Riprendere uno studente. Comportamento sociale e deissi nell’interazione in classe

Within the area of teacher/student interaction, this article examines one methodical practice to reproach unprompted conducts of students in the classroom, whereby the teacher addresses a student by name. The aim is to investigate the way in which teachers exercise authority upon students by using this strategy. The indexical character of this format is examined as associated to its sequential deployment and prosodic features in relation to the students’ prior behaviour. The data consist of the first 15-20 minutes of 20 lessons (given to 6 different groups by 10 teachers in the first 8 grades), that have been video-recorded in 3 different Italian schools. The data have been transcribed and analyzed using Conversation Analysis, focussing on both the verbal and non-verbal conducts of the participants. The analysis shows that the treatment of the students’ activities is locally managed by the teachers. Judgements regarding reproachable conducts are interactively occasioned and result from continuous adjustments to the courses of action. These findings argue for ethnomethodological approaches in analyzing the way in which the teachers’ authority is produced and understood in everyday classroom activities, thus detracting from the view of teacher/students interaction as the result of the application of abstract, pre-defined norms.