This article attempts to align a familiar task of classroom teaching, eliciting from students correct answers about their lessons, with a major organizational domain in studies of natural conversation, that of conversational repair. Numerous studies have analyzed correction sequences in classroom discourse, and our discussion pays special attention to McHoul's (1990) treatment of “repair in classroom talk.” McHoul directly measures the findings on repair in studies of natural conversation to the regularities of correction sequences in classroom lessons. It is argued, contra McHoul, that repair is a different, and prior, order of discursive work, and one that premises the very possibility of classroom correction. Further, the difference may have wider relevance for understanding repair and correction as “co-operating” organizations of talk-in-interaction more generally.

This article examines the interactive import of prosody from a perspective of participants' orientation to talk in interaction, taking advantage of data from institutional discourse to focus on the prosodic packaging of recurring turn sequences of the same discourse activity. The analysis focuses on the third slot of a ubiquitous three-part classroom discourse sequence, the IRF exchange (Sinclair & Coulthard 1975), a site in which teachers make repetitive feedback moves following student responses. Examination of more than 25 hours of classroom discourse and more than 300 third-turn teacher feedback types uncovered a systematic use of prosody for these teacher repetitions that coincides with a teacher's positive assessment of the student response. Further analysis shows that more complex prosodic packaging is used by teachers in their repetitive feedback turns to index other interactive functions.