withholding information

 

I've returned to a journal article that i wrote late year and submitted to an international journal. the article wasn't accepted but the editors strongly advised that i should re-submit it. at the time, I was a bit thrown because of some of the feedback provided by reviewers, especially a query related to the use of withholding information to describe what two children accomplished during interaction to record the word 'like'. I really do want to publish the analysis in one form or another as it was interesting but tricky data to analyse. It begins when the teacher directs a student to help another:


T:now (0.2)are you helping(0.2)Wayne write like?(0.4)don’t tell him(0.2)just help him okay Melodie?,

((Melodie nods/ teacher nods/Wayne watching))

(1.2)

W:li:ke

(3.5)

M:lu:[:::h*

[((teacher opens mouth to form “l”))

[NB. as usual the transcript notation is out of kilter thanks to html but you'll get the drift]

SO, yesterday I returned to Sacks to do some reading about "absence". While I didn't use this in my PhD work, i wondered if it might be a way to justify my use of "withholding information" (should I need to do that in the future).

As usual there is much to be gained from the original words of Sacks. For example:

"A way, perhaps, to develop a notion of 'absence' involves looking to places where such a notion is used and attempting to see whether there are various sorts of relevance structures that provide that something should occur. Parenthetically, I'll give as a rule for reading academic literature, that whenever you see somebody proposing that something didn't happen - and you'll regularly find e.g. sociologists, anthropologists, or historians, particularly, saying that something didn't happen, something hadn't been developed yet - that they are proposing that it's not just an observation, but an observation which has some basis for relevance for it." (Lecture, 6, Vol 1, p. 670)

Sacks elaborates on his point, in relation to paired utterances. For example, where the second part of a greeting is not forthcoming. so,

"The relevance that a first member of a pair sets up for a second, constitutes one locus for talk of absences by Members. When thelk about 'absences' they're regularly talking about second pair members, and they're talking about them by reference to the occurrence of the first pair members." (pp. 670 - 671)

Could this be said to apply to talk that I have analysed? I have data where a student asks for the spelling of a word, and another student gives that information.

J:have you already got peanut?,

(0.2)

D:yes

J:how do you* write it?,

M:um[::

D: [p’ ((looks at his page)) (1.8) ‘e’

((Jamie writing))


So, no absence there. There are lots of examples, however, where the spelling of the word is not provided.

W:how do you write (0.4) like?

((Mckiela beginning to write ‘e’))

T:like ((leans over Wayne)) what does like start with?

Now here's the thing. While the information is not provided in any questions asked of the teacher about the spelling of a word,there IS always an answer of a particular kind i.e. what does it start with? Or, where can you find it? So, in the classroom on that day, there were responses given (am I splitting hairs with the use of that word?)but not the information requested. Since the teacher obviously knew how to spell words ('like', 'butter', 'and'), was she not withholding information that was requested?