Sociolinguistics and Language Education.pdf

518 Part 6: Language and Interaction
Here then, in the course of producing his turn-at-talk, B encounters
trouble with the item rygsaek. He marks the item as a source of trouble by
pausing before its initial saying (lines 002–003), by producing this initial
saying with rising intonation (line 003) and, further, by repeating the item
(line 005). S, the native speaker in this exchange, offers a correction (producing
the item with standard pronunciation) and B subsequently accepts this
by repeating it in line 008 (Word clarifi cation repairs as studied by Mazeland
and Zaman-Zadeh (2004) present another interesting case in which NNS
can be seen to orient to properties of the target language code).
Lerner (1995) has described the instructor/teacher’s use of incomplete
utterances in inviting student participation. Koshik (2002) focuses on
teachers’ use of such ‘designedly incomplete utterances’ in one-on-one,
second-language writing conferences as a practice for eliciting students’
self-correction of their written language errors. Koshik’s aim is to show
how such ‘practices of ordinary conversation can be adapted for specialized
institutional tasks’ (Koshik, 2002: 278). The following example illustrates
the practice:
(27) Koshik (2002: 287)
181 TJ: .h: ((reading)) >he died not from injuries.<
182 (0.5) ((TJ and SH gaze silently at text))
183 but drowned
184 (1.2) ((TJ and SH gaze silently at text))
185 →
186 (4.5) ((TJ and SH gaze silently at text))
187 SH:→ had been?
188 TJ: there ya go.
189 (4.0) ((TJ writes on text))
190 had been left there for thirteen hours
191
owithout any aid. o
192 SH: um hum.
Here the teacher is reading a portion of the student’s text. He produces
this as a series of verb phrase segments the completion of each of which is
marked by fi nal intonation or by a pause (or by both). The last segment (at
line 185) is what Koshik describes as designedly incomplete – it locates an
error in the written text. Recognizing this, the student produces the correction,
which is subsequently accepted by the instructor.
In this brief review of some of the literature we have seen that participants
in these language learning contexts often display an orientation to
notions of ‘correctness’ unlike that typical of ordinary conversation. We
have also seen both student/NNS and teacher/NS adapting the practices
and organizations of conversation to the tasks and activities of the language
classroom. These studies then illustrate some of what makes the
language classroom context the context that it is. Carroll’s (2004) study of