Inclusive third-turn repeats: managing or constraining students’ epistemic status?

ABSTRACT

This study examines classroom teachers’ third-turn repeats marked with the Japanese epistemic stance marker ‘ne.’ The author conducted multimodal conversation analysis on video recordings of English-language classrooms in Japanese secondary schools. The analysis focused on the teachers’ gaze direction during their third-turn repeat, which was marked with the epistemic stance marker. ‘Ne’ marks the sharedness of the repeated item between the speaker and the hearer. By treating the repeated item as shared with the recipient and changing the recipient from the student who answered to the other students who did not answer, the teachers treat the repeated item as also having been available to those who did not answer. Teachers are thus including non-respondent students in the knowing party. The author terms such practice as ‘inclusive third-turn repeat’, which teachers canonically deploy as an inclusive practice in classroom interaction. Depicting how this practice establishes a common knowledge status of the students, the study highlights classroom teachers’ pieces of work towards the goal of co-production of knowledge.

KEYWORDS:

• Inclusive third-turn repeat
• gaze shifting
• epistemic stance marker
• inclusive practice
• multimodal conversation analysis

1. Introduction

Classroom interaction is characterised as an ‘institutional’ interaction (Drew and Heritage 1992) where participants have “differential participation rights” (McHoul 1978, 189)” but share the same goal orientation to “the co-production of knowledge” (McHoul 1978, 210)”. The differential participation rights come from the restricted interaction structure, the two-party speech exchange system between a single teacher and many students (e.g. Payne and Hustler 1980). This is often illustrated with the “three-turn sequence” (e.g. Mehan 1979; McHoul 1978; Lee 2007). The first turn is a teacher’s initiation of the sequence, the second is a student(s)’ reply to the initiation, and the third goes back to the teacher to produce an evaluative response to the student(s) (e.g. Mehan 1979). Students have fewer turn-taking opportunities than teachers and are often made to act as a cohort within the system (e.g. Payne and Hustler 1980; Lerner 1995).

Scholars documented the teachers’ managerial work of a student who does not act as a cohort within the system (e.g. Ishino 2017; Klattenberg 2020; Reddington 2018). For example, Ishino (2017) analysed how the teacher’s question breaks off the students’ talk that is organised in parallel with the teacher-initiated two-party talk. Klattenberg (2020) also observed how classroom teachers’ questions function as a reproach to such students. Those studies illustrated the teachers’ orientation to securing their two-party talk system by attending to individuals and groups who are not with the others as a cohort.

Such teachers’ orientation towards the inclusion of everyone also extends to securing the common knowledge status of the students. Using multimodal conversation analysis, the current study will illustrate how classroom teachers construct students’ ‘homogenised epistemic status’ (Heller 2017) by implementing an inclusive practice. The focal practice of this study is the teachers’ ‘third-turn repeat’ (e.g. Hellermann 2003; Park 2013), which is the teachers’ repetition of a student’s response to their initial question.

Extract 1 is an example of the focal phenomenon observed in an English language classroom at a secondary school in Japan. The teacher translates an English sentence on the blackboard into Japanese. The sentence is ‘the girl reading a newspaper is Miki’. In line 1, the teacher asks the class what ‘newspaper’ means in Japanese.

Extract 1. K0002 11:54–12:03

After a 0.9-second gap, a student, Akira, responds to the teacher in line 3, and the teacher looks at Akira (see Figure 2). Then the teacher repeats Akira’s response in line 4. During the repetition, the teacher shifts his gaze from Akira to the blackboard (see Figure 3) and adds the Japanese final particle ‘ne’ to the repeated item. The final particle, ‘ne’, is an ‘epistemic stance marker’ (e.g. Heritage 2012) that marks the sharedness of the referent information with the recipient (e.g. Hayano 2011, 2017). By marking the item with the epistemic stance marker, the teacher confirms the shared access to the questioning item with the recipient. However, simultaneously, the teacher shifts his gaze away from the responding student (=expected recipient), Akira, to the blackboard. Thus, the teacher does not treat Akira as a particular recipient but treats the cohort, looking at the blackboard, as the recipient of his repetition. Modulating his recipient from Akira to the cohort and marking the shared access to the questioning item, the teacher treats the cohort as the students who also had knowledge access to it.

Terming this practice ‘inclusive third-turn repeat’, I will illustrate the teachers’ managerial work on the knowledge status among students, which enables the teachers to move forward with their pedagogical activity. The finding also highlights teachers’ challenging nature in attending to multiple individuals’ knowledge statuses in the classroom institutional setting.

2. Literature review

2.1. Classroom teachers’ third-turn repeat

While other repetition following the question-and-answer sequence primarily signals an information receipt in mundane talk-in-interaction (e.g. Schegloff 2007), teachers’ third-turn repeat has not been observed as a neutral information receipt in classroom interaction (Hellermann 2003; Koole 2012a; Park 2013; Waring 2008). Previous studies have divided teachers’ third-turn repeat into two different functions: a) confirming the response as a positive evaluation, and b) initiating a further response from the student (e.g. Hellermann 2003; Lee 2007; Park 2013; Waring 2008). For example, Waring (2008) described that the teacher’s partial or complete repetition of the student’s response serves as positive feedback when it is produced with a confirming token, such as ‘right?’.　Observing prosodic features of third-turn repeats, Hellermann (2003) found that when the teacher mismatches the intonation contour vis-à-vis the student’s response and speeds up the third-turn, the third-turn repeat tends to elicit additional student response.

Park (2013) analysed the third-turn repeat in L2 classroom contexts: meaning and fluency context and form and accuracy context (Seedhouse 2004). She found that teachers’ third-turn repeat in the meaning-and-fluency context required students to elaborate further on their initial responses. Conversely, teachers’ third-turn repeat in the form and accuracy context confirmed students’ responses as the correct answer. Extract 2 shows an example of a third-turn repeat in a form and accuracy context. In this sequence, the teacher poses a ‘display question’ (Long and Sato 1983), which requires the student to display a particular knowledge.

Extract 2. (Cited from Park (2013, 152), [SDV_1305])

Here, the teacher asks S1 about their English language knowledge. S1’s response in line 2 appears to be the correct answer, as seen by the teacher’s repetition and immediate positive assessment (‘very good’) in line 3. The following ‘okay’ marks the closing of the sequence. Thus, the teacher’s third-turn repeat in line 3 functions as confirming the correctness of the student’s response. Illustrating other examples, Park (2013) claimed that the teachers’ initial questions always influence the function of their third-turn repetition. Their third-turn repetition index a certain epistemic status (Heritage 2012) between the teacher and the students regarding the initial questioning item (Park 2013).

Based on Park (2013)’s study, I will also observe the teachers’ third-turn repeat in form and accuracy context (Seedhouse 2004), where the repetition confirms the student’s response as the correct answer. Although the literature has not taken a closer look at the teachers’ use of epistemic stance markers or gaze direction to compose their third-turn repeat, the current study will reveal how classroom teachers use those aspects to manage the epistemic status not just between the student and the teacher, but also among the students.

2.2. Epistemic status and an epistemic stance marker: Japanese final particle ‘ne’

In conversation analytic research, ‘epistemic status’ (e.g. Heritage 2012) is defined as a concept concerning the relative access to a targeted element of knowledge or information among the participants. As Heritage (2012, 4) explained, “The epistemic status of each person, relative to others, will of course tend to vary from domain to domain, as well as over time, and can be altered from moment to moment as a result of specific interactional contributions”. Thereby, the ‘epistemic status’ itself is often incongruent with the participants’ ‘actual’ knowledge status regarding specific information as it can be altered by their interactional work, such as their taking of a particular ‘epistemic stance’.

The epistemic stance is the participants’ moment-by-moment expression of their epistemic status relative to their interactants (Heritage 2012). Regardless of their ‘actual’ knowledge status, participants dissemble their knowledge status by taking a certain epistemic stance “to appear more or less, knowledgeable than they really are (Heritage 2012, 4)”. To index a particular epistemic status, participants deploy various conversational resources (i.e. a particular question format), including turn constructional resources, such as final particles or tags (e.g. Kendrick 2018; Drake, Golato, and Golato 2021; Heritage and Raymond 2021).

Japanese final particle, ‘ne,’ has been recognised as such an ‘epistemic stance marker’ (e.g. Hayano 2011). The particle ‘ne’ is roughly equivalent to English interrogative tags ‘you know’, ‘isn’t it’, and ‘right?’ (e.g. Tanaka 2000). It mainly marks the sharedness of the referent information between the speaker and the hearer (Hayano 2011, 2017; Morita 2005; Yokomori, Yasui, and Hajikano 2018). For example, Morita (2005, 121) observed that “‘ne’ may contextualise the assessment as co-constructing activity so that it looks as if they [both the speaker and the hearer] share the same information”. Similarly, within the assessment sequence, Hayano (2011) observed that the speakers tend to mark their assessment with ‘ne’ (2017) when the assessing object is accessible to both the speaker and the hearer. Focusing on ‘ne’ used in other repetitions, Yokomori, Yasui, and Hajikano (2018) also found that the speakers of the ne-marked other repetition display their prior access to the repeated item to the hearer who initially produced it. These studies suggest that the particle ne is an essential turn-constructional resource for adjusting the ‘epistemic gradient’ (e.g. Heritage 2012; Kendrick 2018) between the participants.

The ‘epistemic gradient’ is a metaphoric description that refers to the different degrees of the asymmetrical epistemic relation between participants, which may vary from shallow to deep (see also Heritage 2012). How the gradient is shallow or deep can be negotiated through epistemic stances that participants take (e.g. Kendrick 2018). Although the concept of epistemic gradient often refers to an asymmetric epistemic status between a speaker and a hearer in ‘two-party’ talk, the concept can also be applied to analysing the classroom institutional talk that is organised by a single teacher and multiple students. For example, if only an individual among the multiple students answered the teacher’s question that was initially addressed to all of them, the epistemic gradient between the respondent student (more knowledgeable) and the non-respondent students (less knowledgeable) can be generated at the given moment.

In this study, the teachers appear to adjust this gradient during the third-turn repeat by indexing the sharedness of the repeated item with an epistemic stance marker and modulating its recipiency from the respondent student to the cohort by shifting their gaze direction.

2.3. Teachers’ gaze work in classroom interaction

Modulating recipiency has been frequently reported as one of the functions of teachers’ gaze work (Kääntä 2012; Mortensen 2008; Sert 2019; Waring and Carpenter 2019). For example, Mortensen (2008) illustrated how a teacher’s gaze towards a student elicits a response to their questions before verbally allocating a turn to the student. Similarly, Kääntä (2012) argued that teachers’ gaze, alongside other embodied resources (i.e. head nods or pointing), shapes the participation framework established between the teacher and the nominated student, while the other students are ratified as recipients. Sert (2019) demonstrated that a teacher may further an ongoing pedagogical activity by establishing mutual gaze with a student and fostering their active engagement in the ongoing interaction.

While these studies mainly illustrated the teachers’ directing their gaze towards the possible next speaker (student), Waring and Carpenter (2019) recently observed teachers shifting their gaze from students. Specifically, they analysed the phenomenon in which the teachers shift their gaze from a respondent student to the rest of the class upon acceptance of the student’s response. They claimed that teachers’ gaze shifting accomplished both evaluating the student’s response and informing the entire class of the responded item. In doing so, the teacher managed the tension between attending to the individual and the class as a whole.

Expanding on Waring and Carpenter’s (2019) finding, the current study demonstrates how teachers’ gaze shifting plays a significant role when it is incorporated into their use of the epistemic stance marker during their third-turn repeats. Terming such teachers’ third-turn repeats as ‘inclusive third-turn repeat’, I will illustrate what the teachers accomplish by deploying this practice.

3. Data and methods

The data used for the analysis were about 60 hours of video recordings of English language classes at five secondary schools (8 hours each from schools A and B; 4 hours from school C; 6 hours from school D; and 31 hours from school E). School C is a public high school in Eastern Japan, and the other four are public junior high schools in Western Japan. Every teacher spoke Japanese as their first language and delivered their lessons both in English and Japanese in the recorded classes.

Following the relevant institution’s ethical research guidelines, all the participants, including the parents of the students, were informed of the study before the recordings and had the opportunity to reject the recording of their classrooms. Due to parental consent, the author could only record the pupils back at schools A, B, and C. Thus, the author used a single video camera facing the blackboard from the back of the room to capture mainly the teachers’ interactional behaviours. For schools E and D, the author used two video cameras to record the students’ interactional behaviours as well from the front of the room. The students’ identities have been anonymised, and the images in each figure have been modified to make them unidentifiable.

During my initial observation of the video recordings, a phenomenon caught my attention: When repeating a student’s response, the teachers canonically added the Japanese final particle ‘ne’ or ‘na’ to the repeated item. As for the analytical procedure, I first identified 86 instances of teachers’ third-turn repeats in the form-and-accuracy context (Seedhouse 2004). The focal practice was not evenly observed in each teacher’s lesson. For example, 37 among 86 instances were observed in school A. The teacher in school A begins class with a mini-vocabulary quiz for six to eight recorded lessons, and there is always an answer-check activity to follow. Thus, the focal practice could be observed most frequently.

Then, I further identified 47 cases in which the teacher marked the repeated item with the Japanese final particle ‘ne’ or ‘na’. In 14 out of 47 cases, the teachers used the particle ‘na’ for what seemed to be the same practice. This can be because more than half of the data were collected from the Kansai region of Japan, where people use the final particle ‘na’ instead of ‘ne’ in their dialect (Murakami 2000; Takagi 2020). For example, the teachers at schools D and E hardly used ‘ne’ but used ‘na’ for the same practice. However, I excluded cases where the teachers used ‘na’ from the primary collections for the purpose of this study.¹ Then, I focused on 22 cases, excluding the cases where the camera angle failed to include the respondent student or the teacher during the focal sequence (i.e. when they were off-screen, but the teacher repeated their response).

Through data sessions with my colleagues, the ‘why that now?’ question emerged towards the focal phenomenon. That is, ‘why do the teachers shift their gaze from the respondent student when they mark the repeated item with the epistemic stance marker, ‘ne’?” In all 22 cases, the teachers shifted their gaze from the respondent student in other directions (i.e. to other students, the blackboard). In the following section, I will provide a detailed analysis to answer this question.

All cases were transcribed based on Mondada’s (2018) transcription conventions, with modifications (see Appendix B). The second line of each turn represents a direct translation of the original Japanese, and the third line represents an English translation. The abbreviations used in the direct translation are based on Iwasaki (2013) (see Appendix A).

4. Analysis

In this section, I will first present a typical example of the teachers’ inclusive third-turn repeat, composed of the repetition of the student’s response and the epistemic stance marker, ‘ne’, with their gaze shifting from the respondent student. Twelve cases among the 22 collections are of this type, including Extract 1. Next, I will present the other 10 cases; the third-turn repeat is produced right after the teachers’ verbal minimal receipt token (i.e. ‘right’). Finally, I will present deviant cases of the focal phenomenon.

4.1. Inclusive third-turn repeat

Extract 3 is a typical example of the inclusive third-turn repeat observed in an English-language classroom with first-year students at school A. In this instance, the teacher and students check the answers to a vocabulary quiz that has five questions. The teacher asks each question on the quiz sheet, and once the teacher gets the correct answer from the students, the teacher writes it on the blackboard. In general, the teacher stands in front of the class holding the quiz sheet in her left hand while holding a chalk in her right hand (see Figure 5 in Extract 3).

Before line 1, the teacher and students confirmed that the answer to the fourth question on the quiz sheet was ‘slower’. Then, in line 1, the teacher asks what the antonym for ‘slow’ is in English, which is the fifth question on the quiz sheet.

Extract 3. M0000　05:57–06:04

The teacher’s question in line 1 invites anyone to answer as she scans the class (see Figure 5). Then, only Ryota (see Figure 5) self-selects to respond to the teacher’s question in line 2, and the teacher gives him a positive evaluation by nodding (see Figure 7). As soon as she nods to Ryota, the teacher produces third-turn repeats and marks the repeating item with the Japanese epistemic stance marker ‘ne.’ By marking the item with the epistemic stance marker, the teacher confirms the shared access to the referent information (=‘fast’) with the recipient. However, the teacher does not treat Ryota as the recipient of her ne-marked third-turn repeat in the following way: the teacher shifts her gaze from Ryota to the blackboard, where the entire class’s attention should be focused as the correct answer will be written there. Her repetition is audible to the entire class, as recorded by the video camera in the back of the classroom. This shows that the teacher changes her recipients from Ryota to the cohort. Her epistemic stance marker ‘ne’, in line 10, thereby marks that both the teacher and the cohort had the knowledge access to the repeated item. In doing so, the teacher includes the other students in the same party as Ryota, who showed knowledge access to the questioning item.

Even though the particle ‘ne’ confirms the students’ shared access to the repeated item (Hayano 2011, 2017), the teacher’s bodily orientation does not seem to seek students’ confirmation as she does not look at any of them (see Figure 8). Little space is therefore created for the students to show their nonverbal resistance (i.e. shake their heads, tilt their heads, etc.) against being included in the knowing party. In doing so, the teacher establishes a ‛homogeneous epistemic status’ (Heller 2017) of the students, which allows the teacher to move her pedagogic agenda forward. Indeed, in the subsequent lines, the teacher instructs the students to mark their scores (line 7), which projects the closing of the activity.

4.2. Inclusive third-turn repeat following minimal receipt token

Extract 4 presents the other type of inclusive third-turn repeat, which is produced right after the teacher’s minimal receipt token. This instance is obtained from the first-year students’ English language class at school C. The teacher and students checked the meaning of a particular English word in their textbook.

Extract 4. R0326 10:46–11:00 (participants: T=teacher, H= Hiroki)

From line 1, the teacher asks students the Japanese meaning of the word ‘trip’. Using the kke-marked question format (da kke?) (Hayashi 2012) in line 3, the teacher indicates that the item in question is something that the students have already learned. However, as there is a 0.8-second gap in line 4, the teacher adds further information to increase the likelihood of response (Duran and Jacknick 2020) from line 5. Eventually, the teacher gets a response from a student, Hiroki, in line 9.

Subsequently, the teacher looks in Hiroki’s direction and points towards him with his right hand while providing him with a minimal receipt token (‘so’) (see Figure 11). This shows that the teacher treats Hiroki as the focal recipient (e.g. Goodwin 1979). However, when he repeats Hiroki’s response, the teacher shifts his gaze from Hiroki to the other students (see Figure 12); hence, the teacher changes the recipient of his repetition from Hiroki to others. Then, the teacher adds the epistemic stance marker ‘ne’ to the repeated item. That marks the sharedness of the repeated item with the recipient. Therefore, the teacher treats the other students as if they knew the repeated item, although they did not respond to the teacher’s earlier question. In doing so, the teacher includes the other students in the same party with Hiroki and constructs their knowing status vis-à-vis the questioning item. After managing the epistemic status among the students in this way, the teacher moves to the next question from line 12.

Unlike Extract 3, however, the teacher in this extract made some attempts to pursue a response from the students after his initial question. As can be seen from lines 5 to 8, the teacher needed to perform extra work to pursue the students response (e.g. Duran and Jacknick 2020). In such a context, the teacher’s minimal receipt token acknowledges the respondent student, Hiroki, as a particular contributor before treating him as the cohort. All cases of this type of inclusive third-turn repeat were observed when there was a long gap following the teacher’s initial question, which required the teacher a little more work to pursue a response from the students.

Overall, with both types of inclusive third-turn repeat, the teachers constructed a ‘homogeneous epistemic status’ (Heller 2017) among the students regarding the questioning items. In both cases, when the individual student responded to the teacher’s question, the ‘epistemic gradient’ (Heritage 2012) was generated between the respondent student (who shows their knowledge access) and the rest of the students (who do not show their access) vis-à-vis the questioning item. However, the teacher included the rest of the students in the party of the respondent student by deploying the inclusive third-turn repeat. In this sense, teachers managed the students’ relative epistemic statuses regarding the questioning items.

4.3. Deviant cases

The inclusive third-turn repeat may constrain the students to a silent agreement to be included in the knowing party. After the teacher’s inclusive third-turn repeat, only one student, Extract 5, resisted being included in the knowing party. I, therefore, classify this case as deviant. In the following analysis, I will show how this case highlights the prior observation on the inclusive third-turn repeat.

Extract 5 was obtained from the same classroom as Extract 3. In this instance, the teacher asks questions about a picture in her hands. Some students look at their textbooks because the same picture is contained therein. The picture depicted a busy street with many signs written in English. In line 1, the teacher asked the students if they could read some of the English signs shown in the picture.

Extract 5. M0001　03:48–04:06

When a student, Misaki, responds to the teacher in line 4, the teacher directs her gaze at Misaki. However, the teacher quickly shifts her gaze away from Misaki towards the students on her right side to produce the inclusive third-turn repeat. After scanning the class for 0.8 seconds, the teacher elicits further responses in line 7, asking them if they can see other English signs in the picture. Subsequently, Ryota claims that there is no sign of a hotel in the picture. As Ryota is producing his turn by directing his gaze not at Misaki but towards the teacher (see Figure 15), he is resisting being included in the party who identified the hotel sign in the picture. In response to Ryota’s claim of not identifying the hotel sign, the teacher directs Ryota’s attention towards a particular area in the picture by pointing with her right finger (see Figure 16). Subsequently, Ryota produces his ‘change of state token’ in Japanese, ‘aa’ (Endo 2018), in line 9 and claims his understanding by saying, ‘there it is’ in Japanese. As soon as Ryota returns his attention to his textbook, the teacher takes her gaze away from Ryota (see Figure 17). Eventually, in line 11, another student, Naoki, who is out of the camera frame, self-selects to offer a candidate answer to the teacher’s prior initiation.

This case highlights that the non-respondent students also observe that the teacher manages their epistemic status regarding the questioning item by implementing the inclusive third-turn repeat. Thus, when they do not allow the teachers to do so, they claim that they are not on the same page with the student who responded to the teacher’s question. This indicates that even though the inclusive third-turn repeat is ostensibly a unilateral practice by the teacher, the teachers need the alignment from the non-respondent students to include them in the knowing party.

In contrast to the other cases, in this extract the teacher did not present her questioning items as previously taught. If the teacher formulates the questioning item as tied to previously learned or expectedly known items, the students may feel pressured to demonstrate their lack of knowledge or inability to access it. This is because demonstrating their lack of knowledge of such questioning items would indicate that they did not retain the previously learned items as they should have.

However, the teacher’s question in this extract is not such a case; she only asks students to describe any English signs in the picture she has just shown. In this manner, the student’s ‘face’ (Goffman 1956) would not be threatened when Ryota demonstrates his inaccessibility to the questioning items. In other words, the students may face more challenges in resisting the inclusive third-turn repeat in other cases, such as in Extract 4, where the teacher treats the questioning item as a previously learned item by his questioning formats.

Extract 6² is another type of deviant case obtained from the third-year students’ English language class at school E. Unlike other cases, the teacher in this instance, nominates a particular student, Katsumi, to respond to his question (see line 3). At this moment, the teacher asked Katsumi to translate an English sentence (from their textbook) to Japanese, ‘I like Sakurajima the best’, from their textbook.

Extract 6. K0002 11:54–12:03

Katsumi takes about three long seconds to respond in line 7 after the teacher nominates her. When the teacher prompts a further response in line 8, Katsumi tilts her head towards her textbook. Then the teacher proffers the subject, Taro, in line 10 (as the sentence itself is a line of the main character Taro in the textbook). However, Katsumi is silent again for 2.8 seconds, looking at the textbook. Then, the teacher prompts the initial part of the target sentence, ‘I like’, in line 12. In response to this, Katsumi looks up at the teacher and produces the Japanese translation of ‘like’ in line 13. The teacher further asks Katsumi, ‘to what extent’ in line 14. Katsumi’s answer ‘very’ in line 16 gets the teacher’s negative evaluation as he tilts his head in line 17 (see Figure 19) and elicits a further response as soon as repeating it with rising intonation. From line 19, the teacher seemingly invites other students to answer by shifting his gaze from Katsumi to his right to the left side with hand gestures (see Figures 20 and 21).

Eventually, Yosuke answered the teacher’s question in line 20. The teacher looks at Yosuke in the subsequent line (see Figure 22) but does not give him any receipt token or nonverbal acknowledgement. Instead, the teacher shifts his gaze from Yosuke to Katsumi to produce an inclusive third-turn repeat. When the teacher marks the repeated item with the epistemic stance marker, he even nods to Katsumi with a smile (see Figure 23). In doing so, the teacher treats Katsumi as the focal recipient and treats her as if she also had knowledge access to the repeated item. Thus, through the teacher’s inclusive third-turn repeat, Katsumi was included in the party who knew the questioning item (=‘the best’) with Yosuke by the teacher’s inclusive third-turn repeat.

In prior cases (Extracts 1, 3, and 4), the teachers homogenised the epistemic status between the respondent student and the ‘indefinite’ non-respondent students by implementing the inclusive third-turn repeat. In this case, however, the teacher’s inclusive third-turn repeat homogenises the epistemic status between particular students, Yosuke (who responded with the correct answer) and Katsumi (who failed to respond with the correct answer). While the teachers’ questions in prior cases are formulated to invite anyone in the classroom to answer, the teacher’s question, in this instance, is initially formulated to invite Katsumi to answer (see lines 14 and 18). Given this, Yosuke’s correct response would create a certain epistemic gradient between Yosuke (who responded with the correct answer) and Katsumi (who was initially assigned to respond but failed to respond with the correct answer). Indeed the asymmetry in epistemic status is more notable between Katsumi and Yosuke than between Yosuke and the other non-respondent students. The teacher’s gaze directed towards Katsumi (see Figure 23), rather than towards other students, apparently displays his orientation to adjust the epistemic gradient between Yosuke and Katsumi.

In this way, the teacher deployed an inclusive third-turn repeat to establish Yosuke and Katsumi’s ‘homogenised epistemic status’ (Heller 2017) regarding the questioning item and move forward with his pedagogical agenda. Indeed, from the subsequent lines, the teacher moves on to the next pedagogical activity as he instructs students to stand up.

5. Discussion and conclusion

This study examined a classroom teachers’ inclusive practice that manages epistemic status among students. Specifically, when the teachers produced their third-turn repeat in response to an individual student’s reply, they marked the repeated item with the Japanese epistemic stance marker, ‘ne’ (e.g. Hayano 2011, 2017) or ‘na’ and shifted their gaze from the respondent individual to other students or ‘public space’ such as the blackboard. In doing so, the teachers treated the rest of the students as the party who also had access to the questioning item in the same manner as the respondent student. Thus, I termed this practice inclusive third-turn repeat, as the teachers included the non-respondent students to the knowing party that the respondent student represents. To implement the inclusive third-turn repeat, the teachers artfully shifted their gaze direction (e.g. Waring and Carpenter 2019) from the respondent student to the non-respondent students and added the epistemic stance marker (e.g. Hayano 2017) to the repeated item.

In most cases, after establishing the students’ homogenised knowing status regarding the questioning item, the teachers moved forward with their pedagogical activity (i.e. moving on to the next question). The inclusive third-turn repeat, therefore, can be seen as a pedagogical strategy that publicly establishes the students’ homogenised epistemic status vis-à-vis the teaching object and justifies the teachers in moving on to their next teaching agenda.

This practice, however, can potentially have a problematic nature from a pedagogical point of view. That is, even if there is a possibility that some students were not on the same page with the respondent student (as Ryota in Extract 5 claimed that he did not find the hotel sign) or did not know the answer to the questioning items, the inclusive third-turn repeat is designed to limit the students’ responses to the agreement (Drake, Golato, and Golato 2021; Heritage and Raymond 2021; Pomerantz 1984). For example, as shown in Extracts 1 and 3, the teachers directed their faces not towards the students but towards the blackboard to produce the inclusive third-turn repeat. This indexed that the teachers did not seek confirmation from the students regarding their understanding of the students’ epistemic status. This can constrain the students’ response to a silent agreement to be included in the knowing party. As we only observed the student’s resistance from Ryota in Extract 5, it can be challenging for students to prevent their teacher from homogenising their epistemic status.

Such a potential problem in this practice could illuminate the teachers’ challenging nature of attending to multiple individuals’ knowledge statuses in the classroom institutional setting. As the practice of inclusive third-turn repeat reflects the classroom teachers’ orientation towards the “public construction of a collective epistemic status” (Heller 2017, 170), teachers always face the challenge of attending to individual learning (Koole 2012b; Heller 2017) while instructing collective learning in multiparty classroom interactional setting.

Thus, the findings of this study shed light on classroom teachers’ interactional work from an ‘epistemic’ angle. While securing the two-party talk system is essential for classroom teachers, creating a homogeneous epistemic status (Heller 2017) towards a pedagogical item would also be important to move its pedagogical agenda forward. I believe this kind of inclusion practice could be widely observed in other classrooms where the teacher orients to its institutional goal, ‘co-production of knowledge (McHoul 1978). The teachers would do a lot of interactional work to achieve the co-production of knowledge in the classroom institutional setting. The current study captures a piece of such work as ‘inclusive third-turn repeat’.

Acknowledgments

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 17th International Pragmatics Conference as a panel contribution organized by Dr. Clelia König and Dr. Revert Klattenber. I want to thank the panel organizers and participants for providing insight into this study. I also thank Dr. Daisuke Yokomori for providing valuable feedback on my data analysis. Any errors or inconsistencies that remain are my own responsibility.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

The Japan Society supported this work for the Promotion of Science under Grant number: 19K13305.

Notes

1. Some of the data regarding ‘na’ were presented at the 17th International Pragmatics Conference, where I presented an earlier version of this study. In this paper, the useof ‘na’ will only be presented in Extract 6 as the deviant case.

2. The part of the data in Excerpt 6 has been previously published with a different purpose in Ishino (2020), which demonstrates how classroom teachers’ legitimation of authority is prioritised over the students’ learning activities.

Appendices Appendix A.

Abbreviations used in word-by-word glosses of Japanese transcripts

Adapted from Iwasaki (2013) with modifications

Table

ADV	adverbial form (e.g. ni)
ACC	accusative (e.g. o)
COP	copula (e.g. da)
GEN	genitive (e.g. no)
NEG	negative (e.g. nai)
NOM	nominative (e.g. ga, no)
PAST	past (e.g. -ta)
PP	pragmatic particle (e.g. ka, na)
Q	question marker (e.g. ka)
QT	quotative particle (e.g. to)
SE	sentence extender (e.g. -n, -no)
TE	conjunctive form (e.g. -te)
TOP	topic marking particle (e.g. wa)

Appendix B.

Transcription Convention for Multimodal Aspects

Adopted from Mondada’s (2018) with some modifications for this paper

Table

+ +	Descriptions of embodied conducts (i.e. gaze, hand movements, etc.) are delimited between two identical symbols and are synchronised with corresponding stretches of talk/lapses of time.
+ ->	The action continues across subsequent lines.
->+	until the same symbol is reached.
▼	When an annotation does not fit within the transcription’s specialised place, it appears in a subsequent line with a symbol.
>>	The action begins before the extract.
->>	The action continues after the extract.
- - -	Full extension of the movement is maintained.
TEA	Participants doing the embodied action are identified when they are not the speaker of the turn.
FIG	The exact moment at which a screenshot has been taken is indicated with
#	a symbol, showing its temporal position within turns/segments of time.