Clarifying Meaning Through Classroom Talk

We hope that the following analysis will serve as an illustration of a useful line of research which, over the past 10-15 years, has stimulated increasing interest in the analysis of classroom interaction as a way to providing a better way to understand the processual nature of teaching and learning. Our work addresses a number of issues which transcend the classroom as well as issues which are of immediate practical concern to teachers and students. Among the former is the relationship between talk and the stock of knowledge available to members and how these features of interaction are hearably related. The latter include the joint accomplishment of lessons by teacher and students and how this joint work is hearably done successfully or unsuccessfully. Our way of approaching these issues is to use as a resource the data which are available to us as a record of the interaction as it took place. Our research is a study of the work of the class, not about the work of the class. In other words, we focus on the interaction process whereby our sense of teaching and learning is created, rather than taking that process for granted and using teaching and learning in the manner of an objective positivist science. In this sense a major theme of our work is to show how the social including the of the classroom, is best conceptualized as a of becoming, a which is created by our talk and action, a which is only available to the researcher as counts as the world, not as is the world in some absolute, objective sense. For example, we do not deny the existence of the of the mind; we simply argue that it is not available for us to observe. What we can observe and record is people's talk and action. That, therefore, is what