The Language Features Between a Pupil and a Teacher

Write an analysis of the transcript of a conversation between a teacher and a pupil, explaining in detail what the FEATURES you identify suggest and the relationship between them. This is a conversation between two people set up during school time. Because this is between a teacher and a pupil there would be several cases of false starts, pauses and the register is mostly formal, however there are some instances of informal language used by Jordan and this may be because of his sociolect.

We see an example of a pause at the start as well as a formal register. We can tell that it the teacher is not being covert prestige, but that this is her natural register. This may be because she knew that she had to be serious as this wasn’t a good thing. The formal register is shown when the teacher is giving an instruction and then waiting for it to be followed out before continuing with the rest of the conversation. “Jordan sit down (.) Just getting your name up on the screen (.)” These pauses are indicating that some form of action is taking place, not because the teacher is unsure of what to say as would be in a normal spontaneous script. We can tell that this begins off as a formal conversation because the teacher begins with “Jordan.” This shows that the teacher is in charge and is clearly showing her superiority and not with something like ‘Hello’.

The response to the teacher from Jordan is rather informal; however there were no uses of omission or contraction. We can tell that it is informal by the paralinguistic features shown later on in the conversation. For example, “[Jordan sighs]” and “[Jordan starts texting]” These features are showing that he is not really taking in what the teacher is telling him and that he would rather be doing something else. We can tell that he is not interested because he sighs several times throughout the transcript. The sigh indicates that he is bored and perhaps that he has heard this several times before