Tellings of Remembrances ‘Touched off’ by Student Reports in Group Work in Undergraduate Writing Classes

Instructors of college/university writing classes commonly ask their students to ‘share their ideas’ in groups. This paper aims to describe the sequential structures of a kind of talk typical to group work: students presenting ‘reports’ about early written drafts. Specifically, the data analysis in this paper looks at how a student's report ‘touches off’ another student's telling of a remembrance caused by the report, which in turn offers a complex analysis of the just-prior report, allowing the speaker to prove rather than merely claim an understanding of the report. Touched-off remembrances (TORs) are marked in other ways than just through talk: sometimes group members orient to them via understandings of the report-giver's gestures and other embodied features. Beyond their conversation-structural actions, TORs also work to allow students to demonstrate to each other their cultural literacies—that is, they afford the opportunity to attach a cultural understanding to what they have just heard. The study, which analyzes video data of naturally occurring interactions between students in writing classes, draws its theoretical basis from conversation-analytic literature on ‘second stories’ and on analytic approaches to the way talk, gesture, and other forms of embodiment produce action in the course of interaction.