Sociolinguistics and Language Education.pdf

Conversation Analysis 515
(23) Seedhouse, 2004: 112
1 L1: OK. as you see this is a music box,
2 (.) .hh and my mother made it. it’s=
3 L2: =oh, your mother made it?=
4 L1: =yes, my mother made it. .hh the thing is that when:
5 (.) this is the fi rst thing she did (.) like this,
6 with .hh painting and everything, .hh so nobody.
7 nobody thought that it was going to come out like this.
8 [h a hh] that’s the point. that’s why
9 LL: [heehee]
10 L1: this is special because it took her about three weeks
11 to: to make it, .hh and erm she put erm a really special
12 interest in that and tried to, to make it the best that,
13 er she could. so, (.) so, that’s all. (1.5)
Seedhouse then shows the way the basic structures of interaction are
adapted to the specifi c tasks of the language classroom. Although we have
just briefl y touched on the organization of turn-taking in two differently
focused pedagogical activities, Seedhouse reviews many other aspects of
interaction including repair and action sequencing.
Features and Practices of the Language Classroom and Second
Language Conversations
I now turn to consider some apparently distinctive features and practices
of the language classroom and of talk between native and non-native
speakers. Many of these apparently distinctive features have their roots in
an orientation to ‘language’ that is, broadly speaking, pedagogic. That is,
teachers and learners (again broadly defi ned) display persistent concern
with notions of ‘correctness’ or of ‘getting it right’ (pronunciation, grammar,
lexical selection) that goes beyond what is typical of conversation
between native speakers. We know in fact that in talk between native and
even fl uent speakers of a language, many errors of speaking pass by without
any orientation to them as errors. So, for instance in the following
radio interview, the interviewee’s answer includes at lines 08–11 the clearly
problematic construction ‘it’s not sure whe:ther: you know journalists are
comfortable sorta turning in each other’ in which the speaker seems to
have blended together ‘it’s not clear . . .’ and ‘I’m not sure . . .’
(24) As it happens. Feb 11.05.mov. QT: 7.56
02 Q: o hh but- uh wha- [so what has the
03 A: [crazy
04 Q: rest of the press gallery:
05 (.)