Edinburgh Napier University

  Existing literature on pedagogic practices has yielded many interesting insights on classroom discourse, sometimes called ‘teacher talk’. The centre piece of most of these studies, however, tends to be on the institutionally sanctioned and legitimized on-task exchanges as teacher and students go about the planned content of the lecture or tutorial. The predominant discourse structure often follows the Initiation-Response-Feedback or IRF model (Coulthard, 1992).
Liminal and often invisible spaces of interaction such as what happens during the pre-lecture icebreaker and ‘small talk’ (Coupland, 2001), transitions between topics or activities, and playful moments of sociality a few minutes during break or immediately after the class are often underexplored and devalued. Using transcribed data from more than 150 hours of naturally occurring spoken discourse, collected via participant observation, a discursive approach is used to analyze how teacher and students from highly diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds use the off-task spaces of the classroom for a variety of important functions: to subvert institutionally-sanctioned roles, establish and maintain rapport, modify participation structures, and mitigate potentially face-threatening acts. Most importantly, examples from data will show how the teachers and students in this class use humor and playfulness to establish a culturally inclusive, engaging and motivating learning environment. Theoretical and methodological inspirations are drawn from linguistic ethnography and sociolinguistics.

References:
Coulthard, M.(Ed) (1992). Advances in spoken discourse analysis. London: Routledge.
Coupland, J. (2000). Small talk. New York, Routledge.