The work of examples in classroom instruction
Abstract Providing examples is part of the daily routine that classroom teachers carry out in the course of their lessons, and yet we rarely examine how examples are produced and what kinds of work they do in the lively context of classroom interaction. The present study inquires into how instructional examples are portrayed in prior literature by educational psychologists and brings out what can not be seen through their cognitively oriented research. Following ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, this paper proposes that providing examples is a practical and interactional task enacted within witnessable details of classroom interaction. The second part of the paper provides analyses of talk exchanges taken from college ESL classrooms to demonstrate how instructional examples are part of developing sequences of discourse-in-interaction and how they pull into view an array of competent practices of teaching in and as the teachers’ communicative actions.