Supervisor: professor Renate Pajusalu.
Opponent: professor Leelo Keevallik (Linköpingi ülikool)
Summary:
The PhD thesis "Language, Body and the Pointer: A Multimodal Analysis of Teacher-Initiated Repair Sequences" studies teacher-initiated repair sequences in Estonian elementary classroom interaction. The dissertation 1) gives an overview of the verbal and non-verbal techniques that the teacher uses to initiate the repair; 2) analyses the interrelations between linguistic form and nonverbal modalities (gaze, gesture, posture, the use of material artefacts) during the teacher-initiated repair sequences, from the moment the trouble-source is uttered to the completion of the successful repair. The principal theoretical and methodological frameworks of the present study are conversation analysis and interactional linguistics, intertwined with a multimodal approach to social interaction. The research is based on a corpus of video recordings of 1-4 grade lessons of Estonian and Mathematics (11 lessons, 440 min in total) delivered at schools in Estonia and on the transcripts of those tapes. The multimodal analysis of teacher-initiated repair sequences demonstrated that gesticulation may in various ways make visible the sequence organisation of multiple turns.