2012 Volume 14 Issue 2 Pages 17-30
The aim of this paper is to illuminate the multilayered character of a classroom as a social interactional time-space by paying close attention to students' metapragmatic language use. To do so, this paper first reviews various important perspectives derived from various approaches to classroom discourse, and presents the theoretical and analytical frameworks befit to the current study. Then, the article moves on to provide a case study of an "English conversation" lesson at a public high school in Saitama, Japan. Fully considering students' denotationally explicit "in-group" interactions that focus on identities, power relations, and what is happening in the classroom, the paper identifies two I-R-E sequences which appear to be occurring in different dimensions even though they partly share the same denotational text. By doing so, the paper empirically points to the fact that two different frames which are irreducible to one another are simultaneously "in play", and that different pragmatic meanings are thereby created in a multilayered fashion.
