ABSTRACT
The ‘interpretive’ label has been used to cover a wide range of classroom studies, from the loosest to the most rigorous kinds of ethnography, and from discursive commentaries on how teachers control the transmission of knowledge to detailed structural analyses of how turn-taking is organized. This range of approaches will be illustrated in the present chapter, in rough sequence from the more general and intuitive to the formally systematic. Our starting point, however, is with some of the basic assumptions about social interaction which lead those making them in different methodological directions from those described in the previous chapter.
