ABSTRACT
A closely related reason for being interested in the study of verbal interaction has to do with the contribution it seems such study might make to a more abstract concern in the sociology of education – that is an orientation to educational reform and change. The identification of this orientation in both the rhetoric and implicit motivations of many writers in the field, what Whitty has called the ‘possibilitarian’ position, is well‐documented. There is a good reason for having devoted a substantial amount of time to a clarification of interest in talk. It is that the admissions made place considerable constraint on the types of analysis which could be used to achieve the goals implicit in these interests. A key problem facing analysts who wish to determine how institutional restrictions are constituted and re‐constituted at the very basic level of speech exchanges, is of knowing how to determine the interactional work that is being done utterance by utterance.
