule works here and reassembles the answer in its normative
form. We then hear the next question and student selection.
DISCUSSION
These materials suggest a different understanding of the work of
repair in sequences of direct instruction, and in correction sequences
as well. As Sharrock & Anderson suggest, classroom instruction can
be glossed as the work of “talking through a subject in such a
way that it can be learned” (1982:171). In
the instruction of novices of one kind or another, it is presumed that there
are things they do not know or cannot do, and their instruction is then
unavoidably played out on fields of normative knowledge and
expectations.17
In the context of a
professional field chronically awash with new proposals for
“better” teaching, learning, and knowledge, we can expect
that every next proposal will encounter the practical tasks of teaching
those who do not know. However it is to be done, pursuing the
sequential analysis of teaching's enactments would seem to be a
promising program for describing how it is done.
If knowledge
(re)production is the charge of classroom instruction, the production
of correct knowledge, and thus correction, unavoidably become a part of
the practical and professional organization of the setting, and one of
the prevailing orientations of the parties in the room.
These are tasks that premise their machinery, and the three-turn
organization of direct instruction and its allied party structure are
commonly central to it. The question for our common inquiry, then, is
how to understand the play of repair in the routine discursive works of
classroom direct instruction. In my view, McHoul has restricted this
play to correction “in the strictest sense,” and two
immediate implications follow: The analysis then has no particular use
for reparative work throughout the canonical IRE organizations of
direct instruction, and within that, no use for the
“successful” IRE sequence either, or the sequence that goes
to completion without “correction.” Working with a
conceptualization of repair as correction, we may
particularize to a certain organizational window an indefinite
organizational domain wherein problems of hearing and understanding are
addressed without “time out” from the practical work of the
occasion, and thus miss its operations elsewhere. The problems that
follow are not only a matter of how we then read the work of repair in
classrooms, but also of how we understand classroom correction as
well.
Like instruction, classroom correction is a practical, vernacular
achievement, one of the endless achievements whereby the
“rational properties of indexical expressions” are
assembled by members' ordinary – and disciplined –
discursive and interpretive practices (Garfinkel
1967). It shows an “operation” and entails the
accountable construction of things like questions, answers, certainty,
markedness, structures of address, the organization of parties, and
their occasioned identities. To each of these constituent achievements,
an orientation to the problematics of common understanding seems fairly
relentless, and practical too. Correction premises those achievements
of common understanding.
What is problematic about the notion of “correct in the
strictest sense” can be seen in our materials in Latesia's
first answer, which was marked with uncertainty by her and accepted by
the teacher as “adequate for all practical purposes.” The
difference between “exposed” and “embedded”
correction (Jefferson 1987) makes the point
in a different fashion, as we also see in the teacher's rereading
of Jason's reading of the first passage. Jason's reading is
both reformulated and accepted as correct: Let's go...
becomes Let's get... (see extract 2 in McHoul 1990:356 for a similar organization.):
Correct and incorrect answers are locally produced and measured in
and through the interactional order of their production. Correct
answers are better understood as locally adequate or acceptable answers
for the practical purposes at hand, and perhaps this is the
“strictest” sense of classroom correction.
Rather than treating the work of repair and classroom correction as
alternative expressions of a same organizational domain, we may be
better advised to understand them as different organizations that can
bear on the production of a same sequence, or, in Pomerantz's
(1978) phrase, “co-operating”
organizations. We certainly find correction sequences in classroom
lessons in the particulars of expanded IRE sequences. They are central
to the professional work of teachers and the practical experience of
students. That correction-initiations in classroom lessons tend to be a
teacher's turn (e.g., the teacher's No in line 61)
would seem to be so because correction is both a contingent
and a normative exercise, routinely assigned to teachers and
played out in their assessments of students' replies in next
turns. This seems a surer path to understanding why we commonly find
teacher correction-initiations, and one that need not implicate a
rereading of reparative organizations in classrooms, or within
correction sequences themselves.
But if “repair” and “classroom correction”
are to be understood as co-operating organizations, then we need to
possess their respective organizational identities as usefully
non-identical.18
The “co-operating
organizations” that Pomerantz 1978 elucidates
are those that come to bear on compliment sequences, in the cross-cutting
organizations of assessments and agreements, and the delicacies of receiving
and affirming praise.
Put directly, while the literature on repair
understands correction as of one piece with repair's
organizational domain, our classroom materials offer grounds to
consider whether correction may be a different organizational province.
We may have in classroom materials at least the possibility of an
organization of correction that is non-identical to that of repair, and
whose organizational home and trajectory issue from the regular forms
of talk that we find there. Thus, our critique of McHoul is not that he
(and others) have not found a robust organization of classroom
correction, but that in pressing a direct comparison to organizations
of repair, we may lose sight of organizational differences. However, on
consideration, those differences may not be restricted to classrooms,
and the next section explores a reading of correction and repair as
different, co-operating organizations more generally.
19 The sketch of an argument that begins here
developed from close readings by the manuscript reviewers, and
especially by Anita Pomerantz of how the critique of McHoul's
project might hold a larger interest. The argument that follows has not
had the benefit of their reading. I am indebted to Paul ten Have for
his careful reading of an early draft.
Co-operating organizations
The gambit of co-operating organizations can be pursued in several
ways (for instance, in the further study of classroom correction
sequences). But I want to return to SS&J's first work on
repair, and to suggest that resources there open up the possibility of
co-operating organizations, notwithstanding that the literature is
otherwise quite clear as to where the larger organizational circle is
to be drawn: Correction is a kind of repair, and it is to repair, and
not correction, that we turn to understand the organizational filaments
of both.20
That the terms are at times
equivocal, moving between repair and correction, is a first
observation. This is the uncertainty that McHoul cites in his footnote
referenced above, and the difficulty is not his alone; see also
Drew's (1981, n. 7)
“anxiety” about the apposite usages, especially in
“instructional” contexts. The discussion in SS&J moves
between “repair” and “correction” in ways that
are both effectively descriptive and at times unmarked (as in the title
of their publication). Pomerantz (personal communication) clarifies the
prevailing usage: “Correction” is understood as that which
is regularly achieved on repair's initiation, typically the
replacement of the item that the initiation points to. By this reading
virtually every repair initiation that goes to completion would show a
correction. But insofar as error is conceptually implicated in
what we mean by “correction” – in classrooms or
elsewhere – we would then need to reconcile this usage with
SS&J's discussion of “error” as the restricted
case (1977:363). We are therefore led to ask, in
a preliminary fashion, whether there are (further) grounds for distinguishing
between repair and correction, conceptually and organizationally.
The resources have already been cited above. One is the observation
from which McHoul begins, that there are tasks in society for which
other-correction is exceptionally common. SS&J discuss adult-child
interaction and parent-child interaction in particular, and they
observe that this class of exceptions may be “more generally
relevant to the not-yet-competent in some domain without respect to age
… and appears to be one vehicle for socialization” (1977:380).
The socialization of the not-yet-competent is of course an enormous
topic and domain. However much the exceptions to the preference for
self-repair that it houses may be, in SS&J's lovely phrase,
“transitional usage[s], whose supercession by
self-correction is continuously awaited” (1977:380), the house itself is quite large.
Socialization to competence is a standing task and achievement of every
social order. At the risk of overcharging their discussion, the tasks of
inducting the not-yet-competent into whatever the “community of
practice” may be can usefully be summarized as the tasks of instruction,
or pedagogy, or even social reproduction (as a practical rather than
theoretical undertaking). Classrooms are one site of this work, and
parent-child interaction another, along with apprenticeships, professional
training, and so on. In this light, the exceptions to the preference for
self-repair begin to look exceptional in a different key, with respect to
their place in the routine work of ordinary worlds. As we expect that such
tasks will have their machinery (cf. Moerman & Sacks
1988, Schegloff 1991, Sacks 1992), and as CA has demonstrated elsewhere in
remarkable detail, so we might expect here.
A second resource in SS&J elaborates the first, and it entails
bringing a certain reading to a central passage in the repair paper,
central to its methodical demonstration of a preference for
self-repair, and a paucity of other-correction:
When the hearing/understanding of a turn is adequate to
the production of a correction by ‘other’, it is adequate
to allow production of a sequentially appropriate next turn. Under the
circumstance, the turn's recipient (‘other’) should
produce the next turn, not the correction (and, overwhelmingly, that is
what is done). Therein lies another basis for the empirical paucity of
other-corrections: those who could do them do a sequentially appropriate
next turn instead. (1977:380)
The reading is this: Where a sequentially appropriate next turn can
be done – that is, where a prior turn is understood well enough
to reply – one must have a “special motive” to
produce a correction in next turn instead. This is not a reading of
disengaged possibilities but rather, it follows from the continuing
discussion cited above. Where correction is done, participants
routinely see such a motive at play, namely disagreement:
Therein, as well, lies the basis for the modulation …
of other-correction: if it were confidently held, it ought not to be
done…. Therein, finally, is a basis for much of the
other-correction which does occur being treated by its recipient on its
occurrence, as involving more than correction, i.e. disagreement.21
See Jefferson
1987 for further elaboration of what “reasons” could
motivate corrections, as understood by the parties to the occasion,
e.g. instructing, complaining, forgiving, accusing, which she collects
as the “class of activities ‘accountings’ ”
(1987:88).
(
1977:380)
About motives
The topic of motive is both rich and delicate. Motives, commonly
conceived – in both the disciplinary literatures and folk wisdom
– as wellsprings of action of one kind or another, were among the
identifying tropes of the “normative paradigm” (Wilson 1971) that CA and ethnomethodology (EM) were
actively engaged in topicalizing from their outsets (see Mills 1940 for a prior, suggestive investigation).
It is not that they had no use for motives. Rather, in the effort to
rescue motive as a topic in the construction of accountable worlds, and
compelling as it may be in common parlance, it was not to be admitted
as an unexamined resource for formulating the cogency of social action.
It was instead to be examined and appreciated as one of the resources
for assembling action's accountabilities. Its treatment would then
be consistent with CA's disciplined insistence on inferentially
minimal analysis.
In the particulars of CA's sequential analyses and EM's
analyses of practical action, motive was to be understood as among the
“surface” features of scenic coherence. The very notion of
the projectability of utterance completion makes motive relevant not as
an “antecedent condition” but as a constituent feature of
the intelligibility of action, thus owning a praxiological foundation.
Motive was a hearable thing evidenced in talk's projectable
structure, as in the hearability of a pre-sequence as a
pre-sequence, for participants and analyst alike. Motive, then, is not
antecedent but reflexive to scenic sense, and this treatment of motive
is emblematic of the extraordinary departure of sequential analysis
from the habits of formal analysis and its ‘footing’ in the
natural attitude of taken-for-granted worlds. The motives of which we
are speaking are endogenous to intelligible action, and CA and EM were
engaged from the beginning in disclosing the ignored organizations of
“intelligible actions performed on singular occasions”
(Lynch & Bogen 1996:265).22
Lynch & Bogen offer an
ethnomethodological formulation of this analytic program. Schegloff 1972 offers an early and kindred CA
formulation: how “the production of a world of particular
specific scenes through a set of general formal practices is
accomplished and exhibited” (Schegloff
1972:117).
With these understandings, the reading of a “special
motive” for the production of other-corrections and their
initiations can be elaborated in at least two directions. One turns on
what “special' could mean, and this strikes me as fairly
straightforward within the orbit of CA's program:
“Special” stands with respect to talk's prevailing
orientation to the achievement of common understanding. Intelligibility
is the prevailing orientation. It is evidenced in countless ways, and
perhaps emblematic of these is the way in which each next turn displays
the speaker's understanding of what has gone before.
“Special motives” are special to this.
The second direction leads us to appreciate how sequential analysis
was from the outset a sociological program. It was oriented to
sociology's canonical topics of social action and order, while
proposing an entirely different understanding of where and how the
“order” of action and order might be pursued and disclosed
naturalistically, and in that sense technically, as the order of
competent practice in ordinary worlds (cf. Garfinkel
& Sacks 1970, Sharrock 1986, Sacks 1992, Schegloff
1992, Lynch 1993). What was to be seen
in the compelling detail of material analyses was that
“motives,” for example, had worlds attached. They directed
our attention not inward but outward, to the witnessable fabric of
meaning, action, identity, relationship, task, occasion, context, and
structure and recurrence, and the yield of accountable
worlds-in-common.
In the particulars of our interest here, “motive”
attaches to the intelligibility of identity and relationship. It
figures centrally, for example, in membership category analysis
(see Sacks 1992, Hester
& Eglin 1997), as in how we hear that the crying baby
described in Sacks 1972 is the baby of the
mommy, each doing what babies and mommies do, and thus why the mommy
has picked the baby up. The intelligibility of the story is imminent to
the intelligibilities of its storied actions, identities, and
relationships, and “motive” is reflexive to them all. By
this understanding of motive and its intertwining in accountable
worlds, to speak of motives, or special motives, is to read into
relevance the manifold organizations of meaningful action on actual
occasions. If correction is evidence of special motive, then sorting
out correction from repair leads us to consider its occasions in these
ways and terms.
The task that this line of discussion projects – to collect and
examine occasions of correction to find organizational regularities of
task, identity, and relation as they bear on sequential productions
– is well beyond its preliminary character. Instead, I wish to
offer three suggestive examples of correction sequences to serve the
hunch that correction, rather than repair, is routinely produced
– but certainly not only produced – on occasions when we
can say something like instruction is going on, with the full
entailments of task, identity, and relation that instruction implies.
Parent-child interaction is, of course, emblematic. In the particulars
of these three sequences, we may see more of what could be co-operating
about the organizations of repair and correction.23
My purpose is not to sketch a formal structure of
correction sequences. If there are grounds to figure that there is such
an organizationally identifying domain, that will be a substantial
task, complete with “boundary cases” (Schegloff 1997). As a brief example of what such a
boundary case might look like, Schegloff 1997
reports the following “911” phone call exchange, in which
an address is being confirmed:
It looks like we have here a correction in next turn to line 6 (and
self-correction in the third turn of line 8). But as Schegloff observes,
the turn of line 6 is designed to “check” the address, and in
this the motive for its production and for the correction in line 7 is
intrinsic, rather than special, to their shared task and orientation. Other
such cases can be imagined, as when colleagues engaged in collaborative work
“correct” one another in their common orientation to a task.
(See Greiffenhagen et al. 2003 on the collaborative
work of grammar school students at the keyboard, and Hindmarsh &
Heath's (2000:1873) workplace study, wherein
one colleague produces a potential correctable as a possible solution to a
problem of reference, and has it corrected in next turn by the other.) The
“motives” in the particulars of these scenes are not at all
special—or treated that way by the parties. The analytic task is not
then to adjudicate what constitutes “special,” but rather to
examine whether and how corrections are demonstrably so for the
participants.
In the first fragment, Schegloff reports a dinner-table exchange
between a mother and her son. It begins as the son is gnawing on a
piece of meat, speared on his fork:
The analysis leads us to see how the mother's first remark (a
correction-initiation) is produced and placed to achieve the visibility
of its object, and how the son's repair-initiation in line 3
(Hm?) is produced to “defeat” the recognition of
the correctable thing that the correction-initiation points to, and how
the mother, in next turn, defeats this virtual claim of ignorance: She
“disallows Rob's disavowal of guilty knowledge”
(1989:150) by producing her reply without the
repair of the indexical “that/it” that his repair-initiation
calls for (see Macbeth 1990 for a similar contest
in a classroom context). The analysis is concise and revealing. For our
purposes, it also shows a course of instruction in table manners, and
also the “co-operating organizations” of correction and
repair in how repair is deployed as a sequential organization and
action distinct from, embedded within, and here in
“opposition” to, the correction sequence that occasions it.
It is Rob's orientation to the correction sequence (and its
special motive) that is underway that makes the implicit claim of his
repair-initiation of line 3 intelligible, relevant, and defeasible for
this mother.
The next fragment is well known to students of conversation analysis
as the first sequence in Jefferson's (1972) treatment of “side sequences.” It
shows a correction sequence as three children are playing a game.
Steven is six years old; Susan and Nancy are eight. They are playing a
kind of hide-and-seek for which Steven is counting while the others,
normally, would go off to hide:24
Line
numbers have been added for ease of discussion.
A central technical interest for Jefferson's analysis, in
addition to the larger framing of how side sequences articulate
“at the edges” to whatever the work of the sequence that is
underway may be, is the work of “repeats,” and how they
have their objects, and how those objects are identified and dealt
with. In the particulars here, Eleven? is
produced twice before Steven recognizes it, and we are led by the analysis
to note the timings and placements, and how all repeats are not doing the
same work.
Our interests in the sequence are somewhat different. As Jefferson
notes, on Susan's correction-initiation in line 3
(Eleven), producing the correctable in next turn
to Steven's prior turn, and calling for its recognition in third
turn, “the halting of the game is cooperatively and instantly
accomplished and attention is shunted for game activity to the
dealing-with of a single word, such that further progress of the game
awaits an outcome” (1972:295).
As she further notes, the error here is not a game-relevant error,
insofar as the play of the game turns on a count of paced intervals,
rather than on how the intervals are filled: “The substitution of
‘eleven’ for ‘seven’ does not alter that interval as
would, for example, an omission” (1972:295).
In this sense, the correction has some other warrant, as in “how we
count,” and when the correct counting is produced by Steven in line 6,
we hear Susan's assessment That's better in line 7. She
is, apparently, entitled to it. That is, as a matter of identity and relation,
as an eight-year-old speaking to a six-year-old, perhaps as an old hand in
the game (of counting) speaking to a novice, she has an unremarkable
authorization to produce and assess a correction that is otherwise not
game-relevant: She could well do a sequentially appropriate next action
instead (i.e., hiding). The hearable correction, for us and for Steven, is
thus tied to the occasion and identities of a not-yet-competent performance.
Instruction in competent performance per se is the correction's warrant,
and in that sense its motive. Note further Steven's orientation to the
adequacy of his counting across the disfluencies of his pauses in
producing his count the first time. For these children, competence and
correction, and the identities and relations that organize its
exercise, may be prevailing orientations in addition to – and
co-operating with – the alignments of common understanding that
permit the first possibilities of game play.
Yet intelligibility, and thus repair, has its play too. The
correction-initiation is Susan's in line 3. But in Nancy's
repeat of Eleven? in line 5, produced just the
way Susan says it the first time, we have a repair-initiation,
initiating repair on Steven's hearing of Susan's first
repeat, as evidenced in his next turn (line 4). Simply put, he missed
the correction-initiation and its relevance for his performance. Nancy
then repair-initiates his hearing in third turn (measured to
Susan's line 3), and on Steven's recognition and correct
production in line 6, Susan, as the correction-initiator, offers her
assessment of the found correction in line 7. Thus, a reparative
organization is implicated in the work of showing and finding the
correction's object, without which the correction, and the
instruction it enacts, cannot proceed. Note that the tasks of
correction and repair are produced in turn, and by different speakers,
and show an orientation to different sequential contexts of action. In
each of these two sequences we can say, as of the parties'
orientations, that a spate of instruction is going on, resisted and
then accepted in the first, and unremarkably received in the second,
for which a repair is embedded in the correction work that is already
underway.
The third fragment throws a different light on the discussion,
returning us to classroom instruction and the non-identical relevance
of correction and repair that we find there. In the exchange, from
McHoul's (1990) materials, a student
replies to a teacher's question about models of urban development.
With the student's answer in hand, the teacher's next turn is
normatively the place for correction if correction is to be done (and
is so treated in McHoul's analysis). But here it is repair and not
correction that is operative. Correction will show its relevance, if at
all, only in the presence of the achievement of common understanding
about the sense of the question, and it is to that achievement
that the parties are oriented:
McHoul treats the sequence as an example of the teacher-corrections
we commonly find in classrooms, whereas in natural conversation they
are relatively rare. And indeed, something is being
“corrected” in line 6; however, it is not the
student's answer, but rather his understanding of the question as
displayed in his answer, that the teacher is oriented to in line 6. The
repair that it initiates is then received with the student's
Oh in line 7, as he proceeds to answer in light of this new
understanding of what the question was. The “trouble-source
turn” is not the student's answer of line 5, but the
teacher's question of lines 2–3, an organization again
mindful of third-position repair, as discussed in Schegloff
1992.25
Such repairs have to do with
misunderstandings of prior turns, as they are revealed in next turns, and
“caught” in third turns by the party who produced the turn that
was misunderstood. Schegloff continues to identify the turn components of
such third-position repairs, and observes:
Although third position repairs may initially appear to be
disagreements with the prior turn, and \`no\' may appear to signal such
disagreement, it should be noted, first, that in the remainder of these
turns the speakers operate on their own prior talk, not on that
of the other…. The first component of third position repair, with
“no” as it turn initial particle, is best understood as
initiating repair, rather than as betokening disagreement. (1992:1305, n.
6, original emphasis)
The orientation here thus seems
to be to the common understanding of a question, rather than to the
normative correctness of a reply, on which the exercise of correction,
should it be relevant, is contingent. Repair is then seen to be
“co-operating” throughout the production of the sequence. The
two prior sequences, and our lesson on punctuation, further suggest an order
to the co-operation, when we find them co-operating, wherein problems of
understanding will find their completion first before initiations of
correction can find theirs.
CONCLUSION
Returning to our reading of McHoul's project to compare the
findings of conversational repair with classroom correction sequences,
the alternative reading is as follows. Whereas classroom correction
seems tied to a normative order of correct and correctable replies,
repair in conversation – and classrooms – is tied to the
practical achievement of common understanding, whose achievements
include things like sensible questions, accountable answers, and the
organization of correction sequences themselves. As we examine the
sequential production of classroom lessons, including their correction
sequences, we may be looking at a local, practical, interactional
“sociology of knowledge” in the room, in whose service
organizations of repair are a praxiological foundation that is not
identical with but omnirelevant to its diverse practices and
achievements.
But if there are grounds to consider repair and correction as
co-operating organizations in classrooms, the observation opens the
further question of whether repair might be at play in the production
of correction's objects and organizations in other settings as
well, especially in the instruction of the not-yet-competent – a
description that leads us to consider other organizations of task,
occasion, membership, and relations. Initial grounds for the inquiry
are already in hand: Other-initiation and other-correction are far more
commonplace on instructional occasions than in ordinary conversation.
In pursuing them, we should be clear that the question is not one of
association; it is not that instructing is “associated”
with correction sequences. It is rather that whatever else instructing
entails, correction is one of its imminent, interactionally assembled
evidences. Correction sequences are one of the ways in which members
display and recognize that instructing is going on. One can “read
instruction” (or disagreement) in the identities and relations
that are reflexive to the technical production of an other-correction,
and in this light, the formal structures of practical action (Garfinkel & Sacks 1970) are not only sequential
structures. The parties themselves see repair and correction
differently, as taking up different work, owning different orientations
(and motives), and they seem to produce and place them in ways that
display those orientations.
There may then be both conceptual distinctions and technical
organizations that set correction apart from repair. The discussion so
far has largely been conceptual; the only technical development of what
could be co-operating about these organizations has been of a few
sequences that show repair embedded in sequences of correction. The
critical reading of McHoul's analysis, though technical, has been
conceptual too, addressing the question of whether we have a category
mistake in his comparative program. A return to classroom lesson
materials and other occasions of instruction may show additional
production features of correction sequences – and the relevance
of repair for them – as constituent features of the instructional
tasks and organizations we find there (e.g., how delays in
teacher's third turns leverage instruction for novices; see Macbeth 2003).
In at least this other way, however, the landscape is substantially
unchanged by the proposal of co-operating organizations. Repair is
still understood as the hugely larger domain, both logically and
praxiologically. Repair is implicated in the very organizational
possibilities of correction, as in the production of what a correct or
correctable utterance, reply or response, could be. My point is that
without the sense of difference and co-operation, we would not only
lose the work and relevance of repair in classroom lessons; we would be
left with an understanding of correction – irrespective of
setting and occasion – that is uncoupled from the first work of
common understanding and the organizations that ensure its recurrent
achievement.
Although third position repairs may initially appear to be
disagreements with the prior turn, and ‘no’ may appear to
signal such disagreement, it should be noted, first, that in the
remainder of these turns the speakers operate on their own prior
talk, not on that of the other…. The first component of
third position repair, with “no” as it turn initial
particle, is best understood as initiating repair, rather than as
betokening disagreement. (1992:1305, n. 6,
original emphasis)
