Excerpt 5.3: “You can also reply to my comments.” 105

This excerpt illustrates how Alicia employed humor and laughter to create solidarity with the student by diminishing her institutionally assigned role as a teacher- evaluator and by endowing the student with some degree of power and agency as a writer. The analyzed episode comes from Meeting 2 between Alicia and Bin. Prior to the

exchange, Alicia and Bin discussed the most frequently occurring errors in Bin’s draft: tenses and collocations. Alicia showed Bin how to work with an online collocation dictionary to make sure his nouns were used with appropriate adjectives. The analyzed interaction occurred toward the end of the meeting, when Alicia was summarizing her feedback by pointing out the comments she made on Bin’s draft. As the excerpt begins, she draws Bin’s attention to the statement she made about collocations for the noun “idea”—the word that Bin used in his draft.

01 ((Alicia is looking at desktop screen with Bin,

02 which displays Bin’s draft))

03 Alicia: Yeah so here for (.) example

04 ((points at screen with LH))

05 it said let’s check some idea- (.7)

06 >osome collocations for ideaso<.

07 Bin: ((nods slightly, keeps gazing at screen))

08 A: And you can also like reply↑ to my comments,

09 [(.6)

10 B: [((nods slightly, keeps gazing at screen))

11 A: so you’ll have this little (.3)

106

In lines 3-6, Alicia points at the draft and gives Bin an example illustrating what she previously stated in her feedback summary (not included in this episode): Yeah so

here for (.) example it said let’s check some idea- (.7) >osome

collocations for ideaso<. Bin gives her a back-channeling signal (Allwood, Nivre, & Ahlsen, 1992; Yngve, 1970) through a slight head nod (line 7), thereby acknowledging

13 () you will say,

14 (.6)

15 ((leans back from screen, shifts gaze to

16 keyboard, smiles))

17 <I don’t think (.) this is (0.7) a good idea>

18 ((starts typing, pronounces each word with smile

19 voice and playful intonation as she types))

20 (.5)

21 [().

22 [((shifts gaze to screen, laughs))=

23 B: =oOh.o

24 ((nods, keeps gazing at screen))

25 (.9)

26 A: £You can reply to me.

27 ((slightly turns upper body and head to B and

28 gazes at him while smiling))

29 (.8)

30 B: *hhh.

31 [((laughs, keeps gazing at screen))

32 A: [((laughs, shifts gaze to screen))

33 (1.5) [Figure 5.3a]

34 B: And, oh.

35 ((keeps smiling))

36 (.7)

37 A: £oYeah.o

107 Alicia’s utterance and demonstrating his understanding. Although Alicia’s comment

contains inclusive language (Matlock, 2000)—“let’s check”—it nevertheless

communicates the message that Bin did not use correct collocation with the noun “idea,” and thus may appear face threatening for him. What Alicia does in the next turn,

therefore, can be interpreted as her attempt to minimize the face-threatening nature of this message, encourage the student, and create an affiliative moment in the interaction. In line 8, Alicia invites Bin to participate in the feedback activity by responding to her

comments: And you can also like reply↑ to my comments. In other words, Alicia

opens up a possibility for the student to exercise his agency as a writer by interacting with the teacher in the revision process of his paper (Sommers, 2013).

Moreover, Alicia does not simply give Bin the idea of responding to her feedback, but she actually enacts this suggestion, and she does it in a rather humorous way. As seen from the transcript, she creates a mini role-play in which she pretends to be Bin, and she types a statement of “Bin’s” disagreement with her own comment (line 17): <I don’t think (.) this is (0.7) a good idea>. The good-humored character of this technique is also reinforced by Alicia’s smile voice and playful intonation (lines 18-19), as well as her laughter at the end of it (line 22). The fact that she uses a statement of disagreement as “Bin’s reaction to her feedback” may also suggest to Bin that Alicia’s technique should be taken as a lighthearted role-play, but at the same time, it may also communicate the message to him that he has the right to negotiate teacher’s feedback, and that Alicia is open to this negotiation.

Alicia’s switch from a serious mode of the meeting to a humorous one by entering a play frame (Kozlova, 2008; Zdrojkowski, 2007) appears to be effective, as Bin

108 responds to her humorous example with laughter (lines 30-31). Alicia immediately aligns

with him (line 32), and both join each other in a moment of mutual laughter (Figure 5.3a). The interactional resources that Alicia uses in this example (i.e., role switching, playful intonation, smiling and laughing voice, laughter, the semantic nature of the verbal utterance) may index her attempt to mitigate the possible imposition included in Alicia’s written comment in Bin’s draft, lessen the authoritative character of the feedback

summary (Nguyen, 2007), and create solidarity with the student. While it is true that instructors are expected to evaluate students’ work, any type of assessment or response to a students’ performance assumes teacher’s authority, and thus may appear face

threatening for students. Moreover, according to Nguyen (2007), while the

summarization of lesson materials (as in the case of the analyzed excerpt) is an important part of instruction and a way of recapturing the content of the lesson, it emphasizes the unequal power relations between the teacher and the students, and thus can create a distance between them. Due to the individual (i.e., one-on-one) and face-to-face nature of writing conference encounters, the authoritative character of summing up of materials, or feedback, may be even more pronounced, intimidating, or face threatening for a student (Chen, 2005; Ferris, 2003a; Qureshi, 2013).

As seen in the analysis of the above excerpt, the teacher effectively employs interactional resources to “mitigate directive frames” (Zdrojkowski, 2007, p. 238) of her written comments on the student’s paper. She effectively communicates to Bin that her feedback on his draft should by no means be taken as a final judgment. From this

perspective, Alicia’s humor and laughter are, in a sense, directed to her own institutional identity as a teacher-evaluator as well as the feedback practices assigned to this role, and

109 signify that the roles of teacher and student are not “fixed truths” but rather phenomena

“capable of change and adaptation” (Qureshi, 2013, p. 32). Thus, she attempts to develop affiliation with Bin by “break[ing] down role barriers” (Zdrojkowski, 2007, p. 262) and transforming their institutionally established identities and by inviting Bin to align with this transformation.