Home General Interest Hypothetical mistakes: hedging wrong answers with conditional language in initiation-response-evaluation (IRE) sequences in an American high school classroom
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Hypothetical mistakes: hedging wrong answers with conditional language in initiation-response-evaluation (IRE) sequences in an American high school classroom

  • Jessica Sujata Chandras ORCID logo EMAIL logo
Published/Copyright: December 20, 2023
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Abstract

This article analyzes American high school students hedging incorrect responses to teacher-initiated questions in IRE (Initiation-Response-Evaluation) format using conditional language and hypotheticals in ways that facilitate an affiliative stance between students and their teacher. Scholarship on hedging details its use to approximate responses as a shield against doubt and criticism or as collaborative communication, whereas stance is a grammatically encompassed expression of attitudes related to the content of a message. This study brings together theories of stance, hedging, and conditional language use to outline how errors can be a student-initiated pedagogical tool to deepen explanations and engagement. To broaden understanding of the form and function of both incorrect answers and hedging as a structure expanding traditional IRE turntaking for managing classroom discourse, this article outlines seven examples total where students hedge what they know to be incorrect answers drawn from recordings made in forty, fifty-minute high school level Latin lessons over the 2019–2020 academic year. This study presents a model and impacts of students creatively reconfiguring evaluative responses along with their teacher during instruction through hedging incorrect information in conditional, and sometimes hypothetical, formats.


Corresponding author: Jessica Sujata Chandras, Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Social Work, University of North Florida, Jacksonville, USA, E-mail:

Acknowledgments

I would sincerely like to thank the students and teachers at Mount Vernon High School in Ohio for allowing me and my students to visit and observe over the course of what became a tumultuous year in 2019–2020. This article would not have been possible without the data collection assistance of Bella Creel and transcription assistance of Seth Lockwood.

  1. Author contributions: All authors have accepted responsibility for the entire content of this manuscript and approved its submission.

  2. Research funding: None declared.

  3. Competing interests: Authors state no conflict of interest.

  4. Informed consent: Informed consent was obtained from all individuals included in this study.

  5. Ethical approval: The local Institutional Review Board deemed the study exempt from review.

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Received: 2023-06-29
Accepted: 2023-11-29
Published Online: 2023-12-20
Published in Print: 2024-12-17

© 2023 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

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