ABSTRACT
In this chapter, we introduce two of our focus classrooms: year three at Aralia College and the same year level at St Luke’s School. The transcripts taken from these classrooms are indicative of the everyday talk that occurs in a vast number of schools in Australia and in comparable societies. They are, to all intents and purposes, normal Australian classrooms-neither was selected because of any novel features, notable inadequacies, particularly outstanding students or particular excellence in teaching. Their inclusion here was based on the view that the interactions and talk we would be able to collect as data in these two classrooms were ordinary
Our purpose here is to document and contrast attributes of the Child-Student accomplished by the teachers and students in these classrooms. It is important to note that this chapter does not provide an exhaustive list of all the attributes of the category ChildStudent that the transcripts might support. Further analyses, or other sorts of analyses, may reveal other attributional work done in and through the classroom talk of either site. For the purposes of showing comparabilities, however, we will, for the moment, dwell on two locally driven attributes that were available in the whole class talk in these two classrooms. The first of these was precompetence, and the second, being a member of a cohort. When describing the enactment of the category Child-Student we find a nexus in the accomplishments of precompetence and cohorting. First, then, we will consider the attribute of precompetence.
