More about 'appearing not to hear'

The days have flown past and I am still working on the journal article. Last post I wrote how I had sorted out the transcript - finding utterances that appeared not to make sense in the context of turns at talk, returning to recordings and discovering things I had missed in my "final" transcript for my thesis. I thought I had it sorted until today -as I was checking over my analysis I returned to something that had bothered me for a long time. One student takes a lot of time to help another record a word ('eat'), but in the end writes the last letter himself and walks away. It always niggled me that after some minutes of talking through what letters to record, and waiting, the student just picked up a pencil and wrote the letter 't'. Today I watched the recording AGAIN and listened to the audio recording. Sure enough -things I had missed that led to more changes to the transcript and a different understanding of actions.

Lest I sound inefficient, or worse -bothered by minutae to the point of seeming ridiculous-the continuing process of reviewing and rethinking the transcript and my analysis post PhD has taught me so much more about analysis from the perspective of ethnomethodology/conversation analysis. Without fail, things that don't make sense for me in the actions of young students (only 5 and 6 years of age) turn out to be things that I have missed, rather than because they are the actions of young children (that don't necessarily make sense, according to some adult views of things).

In relation to 'appearing not to hear', I have a strong sense of the ways in which children manage their interactions in a situation where many things come to bear. Children seated at a table, at a time when the teacher is not managing interaction, are able to manage their own activity, including not interacting with others, in ways that are orderly.

Now if I can just finish that article ...