On Designedly Incomplete Utterances: What Counts as Learning for Teachers and Students in Primary Classroom Interaction

The article analyzes a variety of Koshik's (2002 Koshik, I. 2002. Designedly incomplete utterances: A pedagogical practice for eliciting knowledge displays in error correction sequences. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 35: 277–309. [Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) Designedly Incomplete Utterances (DIU) as they are produced in whole-class, teacher-led instruction sequences held in 2 third-year groups in an Italian primary school. This device, one of whose basic pedagogic functions is to solicit displays of knowledge from students in the shape of utterance completion, is a recurrent feature of teacher–student interaction in this setting. The study focuses on one specific and locally managed use of the device, whereby the teacher's orientation to the pedagogic goals of the organization of interaction surfaces in features of talk. I found systematic features in the construction of what I call main-clause DIUs, which teachers recurrently use to cast students as learners, by treating their verbal behavior as providing evidence that some type of learning has occurred in prior talk. The findings provide grounds for a critique of the Initiation-Response-Evaluation model and for a characterization of questioning in instruction sequences, both of which account for the specific institutional relevancies of interaction in this setting.