alongside silence, downward gaze and prosody to accomplish the action of
maintaining the turn until the lexical element is retrieved. Such a pattern of
behaviours may be compared to the so-called ‘solitary’ word searches in adult-adult
talk (Goodwin and Goodwin, 1986). The teacher clearly interprets these behaviours as
non-turn final: the child is engaged in self-directed activity and is not soliciting the
participation of the teacher. In a sense, then, the adult is collaborating with the child
by tolerating the silences and search behaviours in order to afford the child the
valuable opportunity to retrieve her word.
In contrast with solitary searching, both verbal and non-verbal interactional
techniques mobilise the adult into participation in the child’s search. Direct invitations
(Oelschlaeger, 1999) are constructed either by wh-question or by gaze shift. Rather
than a standard wh-question (Schegloff et al., 1977), the child includes semantic
elements and gesture that clarify the target of the search. According to interviews with
the teacher, this technique is taught explicitly to the child in the specialist language
resource setting during therapy tasks and small language groups. Interaction analysis
therefore provides evidence of spontaneous usage by the child in a real time context.
Gaze direction and the timing of gaze shift are used competently to signal the
abandonment of solitary searching. When searching alone, gaze is maintained on the
local visual resources, such as the pictures of a book on the table. In contrast, gaze is
directed towards the teacher in order to signal an invitation to participate in her
search. It is thus used by a child who experiences a specific language difficulty in a
comparable way to how it is accomplished in adult-adult talk (Goodwin and
Goodwin, 1986) and in aphasic interaction (Oelschlaeger, 1999).
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