What’s the use of triadic dialogue? An investigation of teacher-student interaction

The fact that the spoken texts of classroom interaction- particularly those involving teacher with whole class- are co-constructed relatively smoothly, despite the number of participants involved, suggests that they are organized in terms of standard strategies, embodied in typical forms of discourse that have evolved for responding to recurring types of rhetorical situation (Miller, 1984; Kamberelis, 1995). That is to say that, like written texts, they can be thought of as being constructed according to one of a set of educational genre specifications. One such rhetorical structure, the ubiquitous ‘triadic dialogue ’ (Lemke, 1990) (also known as the IRE or IRF sequence (Mehan, 1979; Sinclair & Coulthard, 1975), has attracted considerable attention in recent years, and has variously been seen as, on the one hand, essential for the co-construction of cultural knowledge (Heap, 1985; Newman et al., 1989) and, on the other, as antithetical to the educational goal of encouraging students ' intellectual-discursive initiative and creativity (Lemke, 1990; Wood, 1992). Drawing on episodes of teacher-whole-class interaction collected during a collaborative action research project, this paper will show, however, that the same basic IRF structure can take a variety of forms and be recruited by teachers for a wide variety of functions, depending on the goal of the activity that the discourse serves to mediate and, in particular, on the use that is made of the follow