I KNEW i was right

This morning I dug out the video recording of independent writing and watched it. I found the four sequences of interaction that I was interested in - and yes, no evaluation of the students' answers by the teacher. I knew I knew it -just had to check. It has been almost a year since i last looked at the video and over two years since I developed the transcript, so difficult to recall what I focused on and included in the transcript. Although i did have a hunch that i would have been meticulous.

The matter of evaluation of a student response is particularly tricky because it might involve a non-verbal action like a nod (or in the case of the teacher in my study, a wink). However, I didn't find anything that suggested that the teacher even acknowledged student answers to her questions in the four sequences of talk. She asked a question of a student, in each case, and then walked away.

There was a strange thing about watching the video this morning. Since I have been focusing for so long on minute aspects of turns at talk, via the transcripts, it was thoroughly strange to see the talk all put back together. Although I know that from the Ca perspective the video is the data, during independent writing everyone in the classroom was doing different things. Thus there was an incredible amount of talk and it isn't easy to hear talk on the video recording. Audio recordings of the day "supplemented" my transcript of talk that occurred at the table and around it. Thus when watching the video, I "hear" talk that can't be heard very easily, so fill in talk from my memory of it.

Now I can complete the paper that I am writing about interactions that were self-started by students. I am pretty sure that i have it right for those sequences of talk that i analysed.