7 C uhm the princess wanted to go to (.) ↑Mary's house
((PP princess--------PP Mary---------))
8 T They’ve already sorted that haven’t they
*PP = Points pencil with lowering arch-like movement from semi-upright
position until figure is touched.
The sequence starts with the teacher’s story ‘invitation’ (Radford, Ireson and Mahon,
2006) whose design elicits an idea from C about a next possible event in her story.
Ciara’s story ideas concern two female characters (Mary and a princess) that are
represented by figurines that she has drawn and which she can indicate with a point of
her pencil. In line 2 Ciara makes a series of points at the two pictures, alternately,
which supplies T with clues regarding the respective references of the first and third
person female pronouns. That she is searching for a lexical item is first indicated at
line 3 when she stretches the vowels of both ‘sh:’ and ‘she::’ and subsequently
pauses. Whilst production of ‘s:’ is difficult to interpret, ‘name’ is hearably a
substitute for the specific name of the character. Indeed, T orients to ‘name’ with a
clear labelling of the searched-for item in line 4 (‘This is Mary’). The final downward
intonation here suggests that T’s label is not tentative. It could be argued that T is
supplying a correction, in the pedagogical sense, rather than offering a candidate
lexical item for either acceptance or rejection. At line 5 C accepts the ‘correction’ by
reformulating her earlier idea and incorporating T’s name, thus concluding the repair
sequence. Another notable feature is that Ciara’s gaze remains consistently fixed on
the figurines from lines 2-7. According to previous studies and evidence from extracts
1 and 2, this provides additional confirmation that T is not invited to participate in her
search. Production of the semantic category label is powerful, then, since it triggers
T’s involvement, despite lack of direct invitation by gaze.
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