Teachers' instructions: Toward a collections-based, comparative research agenda in

classroom conversation analysis

Numa Markee

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

ABSTRACT

In this paper, I first lay out the rationale for a collections-based, comparative, ethnomethodological/conversation analytic (EM/CA) research agenda that is ultimately designed to understand how teachers of various second/foreign languages do classroom instructions as mundane activity. I then lay out what such a methodology entails, and also consider its advantages and disadvantages at this stage in the development of the proposed research program. Next, I provide an updated empirical analysis of how ESL/EFL teachers at different institutions, in different countries and, indeed, in different decades consistently deploy a tightly organized nexus of interrelated embodied social practices, actions, pragmatic/grammatical resources and exogenous cultural artifacts to organize impending classroom activity. Finally, I conclude with a discussion of how this research agenda might be developed in the future.

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In this paper, I first lay out the rationale for a collections-based, comparative,

ethnomethodological/conversation analytic (EM/CA) research agenda that is ultimately

designed to understand how teachers of various second/foreign languages do classroom

instructions as mundane activity. I then lay out what such a methodology entails, and

also consider its advantages and disadvantages at this stage in the development of the

proposed research program. Next, I provide an updated empirical analysis of how

ESL/EFL teachers at different institutions, in different countries and, indeed, in different

decades consistently deploy a tightly organized nexus of interrelated embodied social

practices, actions, pragmatic/grammatical resources and exogenous cultural artifacts to

organize impending classroom activity. Finally, I conclude with a discussion of how this

research agenda might be developed in the future.

Rationale for collections-based, comparative EM/CA research on teachers’ classroom instructions From an EM perspective, (language) teachers’ classroom instruction sequences are an

interesting object of study for at least two reasons. First, instruction sequences — in

particular, those that initially set up impending classroom activity, as opposed to follow

up instructions which serve to clarify or modify these initial instructions1 — are likely

ubiquitous in all classroom talk-in-interaction in all classrooms all over the world.

Indeed, such sequences may turn out to be a mandatory practice in the social construction

of the kind of institutional talk that we, as members of the professional communities of

second/foreign language teaching and applied linguistics/second language studies

(AL/SLS) recognize as being prototypically constitutive of language classroom talk.

Second, it seems that initial instruction sequences constitute a seen but typically

unnoticed kind of classroom talk, at least in SLS research. More specifically, the

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complexity of these members’ practices is hidden in plain sight by the characteristically

unremarkable nature of their mundane occasions.

Third, from a CA perspective, to date, classroom research on this phenomenon

has mostly focused on instruction sequences in settings such as mathematics education,

driving classes, dance classes, craft education, doctor-patient interaction, etc. (see

Amerine & Bilmes, 1988; Broth & Lundström, 2013; De Stefani & Gazin, 2014;

Keevallik, 2014; Lindwall & Ekström, 2012; Lindwall, Lymer & Greiffenhagen, 2015;

Stukenbrock, 2014). However, in CA work within SLS, the topic has been conspicuously

under-investigated (though see Hellerman & Pekarek Doehler, 2010; Markee, 2013,

2015a, 2015b; Seedhouse, 2008). Consequently, we still know little about how

instruction giving sequences in language classrooms are set in motion in and through

talk-in-interaction as a nexus of embodied social practices, actions,

pragmatic/grammatical resources and exogenous cultural artifacts. More broadly, this

research agenda also fits into an ongoing program of CA research into planning as a

social practice (see Burch, 2013; Markee 2015b; Markee & Kunitz, 2013), a point to

which I return at the end of this paper).

Regarding the need for a collections-based, comparative methodology to ground

research on teachers’ instruction-giving sequences, all the SLS-based studies referenced

previously have used single examples to begin to understand how initial instruction

sequences are organized. While useful, we can get a much better sense of how robust

these initial findings are by using a collections-based methodology. Furthermore, by also

laying the groundwork for a comparative, cross-linguistic CA approach, we can begin to

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get a sense of how general these practices may be in languages other than English, which

(as often happens) has been the focus of most prior research in this area.

To be sure, this proposal is controversial, as it entails EM/CA researchers

engaging in replication research, which may be anathema to some writers who work

within the broadly qualitative epistemology of EM/CA. I have addressed these matters in

some detail in Markee (2015a), and so will not rehearse these arguments here in any great

detail. Suffice it to say that this kind of research has an impressive track regard in CA.

More specifically, Moerman (1977) is an early example of such research (to my

knowledge, it is the first CA publication in this genre), while Sidnell (2009) is an

excellent mature example of the comparative CA research program initiated by

Moerman. This observation attests to the ongoing importance of this research program in

CA studies.2 Finally, note that, to date, I have used a CA methodology to analyze six sets

of instruction giving sequences that meet the standard of exact replication. If the research

agenda I propose in this paper were taken up by 50 people who also analyzed just three

CA fragments in each replication, we would soon have a very large collection of 150

fragments.

An overview of the ongoing development of the collections-based comparative CA methodology used in this paper: advantages and disadvantages In the previous section, I have laid out in general terms why I believe the collections-

based comparative methodology used in this paper provides the foundations for a

worthwhile research agenda in CA classroom research. But how does this methodology

work, and what are its specific advantages and disadvantages? Let me recount how this

methodology has evolved. Briefly, in Markee (2015b), I analyzed in detail two

extraordinarily similar instruction-giving sequences produced by teachers who worked in

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different institutional contexts in different countries. The first teacher worked at a private

language school in Saffron Walden in the UK (see Van Lier, 1988), while the other

taught in a university service course program in the USA in 1990. Van Lier does not

provide any ethnographic background data about the teacher he studied, so we know

nothing about how (in)experienced s/he was, his/her native/non-native speaker status

(although the teacher seems to be a native speaker of English), nor does he give any more

detailed information about the kind of course that s/he was teaching than what has

already been provided.3 However, the teacher in the US service course program had at

least five years of prior teaching experience when the data were gathered in 1990, was a

native speaker of English, and worked as a teaching assistant in a fairly general English

for academic writing course for students who had already been admitted to the host

university.

In Markee (2015b), I also reference (but do not analyze) a sequence originally

gathered in the course of a British Council-sponsored research project in the mid 1980s

and subsequently published by Seedhouse (2008). These data consist of a words-only

transcript (i.e., the data were not transcribed according to Jeffersonian transcription

conventions used in CA) of some pedagogical instructions given by a teacher at a private

language school in Mexico City. Again, that is all the background information that is

available, but presumably the teacher was a native speaker of British English. But what

again struck me rather forcibly was that the teacher in these data also deployed exactly

the same nexus of social actions, practices pragmatic/grammatical resources and

categories of exogenous cultural artifacts that the two teachers in the British and

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American materials had used in the mid 1980s and 1990, respectively. I return to analyze

this fragment in detail later in this paper.

In addition, I also cite another paper in the 2015b publication (specifically,

Markee, 2013), in which I provided an empirical analysis that speaks to the somewhat

different question of whether students actually followed the ESL teacher’s written and

oral instructions in an English for specific purposes (ESP) course. The curriculum

designer/materials writer/teacher in these data was me; for all intents and purposes, I am

a native speaker of English, and at the time (the data were gathered in 2006), I had over

30 years of experience either teaching or supervising ESL classes. The students were

exchange students from an Italian university who were taking a course on energy systems

run by the host university’s Department of Nuclear, Plasma, and Radiological

Engineering (NPRE). And the ESP course I taught was a highly content specific adjunct

course that was designed to support the NPRE course. Now, it turns out that the students

in these data tended not to follow these written and oral instructions; but more

importantly for present purposes, the same nexus of social actions, practices

pragmatic/grammatical resources, and kinds of exogenous cultural artifacts that were

documented in the previous papers summarized above were also observable in these data.

So, to summarize: that these essentially identically organized interactional data

were: 1) produced over the course of three different decades by four teachers (two of

whom did not know each other), who: 2) had a broad range of professional experience;

and who: 3) worked in very different geographical and professional contexts of

implementation all struck me as truly remarkable. Indeed, as a competent member of the

professional communities of ES/FL teachers and SLS researchers, I strongly believed that

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these findings could simply not be dismissed as mere coincidence. But the question I

found myself asking was: how could I demonstrate that these findings could not be a

product of pure chance while still using an exclusively qualitative, CA methodology?

The empirically based answer that I develop in this section is that the four

examples discussed in the previous paragraphs constitute the beginnings of a more

broadly based collection of teachers’ instruction-giving sequences. More specifically, by:

1) looking for more examples of such sequences in my data corpus; 2) asking colleagues4

who also work in classroom research to do the same thing; and 3), scouring the SLS

literature (see, for example, the empirical data in Neumann & McDonough, 2014, 2015,

and Extracts 2.10 and 6.4 in Sert, 2015), it should be possible to develop a fairly large

collection of these interactional objects relatively quickly. And this is already beginning

to happen.

More specifically, the total number of transcribed examples of ES/FL teachers’

instruction-giving sequences provided by the colleagues identified in Note 4 currently

stands at 35. In my own database, I have transcripts of instruction-giving talk produced

by 11 different teachers teaching in different programs and courses (including one set of

instructions that I gave during a graduate level class on task based language teaching for

MATESL students; this observation speaks empirically to the idea that teachers’

instruction-giving sequences are not a phenomenon that is peculiar to language teaching).

In addition, I have hundreds of hours of videos that I have not been able to transcribe yet

which potentially contain many more examples of teachers’ instruction-giving sequences.

For these reasons, I cannot give an exact figure for the number of instruction-giving

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sequences that I have in my data, but there is a minimum of a further 41 examples of such

sequences in my data.

Now, I want to clarify that the complete set of interrelated embodied social

practices, actions, pragmatic/grammatical resources and exogenous cultural artifacts that

are talked into relevance in Figure 1 and Fragments 3-5 in this paper represents a

relatively small subset within the larger database of such sequences. That is, finding

other examples that are exactly similar to these three fragments represents, in a sense, the

holy grail of research on such sequences. However, it is equally clear that all of the

examples in this growing larger collection of instruction-giving sequences typically share

several of the characteristics empirically described in this paper.

Obviously, the single major advantage of collecting materials in this way is that it

is possible to continuously add empirical exemplars of teachers’ instruction-giving

sequences that are drawn from a wide range of geographical and institutional contexts to

the database fairly quickly and easily. But there are also disadvantages that we should be

careful not to ignore. Ideally, such a collection should be public and easily accessible.

But factors such as different standards of privacy used by institutional review boards in

different institutions and countries, and the lack of standardization in technological

platforms and practices are likely to pose formidable obstacles to realizing this goal.

Furthermore, the fact that some transcripts in the database have, for a variety of reasons,

become disassociated from the original video or audio recordings and/or from exogenous

cultural artifacts such as textbooks and handouts that were observably talked into

relevance by participants in and through embodied talk-interaction is quite problematic.

Similarly, the fact that the database contains contributions that are not transcribed

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according to the kind of Jeffersonian transcription conventions that are foundational to

CA work is potentially a considerable limitation on the empirical adequacy of these

materials. More specifically, while data that are not transcribed to Jeffersonian (let alone

multimodal) standards of granularity may be adequate in terms of developing relatively

static taxonomies of the pragmatic and grammatical resources that teachers deploy in the

course of giving students instructions, such data are much less adequate in terms of

explicating how these sequences are co-constructed by participants on a moment-by-

moment basis. In conclusion, while I believe that the advantages of the proposed

methodology ultimately outweigh its disadvantages, considerable care has to be exercised

in terms of what kinds of claims are made on the basis of such a collection.

How do ES/FL teachers organize impending classroom activity through initial instruction-giving sequences? Let me begin this section by briefly sketching out the larger sequential context in which

teachers’ initial instruction-giving sequences occur. While such sequences at (or toward)

the beginning of a class are often the first activity to occur in classroom talk, it is clear

(particularly from my data) that there is considerable variation among teachers as to what

kinds of issues they attend to as the first item of business. More specifically, there are

many examples of teachers engaging in social talk (such as asking students what they did

over the weekend) as a lead in to the more formal agenda of what is to be achieved during

a lesson. Teachers may also do various kinds of house keeping work (for example,

inquiring whether all students have turned in an assignment or whether they have

received their grades), or, particularly in technology-rich environments, engage in trouble

shooting various technical problems that threaten to impede the successful

implementation of the teacher’s lesson plan for the day. Other activities are undoubtedly

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also empirically observable, but the main point I wish to make is that teachers

contingently orient to beginning class with any or all of these activities as possible

precursors to telling students what they will be doing in the upcoming class period(s).

Thus, in one case in my data, in a class that was beset by technical problems, the teacher

was only able to start telling students what the agenda for the day would be in the 23rd

minute of class. But typically, teachers are able to get to the point of laying out the

official class business of the day much more quickly.

There is also considerable idiosyncratic variation in terms of the kinds of tricks of

the trade that teachers use to keep students on their toes. For example, in lines 11-18 of

Fragment 1, a teacher in my database — let us call him Dan — observably plays with the

order in which he is going to ask the students questions that they already have access to

on a previously distributed handout:

INSERT FRAGMENT 1 ABOUT HERE However, while there are doubtless all kinds of different examples of such

individual variation, what we are principally interested in documenting in this paper is

how teachers observably orient to using a preferred (in the technical CA sense of this

term) repertoire or nexus of interrelated embodied social practices, actions,

pragmatic/grammatical resources and exogenous cultural artifacts to organize impending

classroom activity. From this perspective, the talk illustrated in Fragment 1 is

remarkably consistent with other examples in my database on a number of different

levels. First, pragmatically speaking, these instruction-giving sequences are massively

introduced by discourse markers such as “ok” and/or “now” (as in lines 1 and 11 of

Fragment 1). While these two discourse markers do different work (“now” tells students

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that something new is coming up in the incipient talk, while “ok” closes down previous

activity), they both serve to delineate the boundaries of impending instruction-giving

sequences. Similarly, as shown in lines 15 and 17 of Fragment 2, these sequences are

prototypically closed off by “ok” or “ok” + an optional question + an optional evaluative

term such as “good”:

INSERT FRAGMENT 2 ABOUT HERE

Fragment 1 is also consistent with the general observation that there is no default

preference for teachers to do oral instructions as directives that are grammatically

realized as bald imperatives (see also Markee, 2015b). This empirically grounded

statement is dramatically illustrated by a comparison of the written instructions shown in

Figure 1, in which directives that are grammatically realized as bald imperatives are

prevalent (see, in particular, the instructions associated with Steps 1-4). In contrast, bald

imperatives are strikingly rare in the oral interpretations of these written instructions.

Figure 1: Written instructions: Data provided by Rue Burch (3/28/15): S414A Advanced Class Presentations Goals:

You will present, in groups of 3, on topics related to Hawaii. The presentations will be 10 – 15 minutes long, and must also include visuals such as a Powerpoint presentation, handouts, or a poster. In preparation for the presentation, you will 1) research about the topic on the internet, 2) devise and conduct a short questionnaire, survey or interview to ask

locals, and 3) keep track of vocabulary words that you have learned. On each of the following days, we will spend approximately 1 hour of class time working on the presentations.

Step 1 (Thursday, July 18th)

• In groups and as a class, brainstorm topics and consider the pros and cons of researching/presenting on the topic.

• In groups, choose the topic (you can develop/hone it as you go along).

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• In groups, devise your plan for your research. Who will do what? What will get done over the weekend?

Step 2 (Monday, July 21st)

• Share what you have found in your research so far. • Devise questionnaires, surveys or interview.

o How many questions? o What questions will you ask? o How many people will you try to ask? o How will you approach people when asking them to be involved?

• Turn in a list of vocabulary items you’ve learned, and what you think they mean.

• As homework, begin working on visuals (i.e. background information) Step 3 (Tuesday, July 22nd)

• Conduct questionnaire, surveys or interviews on campus. (others may be conducted off campus)

o One group member records (audio or video – GET PERMISSION!) • Turn in a list of vocabulary items you’ve learned, and what you think they

mean. • As homework, continue working on presentation (i.e., compiling answers

from surveys). Step 4 (Wednesday, July 23rd)

• Finalize presentations o Ask any remaining questions o Decide speaking roles and/or order

• Turn in a list of vocabulary items you’ve learned, and what you think they mean.

• As homework, finish preparing presentations. Send R any handouts or Powerpoints you have created.

* At any point, if you need to have anything printed off, please let me know the day before, and I can print them for you.

Let us now look at how the teacher R talks through these written instructions.

Fragment 3 displays a spate of talk that is extracted from the complete transcript, the

recording of which lasts approximately eight minutes. The complete transcript is 330

lines long; Fragment 3 reproduces a 47 line subset (i.e., lines 171-208) of the complete

transcript. This extract lasts approximately 1 minute and 15 seconds and occurs between

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minute 3.45 and (just over) minute 5.00. In this fragment, R talks through the written

instructions contained in Step 1 shown in Figure 1 (see also the notes at the beginning of

this transcript).

INSERT FRAGMENT 3 ABOUT HERE

Strikingly, R’s oral interpretations of these instructions in Fragment 3 do not

make use of any directives realized as bald imperatives (indeed, only seven unequivocal

examples of such functions/structures are found in the entire eight minutes of the

complete transcript). More specifically, R uses a range of grammatical structures (for

example, “I want you to + V;” “going to + V;” “will + V;” “you/I want (you) to + V”)

that state or describe the social actions that R is requiring the students to accomplish in

the future. In contrast, notice that, in the written version of these instructions, bald

imperatives that realize the social action of issuing directives massively predominate as

the function/structure of choice in Steps 1-4. Furthermore, in the Goals section of the

written materials, some of these grammatical structures (specifically, “will + V” and

“must + V”) realize the seemingly over-arching social action/speech event of goal setting,

but the putative distinction between goal setting and other types of instruction giving

actions dissolves away in the oral version of these instructions.

So, on the basis of the analysis-so-far, the mini-speech event/social practice of

oral instruction giving sequences illustrated in Fragment 3 dramatically illustrates that the

organizations of written and oral discourse are quite different (a fact which, of course, we

have known for a long time). In addition, and much more interestingly, this mini-speech

event/social practice also involves the teacher contingently deploying not just one but a

number of constitutive social actions/speech acts that minimally include goal setting,

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directives, statements, descriptions, and requirements that collectively specify what

students must do.

The grammatical structures that realize this mini-speech event/social practice in

Fragment 3 are part of a longer list of unmitigated and mitigated forms that are

prototypically used to do giving instructions (see also Markee, 2015b: 121 for an earlier,

less satisfactory account of these issues). The deployment of these grammatical

structures is an interactionally contingent phenomenon (an issue that I return to later in

the paper). Unmitigated forms include: bald imperatives; declarative statements that

describe a current or future situation and, in so doing, direct the students to do something,

such as “okay you two are partners”; “you will/ you’re going to + V”; “you need to + V”;

“you must;” and “I want you to + V.” More mitigated forms include: “please + IMP V;”

“shall we + V”;” “you can + V;” “can/could you + V”; “why don’t you . . .”; “I suggest

that . . .”, and various kinds of if clauses. These more mitigated forms seem to request

rather than direct students to engage in particular kinds of activity. We can therefore add

a range of +/- [strong] requests to the previous list of constitutive social actions/speech

acts that may be used to do instruction giving sequences.

Finally, in terms of what teachers tell students to do in the course of instruction

giving sequences, R observably tells students in the complete version of Fragment 3: 1)

how they will be working (in groups; line 172, 188, 254); 2) what resources they will need

(audio/video recording devices, lines 47, 254-255, not reproduced here;

survey/questionnaire instruments to conduct interviews, lines 111-112, 210, 224-229 and

250-251, not reproduced here); 3) what tasks they will have to accomplish (doing

presentations, lines 9, 11, 31, 44, 57, 77, 213, 280, 285, 300, 307, mostly not reproduced

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here; conducting research, line 84, 131, 207-209, not reproduced here;

speaking/practicing English, lines 106-107, not reproduced here; doing homework, line

122, not reproduced here; making a list of new vocabulary items learned; lines 126-128,

134-135, 239-242, 246-247, not reproduced here); brainstorming (lines 173, 188-189,

327-328, some instances not reproduced here); and devising a plan (lines 203, 236, some

instances not reproduced here); 4) how much time they have to accomplish tasks (10-15

minutes; lines 34-35, not reproduced here); and 5) why they should do something

(brainstorming will help people who are having trouble coming up with presentation

ideas, lines 178-184). Again, this five item list mirrors exactly how the two teachers

studied in Markee (2015b: 120-121) explained what students would have to do, and is

relevant to how I did the instruction giving sequence in Fragment 1 of Markee (2013:

133-134). As with Rue Burch’s materials discussed above, this chapter of mine also

explicitly shows how participants translate a set of written materials (or tasks-as-work

plans, in Coughlan & Duff’s 1994 terminology) into oral tasks-as-activity.5

Let us now see how almost exactly the same range of phenomena is exhibited in

Fragments 4 and 5.

INSERT FRAGMENTS 4 AND 5 ABOUT HERE

Tables 1-2 provide a summary of how similar the overall organization of the talk

produced in Fragments 4 and 5 is in relation to the organization of the interactions in

Fragment 3 and the other data referenced in this paper. More specifically, Table 1

summarizes the “how, what, and why” aspects of teachers’ instruction giving sequences

instantiated in Fragments 4 and 5:

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Table 1: Organizational structure of Fragments 4-5

The “how, what, and why” aspects of teachers’ instruction giving sequences

1. How students will be working • Fragment 4: “And what I want you to do is to talk about your things now in

the same way as I did about mine, saying what it is and give the history of it” (lines 12-15);

• Fragment 5: “tell your partner, … the ti:tle of the book, … the title of the story? … who:. we talked about who before” (lines 12-33).

2. What resources they will need • Fragment 4: a) “personal objects” (lines 5-6); b) “catalogue type descriptions”

(line 7-8); • Fragment 5: “the book that you read” (line 6).

3. What tasks they have to accomplish • Fragment 4: “Today’s class is going to be about describing objects, and we’re

going to look at three different types of description.” (lines 1-3); • Fragment 5: “so talk about three things. … the title … who: is in the story …

whe:re is the story.” (lines 36-41). 4. How they will accomplish the task

• Fragment 4: “we’re going to work in two groups …” (lines 18-19); • Fragment 5: “okay no::w. I’d like you to:: talk with your partner?” (lines 1-2).

5. How much time they have to accomplish these tasks • Fragment 4: The class period (line 1); • Fragment 5: Five minutes (line 5);

6. Why they should do something (Assessment) • Fragment 4: “How, why have you got it, and maybe also say why is it

important to you.” (lines 15-16); • Fragment 5: Not instantiated.

Since the behaviors highlighted in Table 1 are exactly the same as those discussed

earlier in this paper, I will not discuss them further here. Note, however, that these newly

analyzed data speak to the increasing robustness of the phenomenon under study using

the most demanding standard of replication, namely exact replication (see discussion in

Markee, 2015a).

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Let us now look at Table 2, which summarizes the grammatical resources

originally found in Markee (2015b: 121) that are also used to achieve instruction giving

sequences in Fragments 4 and 5 in this paper:

Table 2: The grammatical resources that inhabit teachers’ instruction sequences

Unmitigated forms and formats: Bald Imperatives

• Fragment 4: “hang on for a sec” (line 21); “join this group” (line 24); • Fragment 5: “talk with your partner” (line 4); “tell your partner” (lines 12, 23, 28)

Declarative statements that describe a current or future situation and, in so doing, direct the students to do something Numbering off students

• Fragment 4: “(so, would you be a group of six here): you two, and you four. and you’re going to be seven here” (lines 19-20)

• Fragment 5: Not instantiated

You will/you’re going to + V • Fragment 4: “Today’s class is going to be about describing objects, and we’re

going to look at three different types of description. I’m going to write it here on the board, what we’ll be doing.” (lines 1-4); “The first type will be ‘personal’ OK?” (lines 5-6), “The second type will be catalogue type descriptions.” (lines 7-8); “we’re going to work in two groups.” (lines 18-19) “and you’re going to be seven here.” (lines 21-22); “I’m going to come and sit with each group …” (lines 25-26);

• Fragment 5: Not instantiated Need to + V

• Fragment 4: Not instantiated • Fragment 5: Not instantiated

I want you to + V

• Fragment 4: “And what I want you to do is to talk about your things” (lines 12-13);

• Fragment 5: “I want you to talk about this.” (line 8). Mitigated forms and formats Please + imperative

• Fragment 4: Not instantiated • Fragment 5: “Please talk” (line 44)

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I’d like you to + V • Fragment 4: Not instantiated • Fragment 5: “ okay no::w. I’d like you to:: talk with your partner?” (lines 1-2)

You can + V /if you can • Fragment 4: Not instantiated • Fragment 5: Not instantiated

Can you + V

• Fragment 4: “can you put it at the back” (lines 17-18); “Can you get into a little circle” (line 20-21); “Can you move your chairs quietly” (lines 22-23)

• Fragment 5: “yvonne can you talk with lydia?” (line 46)

Would you + V • Fragment 4: “would you be a group” (line 19) • Fragment 5: Not instantiated

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Again, I will not discuss these findings in much detail here. Suffice it to say that the

data reproduced in Table 2 are again particularly compelling from a comparative CA

perspective. With a few exceptions, almost all of the grammatical resources that were

found in the other fragments discussed in this paper are also attested in Fragments 4 and

5. This finding again meets the standard of adequacy required for exact replication.

Let us now move on to discuss how (and by extension, why) speakers deploy

particular grammatical forms (say, “I want you to + V” versus bald imperatives) at

particular moments in talk-in-interaction. As I noted previously, this question is a

contingent, interactional issue. For this reason, I draw principally on Fragments 3 and 5,

which are transcribed according to Jeffersonian standards of transcription to make my

case.6

Before I illustrate this claim empirically, let me take care of some potential

objections. When I first started working with these kinds of data, I was surprised at the

comparative rarity of bald imperatives when compared to forms like “I need you to +

V”or “I want you to + V”) and the more mitigated forms listed in Table 2 (such as “I’d

like you to + V). This finding was counter-intuitive, since classroom talk is an unequal

power speech exchange system, so it is certainly not the case that teachers do not have

the right to issue directives realized as bald imperatives. I therefore concluded that this

behavior had to be a matter of teachers orienting to a preference organization that, all

things being equal, values mitigated, collaborative instructions over unmitigated,

directive instructions. More specifically, despite its institutional character, the classroom

is still a highly social space, in which more mitigated talk is the preferred norm, while

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bald imperatives are comparatively dispreferred. More specifically, the former practice

enables teachers to maintain their social relationships with students in a way that is more

conducive to managing teaching/learning activity than its more dispreferred counterpart.

In other words, to elaborate on what I claimed previously, the deployment of one

grammatical form rather than another is always a local matter of recipient design, not

chance.

Now, of course, there are apparent counter-examples to this observation. For

example, Steven Talmy’s work on classroom interactions at Trade Winds High

documents the frequent use of bald imperatives, particularly by one teacher, Mr. Day,

who earned the well-documented reputation among students of being an extremely strict

disciplinarian (see Talmy, 2009a). But Talmy’s data can be reconciled with the broader

argument that collaborative activity is preferred over directed activity by noting that this

teacher regularly suspends this preference and contingently uses bald imperatives to

force unruly students to show him respect as a prerequisite for any sort of

teaching/learning activity to take place. In summary, Mr. Day makes massive use of

bald imperatives to achieve a social action that is highly relevant to particular moments in

particular conversations involving particular participants. In contrast, less authoritarian

teachers working in the same contentious environment as Mr. Day tend to use the kind of

forms documented in Table 2 (see Talmy, 2009b: 352).

Let us now return to Fragments 3 and 5 to see how grammatical forms like

“you’re going to + V”, “I’d like you to + V” and/or “I want you to + V” on the one hand

and bald imperatives on the other are deployed in the general ecology of teachers’

instruction giving sequences. As we will now see, the preference for mitigated forms

  21  

works hand in glove with the practice of progressively upgrading the strength of

instructions in successive turn constructional units. More specifically, the talk exhibited

in Fragment 3.1 suggests that bald imperatives are protypically deployed as the final

element in an unfolding series of prior utterances that grammatically encode the social

practice of instruction giving through the grammatical forms listed above. So, in lines

134 and 135, R uses the structure “you’re going to + V” twice in quick succession. He

then uses the form “I want you to + V” in line 138, and in line 140, finally produces the

bald imperative form “write.” This is an example in which the teacher progressively

upgrades the strength of his instructions during the course of a sequence, and the final

bald imperative form is deployed as part of a conclusion that is introduced by the

discourse marker “so” in line 139. In addition, T also seems to be orienting to the

independent practice of constructing lists as interactional objects that are prototypically

achieved in three parts (Jefferson, 1991), here realized through different grammatical

structures.

INSERT FRAGMENT 3.1 ABOUT HERE

In Fragment 5, we find several parallel sequences that pattern in similar ways.

More specifically, in lines 1-2, T uses the structure “I’d like you to + V” and follows up

in line 4 with a bald imperative (note however, that there is some ambiguity in this

analysis: is “talk” in line 4 an elliptical form of “I’d like you to + V,” or is it a

straightforward bald imperative?). Next, in line 8, T initiates another instruction giving

sequence by using the structure “I want you to + V,” which is followed by the mitigated

form “Please + IMP V” in line 9. In turn, this sequence is concluded with the bald

  22  

imperative in line 12 (although again, the same difficulty of interpretation concerning

whether “tell” is actually an elliptical form also occurs here).

Now, whether these examples in Fragment 5 instantiate another instance of

instructions whose strength is progressively upgraded in each stage of the sequence is

less clear than in the example exhibited in Fragment 3.1. That is, is the form “Please +

IMP V” in Fragment 5 an upgrade on “I want you to + V” in the same fragment? I rather

doubt this. However, the imperative form in line 12 can be interpreted as doing such an

upgrade (assuming that this is not an elliptical form). Furthermore, in the continuation of

this sequence, which is also achieved as a three part list7 (see lines 15-42/43), all the

remaining utterances that do giving instructions in the third slot are done as bald

imperatives: see lines 23, 28, and 36. Notice that the last of these bald imperatives

(“talk”) is also introduced by the discourse marker “so.” Finally, in the last three lines of

this fragment, T achieves the final instruction giving sequence with the mitigated forms

“please + IMP” and “can you + V.”

Thus, to summarize: all things being equal, the default preference organization to

which ESL/EFL teachers in these data observably orient when doing instruction giving

sequences involves the preferred use of collaborative, mitigated grammatical forms and

the comparatively dispreferred use of bald imperatives. Indeed, bald imperatives are

rarely deployed as the first grammatical option for giving instructions, and when they are

deployed in this fashion, this practice achieves a very specific, locally relevant, and above

all contingent social action. In some cases, speakers orient to the organization of lists as

three part objects as an independent resource for giving instructions. And finally, as

illustrated by the repeated use of the bald imperative as the maximally upgraded

  23  

grammatical resource in lines 12-42/43 of Fragment 5, the same grammatical form often

occurs in discoursal clusters.

This phenomenon may be explained by the planning relevant practice of

cannibalizing and recycling previous material in an emergent or previous turn (Markee &

Kunitz, 2103). This practice — in which the production of a particular form in one turn

or turn constructional unit potentially touches off the further deployment of this form in

the following sequentially bounded talk — is endemic not just in classroom talk but also

in ordinary conversation (see Goodwin, 2013, who calls this practice format tying).8

From a discourse analytic perspective, cannibalization and recycling behavior can be

understood as a resource that speakers use to build up the cohesion and coherence of an

emerging text (Halliday & Hasan, 1976), thus giving it its texture. However, from a CA

perspective, each instance of this practice must be analyzed in its own terms in order to

understand what specific practice is being contingently achieved in real time. For

example, repetition can either function as a means of initiating repair OR it can be used

to confirm that something has been understood.

Conclusions

In this paper, I have begun the task of developing a comparative CA research

agenda on teachers’ instruction-giving sequences that meets the demanding standards of

exact replication. The main empirical findings so far (which are currently based on

ESL/EFL materials that are drawn from different decades, countries and institutions)

confirm the robustness of the initial findings reported in Markee (2015b), namely, that

such sequences are organized as a tightly organized nexus of interrelated embodied social

practices, actions, pragmatic/grammatical resources and exogenous cultural artifacts that

  24  

collectively organize impending classroom activity. More specifically, this mini speech

event/social practice is comprised of a range of social actions that minimally includes

goal setting, directives, statements, descriptions, requests and requirements that

collectively specify what students must do. In addition, the pragmatic boundaries of

these sequences are marked off by the use of discourse markers such as “now” and “ok.”

The attested range of grammatical structures in the data that do these actions is rather

limited. Furthermore, the structures that realize these social actions typically progress

from mitigated to unmitigated forms such as the bald imperative, which, counter-

intuitively, occurs rarely in the data.

The main focus of this paper has been on the sequence organization of instruction

giving sequences, but there is evidence that this practice interfaces with other, completely

independent conversational practices such as: 1) constructing lists in three slot increments;

2) progressively upgrading the strength of an instruction through the contingent

deployment of a fairly finite set of grammatical structures; and 3) cannibalizing and

recycling material from previous turns or turn constructional units. In turn, this last

practice results in the observed phenomenon of structural clustering.

In terms of future work that this research agenda might generate, the ESL/EFL

materials studied in this paper serve as the base-line for further research on how teachers

give instructions in other languages such as French and Italian (see Markee, forthcoming;

Markee & Kunitz, forthcoming, respectively). Obviously, this list can be expanded

exponentially if/when researchers who are competent in other languages take up the call

for further comparative research in this area. Following Schegloff (2009), any such

research program must take care not to treat the English data discussed in this paper as a

  25  

preferred or default standard, against which teachers’ instruction giving practices in other

languages should be evaluated. For example, while it would be interesting to find out

whether the apparently dispreferred status of bald imperatives as a grammatical resource

for giving instructions in English also holds true for other languages, it would not be

appropriate to claim that bald imperatives should therefore also be avoided as a matter of

principle in the teaching of other languages in which such a finding is not empirically

replicated. In other words, the linguistic and cultural integrity of how teacher-speakers of

other languages do instruction giving sequences in naturally occurring classroom talk-in-

interaction must always be respected in any future comparative CA research program on

these practices.

In addition, the same basic methodology can also be adapted to investigate how

other mini speech events that are omnipresent in classroom talk (such as teachers’

explanation sequences) are organized. Finally, as and when the kinds of findings

discussed in this paper become robust enough to be disseminated in the CA literature on

curriculum design/implementation (see for example, Seedhouse, 2008, Sert, 2015; Walsh

2006), we will likely have to rethink how we as teacher educators and trainers get pre-

and in-service teachers to engage and interact with such materials. More specifically,

what standard of transcription granularity is most appropriate for teacher

training/education purposes (words only, Jeffersonian transcription conventions, or the

kind of multimodal transcription conventions used by Goodwin, 2013 and others)? How

essential is it to expose teachers-in-training to the full range of cultural artifacts that are

talked into relevance in and through interaction? And what is the role of ethnographic

information in the context of teacher education/training as a resource that may

  26  

legitimately help pre- and in-service teachers understand the surprising complexity of

instruction giving sequences as they reflect on their own practice? These (and doubtless

other) issues need more work, and must also be worked into the comparative CA research

agenda outlined in this paper.

  27  

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Notes

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                                                                                                               1 I distinguish between these two kinds of instruction sequences because they occur in different sequential positions. Furthermore, while initial instruction sequences — by which I mean any sequences which introduce a new spate of classroom activity (such as, for example a new exercise or task), irrespective of whether this activity occurs at the beginning or in the middle of a class — probably constitute an obligatory component of classroom talk, follow up instruction sequences are contingently optional. Furthermore, they may or may not be achieved by the same range of embodied social practices, actions and pragmatic/grammatical resources. Until we have empirical evidence that speaks to these matters, it is prudent to limit the present discussion to initial instruction-giving sequences. 2 See in particular the contribution by Schegloff (2009), who has some stringent criticisms about how Rossano, Brown and Levinson (2009) conduct their study, which anyone who aspires to do replication research in CA would be well advised to take on board. I return to this issue later on in this paper. 3 The status of this kind of information is controversial in CA. For present purposes, I do not claim that we have to have such information in order to understand empirically how the details of interaction work. But I do think that such information is generally useful as background material that can help members (and, indeed, non-members) of the professional communities of S/FL teachers and SLS researchers get a sense of how robust the findings reported in this paper are across a range of professional and linguistic contexts.    4 In this context, I wish to thank the following colleagues who have generously sent me unpublished examples of ESL teachers’ instruction-giving sequences, or who have brought to my attention examples of such sequences that they have published: Rue Burch (University of Hawai’i at Manoa, USA); John Hellermann (Portland State University, USA), Nigel Musk (Linköping University, Sweden); Heike Neumann and Kim McDonough 2014, 2015) (Concordia University, Canada); Keith Richards (University of Warwick, UK); Klara Skogmyr (Stockholm University, Sweden); Paul Seedhouse 2008) (University of Newcastle, UK); Steven Talmy (2009) (University of British Columbia, Canada); and Hansun Waring (Teacher’s College, Columbia, USA). In addition, I wish to thank Virginie Fasel Lauzon (University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland) and Kirby Chazal (Boston University, USA) for some French as second/foreign language data, and Pierangela Diadori (University for Foreigners of Siena, Italy) for access to the CLODIS database of Italian as foreign language classroom materials. All of these resources will be used in future comparative, cross-linguistic research (see, for example, Markee, forthcoming and Markee & Kunitz, forthcoming). The institutional affiliations of the researchers listed above are given to give readers a sense of the international scope of the emerging collection. 5 Notice that having access to both the oral and written versions of teachers’ instructions as part of the extended, exogenous context of cultural artifacts that participants talk into observable relevance is important in both these data sets. Speaking to this issue, although I did not provide an oral rationale for doing the prediction activity that is the subject of Fragment 1 in Markee (2013), such a rationale is prominently displayed as part the written instructions (see Markee, 2013: 32). Furthermore, although I do not state explicitly in this fragment that this prediction task should be accomplished in dyads, the

  32  

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         fact that I tell the students to do this task “same as before” is in fact an instruction to do this talk in dyads (see also lines 93-95 of the complete version of Fragment 3 in this paper). However, the other three “how, what why” categories discussed in this section are explicitly present in these data. 6 While it is possible to do interactional analyses of data that are not transcribed according to CA transcription conventions, great care must be exercised when doing this. For example, Fragment 4 probably works in the same way as Fragments 3 and 5; but there is evidence that not all of the talk in Fragment 4 has been transcribed to even a words only standard. See for example, lines 23-24, during which the teacher says “. . . quietly, so it doesn’t make too much noise. Yes, join this group.” The sentence “Yes, join this group” seems to be a response to a question by a student that has not been transcribed. 7 I interpret the occurrence of the discourse marker “okay” in line 42 as evidence that empirically supports the claim that this sequence ends in lines 42/43. 8 In cognitive SLA, this phenomenon is called priming (see Kim, 2015).