PUB - Publikationen an der Universität Bielefeld

While classrooms interaction has long been a research issue in conversation analysis, prosody has only rarely been taken into consideration in this particular context. Addressing this research gap, the chapter aims at desribing the role of prosody for the organisation and accomplishment of conversational tasks and social actions typically occuring in classroom interaction. More specifically, it concentrates on two social actions, the socalled ‘teacher question’ (a lesson-oriented question adressing the whole class), and reprimands to single students, both carried out by teachers on a regular basis. Analyses show how teachers use prosody as a major resource to constitute these two actions within a single complex turn, thereby accomplishing the conversational tasks of managing students' attention and transfering relevant knowledge through prosodic information structuring in the course of the ongoing interaction. While the analytical focus is on prosody, other embodied resources, such as gaze behaviour and body positioning, are also considered