Appearing not to hear

Recently I have been writing a draft of an article. I am drawing on sequences of talk from my PhD analysis of independent writing, although I have made some substantial changes to the analysis that appears in my thesis.

The sequences of interaction all relate to one student's attempt to get help to write the word 'eat'. Although I spent months developing the transcript that the talk is taken from, I found several points of difference when I began analysing the transcript this time -basically utterances that didn't seem to make sense in relation to talk that came before it. I went back to the video and audio recordings -a day's work resulted in the changes that I have now made to the transcript.

My analysis has also changed. I have taken a different angle to the analysis in my thesis where I examined the talk in relation to one student's correction of the errors made in helping. This time I have focused on the ways in which students use "not hearing" to avoid giving help. Not hearing appears to be an important method for avoiding providing help without directly declining to give it, not hearing also avoids providing an answer that is powerfully required by a direct question. Not hearing was also used by students to exclude another without saying anything. All up - an effective way to manage social activity when students are seated at tables in close proximity to each other.