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Supportive teacher talk: the

importance of the F-move


Richard Cullen

This paper investigates a particular aspect of teacher talkthe teachers


provision of feedback or follow-upand examines the role it plays in EFL /ESL
classroom discourse. It draws on transcript data from a secondary school
classroom in Tanzania to illustrate a teachers follow-up moves, where these
moves form the third part of a chain of I-R-F (InitiateRespondFollow-up)
exchanges between the teacher and her students. Two main roles of the F-
move are identiedevaluative and discoursaleach of which, I argue,
supports learning in dierent ways. The paper focuses, in particular, on
discoursal follow-up, and the strategies which the teacher in the data uses to
build on students contributions and develop a meaning-focused dialogue with
the class.

Introduction The F-move refers to the Follow-up or Feedback move identied by


Sinclair and Coulthard (1975) in their now well-known analysis of
classroom discourse, as the third move in the I-R-F exchange structure,
where I represents an initiating move, such as a question posed by the
teacher, R is the response from the classusually from an individual
studentand F is the follow-up comment by the teacher. The three
moves are illustrated in Example 1 below:
(1) T: Whats the boy doing? (I)
S1: Hes climbing a tree. (R)
T: Thats right. Hes climbing a tree. (F)
In this example, the teacher is asking her students a question about a
picture in their textbooks. The teachers F-move has a primarily
evaluative function: it gives the students feedback about whether the
response was acceptable or not, a function that was recognized in the
term feedback, which Sinclair and Coulthard originally used to describe
the move. Subsequently, the term follow-up has become the preferred
term, in recognition of the fact that feedback describes a function of the
move rather than the move itself (Sinclair and Brazil 1982). The
implication is that the move may also serve other functions.
The purpose of this paper is to consider the role that teachers follow-up
moves perform in the English language classroom. The kind of
classrooms I shall be referring to are large secondary school classes
where English is taught as a foreign language on the school curriculum,

ELT Journal Volume 56/2 April 2002 Oxford University Press 117

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and where traditional whole class teacher-fronted interactions (Jarvis
and Robinson 1997: 212) predominate. The arguments I shall make
regarding the importance of follow-up are not, however, exclusive to such
contexts, but I believe they have application in almost any classroom.

I-R-Fs and the The I-R-F exchange structure as traditionally practised, with the teacher
classroom context providing the great majority of the Initiation moves, has been the target
of some criticism in the communicative language teaching movement,
on the grounds that it fails to give the students opportunities to ask
questions themselves, nominate topics of interest to them, and negotiate
meaning (Nunan 1987, Thornbury 1996). In short, it is associated with a
heavily teacher-centred classroom methodology. Nevertheless, it seems
to have survived the communicative revolution remarkably unscathed, an
observation made by Nunan (1987). One reason for this may be that
teachers instinctively adopt an I-R-F mode of instruction because it is
perceived, perhaps unconsciously, to be a powerful pedagogic device for
transmitting and constructing knowledge. Seedhouse (1996) notes the
high frequency of I-R-Fs in transcripts of parent-child talk, presumably
for the same reason, and makes the point that given the prominence of
the I-R-F cycle in parent-child interaction, one might therefore have
expected communicative theorists to be actively promoting the use of the
I-R-F cycle rather than attempting to banish it. (ibid.: 20)
It is arguably the third part of this cycle, the F-move, which distinguishes
classroom talk most obviously from many speech events outside the
classroom (although as we shall see, follow-up moves do occur in other
contexts too, albeit less frequently), by dint of the important pedagogical
function it serves, that of providing feedback to the learner. Outside the
classroom (e.g. in social conversations), follow-up moves are always
optional and unpredicted (Francis and Hunston 1992: 136). In the
classroom context, on the other hand, a teachers follow-up is normal and
expected, as Sinclair and Coulthard (1975: 51) argue:
So important is feedback that if it does not occur we feel condent in
saying that the teacher has deliberately withheld it for some strategic
purpose. It is deviant to withhold feedback continually.
They go on to describe a class reduced to silence by the teachers
deliberate failure to provide feedback: the students could not see the
point of the teachers questions. Feedback or follow-up is thus seen as an
obligatory, inevitable, feature of teacher-initiated classroom exchanges. It
is thus worth investigating further the role it plays in supporting
learning, with a view to determining how teachers can use it to best
eect.

F-moves outside the Although follow-up moves are arguably most prevalent in exchanges
classroom involving asymmetrical role relationships, such as teacher-to-student and
parent-to-child (and, as Coulthard (1982) has shown, in doctor-patient
exchanges), they can also occur in conversation between equals, as the
two exchanges below from Francis and Hunstons (1992) data illustrate.
The exchanges are taken from a telephone conversation:

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(2) A: You got home all right? You werent too tired? I
B: Well, er, I got up pretty late myself. I mean II was R
supposed to get up at about seven oclock.
A: What dyou mean, you were supposed to? I
B: Well I had the alarm clock on for seven. R
A: Hah (low key) F
(Francis and Hunston 1992: 138)
(3) A: Well, your alarm clock doesnt seem to work. I
B: No, it did. I think I turned it o. R
A: Mm. Its you that doesnt work. F
(ibid.: 142)
In the above examples the functions of the F-moves, that is the discourse
acts which they perform, are very dierent from the evaluative function
of the classroom example in (1) above, a function whichnot
surprisinglyis very rare in everyday conversation. As Hah in (2), said
with a low key intonation, and his Mm in (3) are classied by Francis
and Hunston as terminate acts, in that they acknowledge the preceding
utterance and terminate the exchange. In (3), As Its you that doesnt
work acts as a follow-up comment, an act whose function, as described
by the authors (p. 133), is to exemplify, expand, explain, justify, provide
additional information, or evaluate ones utterance, and not, it will be
noted, the preceding speakers. Another act commonly associated with
F-moves in Francis and Hunstons data is the endorse act, where a
speaker oers a positive endorsement (e.g. an expression of sympathy) of
a preceding utterance (e.g. You poor thing.).
Analyses of everyday conversation are interesting in that they reveal
functions of follow-up moves which, as we shall see, are also available to
language teachers in their everyday classroom interaction, alongside
more traditional evaluative follow-up, and which are clearly present in
the classroom data presented in this paper.

Evaluative and From an analysis of lesson transcripts made by the author from video
discoursal roles of recordings of secondary school English classes in Tanzania, two broad
follow-up pedagogical roles of the follow-up move emerge: an evaluative and a
discoursal role. The evaluative role is exemplied in Example 1, and its
function is to provide feedback to individual students about their
performance, and in particular, in the language teaching classroom, to
allow learners to conrm, disconrm and modify their interlanguage
rules (Chaudron 1988: 133). The focus is on the form of the learners
response: whether, for example, the lexical item or grammatical structure
provided by the learner was acceptable or not. The feedback may be an
explicit acceptance or rejection of the response (e.g. Good, Excellent,
No, Nearly) or some other indication that the response was not
acceptable (e.g. repetition of the response with a low rising, questioning
intonation). Evaluative follow-ups typically, but not exclusively, co-occur
with display questions in the I-move, that is, questions which the
teacher asks in order to elicit a pre-determined response.

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The discoursal role of the F-move is qualitatively dierent from its
evaluative role: the purpose is to pick up students contributions and to
incorporate them into the flow of (classroom) discourse (Mercer 1995:
26), in order to sustain and develop a dialogue between the teacher and
the class: the emphasis is thus on content rather than form. There is no
explicit correction of the form of the students R-move, although the
teacher may give implicit feedback by reformulating the utterance in a
linguistically more acceptable form. Discoursal follow-up typically co-
occurs with questions which have a referential rather than a display
function (i.e. where there is no right or wrong answer predetermined by
the teacher).

Discoursal follow-up: The transcript below is taken from a video recording of an English lesson
an example from an in a government secondary school in Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania. The
EFL classroom teacher is asking her class of some 40 girls questions about the picture
on the cover of a graded reader they are about to read. The extract forms a
chain of I-R-F exchanges, with the F-moves printed in bold face and
numbered F1, F2, etc.
TRANSCRIPT

T: Where was the picture taken? Yes, please? I


S1: In the aeroplane. R
T (F1): In the aeroplane. Good, yes. In the aeroplane. F

T: Now, second question. What do we call this man in the white


shirt?
Yes please? I
S2: The R
T: Just one word is enough. R/I
S2: Pilot. R
T (F2): Pilot. Yes. The pilot. F

T: Now what is this other man holding? Yes, please? I


S3: A pistol. R
T (F3): A pistol. Right. F

T: Now what kind of man is he? What do we call such men


who have pistols and point them at pilots? Yes, Please?
Indicates S4. I
S4: We call a robber. R
T (F4): A robber? Yes. A thief you mean? Yes, if this was happening
on the ground, it could be a thief, but this mans in a plane.
Pause F

T: Anyhow let us move on. Maybe we will know the name of


this man who is holding the pistol later. Can you tell me
what is he telling the pilot? I
Suppose you are there, listening. What is he telling the pilot?
Yes?
S5: He is telling him Hands Up! R
T (F5): Hands up! F

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T: Anything else? Yes? I
S6: He is telling him now to be under his control. R
T (F6): Now you are under my command. You have to do whatever
I want you to do. F

T: Anything else ? Now, if he shot the pilot, what do you think


would happen to the plane, and all the passengers that are
inside the plane? Now some people hereits very quiet here.
What do you think would happen to the plane? Yes please? I
S7: The plane would fall down. R
T (F7): The plane would fall down. It would crash, and all the
passengers unfortunately would die. Maybe some would
survive, but most likely they would die. F

T: Now suppose you were inside the plane and this was
happening. What would you do? You have to imagine
yourself now, you are in the plane. I
Pause. Now Ill give you two minutes to discuss it with your
friend.
Two minutes. Ss discuss in pairs at their desks. OK, yes, please?
S8: I shall pray my God because I know it is my nal time.
Laughter. R
T (F8): She says shes going to kneel down and say Please God, F
forgive my sins. Laughter.

T: Yes, please? I
S9: I wont do anything, Im going to die. R
T (F9): She wont do anything. Shell just close her eyes F
Laughter and say: Take me if you wantif you dont want,
leave me.

T Yes? I
S10: I will shout. R
T (F10): You will shout. Aagh! Laughter. I dont know if Heaven will
hear you. Laughter F

T: Yes, please? I
S11: I will be very frightened and collapse R
T (F11): Youll collapse? So you will die before the plane crashes.
Laughter. F

T: Now will you open the story now. Hijack over Africa.
Key: I = Initiate
R = Response
F = Follow-up
R/I = Re-initiate, where the teacher modies her question or
instruction at the I move in response to the students
R-move.
The teacher begins by asking the class fairly straightforward display-type
questions, and the rst four F-moves perform essentially the same
evaluative role illustrated in Example 1. Thereafter, however, the teacher

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asks a sequence of more open-ended, referential questions, to elicit
personal responses from the students, and the F-moves (F5F11)
consequently assume a predominantly discoursal role: the teacher is
using the follow-up move to focus the attention of the whole class on
individual student responses, rephrase them in a more acceptable form,
and then elaborate on them in order to extend the dialogue and
encourage further contributions. The aim is thus not so much to provide
corrective feedback to individual students, although indirectly she may
be trying to do this through reformulating the students contributions (as
in F-moves 6 and 7), but to feed students contributions into the
emerging class discussion.
In a paper based on data from Primary school EFL lessons in Malaysia,
Malta, and Tanzania, Jarvis and Robinson (1997: 214) see this kind of
follow-up as a discoursal means of formulating and aligning meaning,
where the teacher reformulates the childrens contributions and presents
them back to the class so that their meanings are more closely aligned
with what has already been said, and can therefore act as a platform on
which to build and extend the discussion. Similarly, Edwards and Mercer
(1987: 132), describing research carried out in mother-tongue classrooms
in the UK, see teachers follow-ups as a crucial element in the I-R-F
exchange structure, where the teacher acts as a kind of lter or gateway
through which all knowledge must pass in order to be included in the
lesson as a valid or useful contribution.
It can be seen from the above discussion that there is a signicant
dierence in purpose between follow-ups which have a primarily
evaluative function and those which have a mainly discoursive one. In
the former, support for learning is in the formal correction which the
F-move oers. In the latter, support for learning consists primarily in the
teacher providing a rich source of message-oriented target language
input as s/he reformulates and elaborates on the students contributions,
and derives further Initiating moves from them. The focus is on the
content, not the form of the students Response moves.
In any teacher-initiated classroom interaction, the teacher has to make a
principled choice between each type of follow-up. If the teacher only
gives evaluative follow-up, it will impede the development of a
communicative classroom dialogue between the teacher and the class.
On the other hand, if the teacher only gives discoursal follow-up, s/he
will not necessarily help the students to notice and repair their errors
(despite reformulating their responses), and ll gaps in their
interlanguage. Making on-the-spot judgements about what kind of
follow-up is most appropriate when responding to individual students
contributions, and providing a balance between the competing needs for
formal feedback and content-based follow-up, are skills language
teachers need to deploy constantly in almost every lesson they teach. The
extract from the Tanzanian class shows a teacher clearly, and I would
argue, successfully, attempting to provide this balance.
Table 1 lists the 11 F-moves present in the transcript in the left-hand
column, recording the teachers exact words for each move. In the
middle column I have attempted to classify each F-move as having either

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F-move Function Teacher strategy
(1) In the aeroplane. Good, Evaluative Repetition of students (Ss)
yes. In the aeroplane. contribution.
Praise.
(2) Pilot. Yes. The pilot. Evaluative Repetition of Ss contribution.
Praise + slight elaboration of Ss
utterance.
(3) A pistol. Right. Evaluative Repetition of students
contribution.
Praise.
(4) A robber? Yes. A thief you Evaluative 1 Repetition of Ss contribution
mean? Yes, if this was with low-rising intonation.
happening on the ground,
2 Clarication check (A thief you
it could be a thief, but this
mean?)
mans in a plane.
3 Additional comment to provide
clue to preferred response.
(5) Hands up! Discoursal Repetition of Ss contribution.
(6) Now you are under my Discoursal 1 Reformulation of Ss
command. You have to contribution.
do whatever I want you
2 Elaboration.
to do.
(7) The plane would fall Discoursal 1 Repetition (fall down).
down. It would crash, and
2 Reformulation of Ss
all the passengers
contribution (crash).
unfortunately would
die. Maybe some would 3 Elaboration.
survive, but most likely
they would die.
(8) She says shes going to Discoursal Reformulation and elaboration.
kneel down and say Please
God, forgive my sins.
(9) She wont do anything. Discoursal 1 Repetition of part of Ss
Shell just close her eyes response.
Laughter and say:
2 Elaboration.
Take me if you want
if you dont want, leave
me.
(10)You will shout. Aagh! I Discoursal 1 Repetition.
dont know if Heaven will
2 Elaboration (Aagh!).
hear you.
3 Comment.
(11) Youll collapse? Discoursal 1 High rising repetition of part
of Ss utterance (to show
So you will die before
table 1 surprise).
the plane crashes.
Analysis of follow-up
2 Comment.
moves based on the
lesson transcript
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an evaluative or a discoursal function, according to my interpretation of
its purpose in the emerging TeacherClass interaction. The right-hand
column describes the various strategies the teacher has employed for
each move, such as repetition, reformulation, etc. These are discussed
further in the next section. Most of the moves were not dicult to
categorize, apart from No. 5 (Hands up!) which could be either. I have
classied it as discoursal because the teachers attention seems to be on
the content, not the form of the students response. She repeats the
response by way of acknowledging it and incorporating it into the flow of
discourse, and immediately goes on to invite further suggestions from
the class.

Features of eective When assessing the eectiveness of the teachers follow-up in this
follow-up extract, it seems that there are four specic strategies which the teacher
appears to use particularly well, and one general quality which
characterizes all of her follow-up moves. Of the four strategies, the rst
three relate specically to the discoursal role of the F-move, while the
fourth occurs across both types of follow-up.
1 Reformulation: The teacher makes frequent use of this strategy to
repair a students contribution, and thus provide the class with a
model of correct usage, without interrupting the flow of discourse she
is developing with the class. This can be seen, for example, in moves 6
and 7. In F6, the students response He is telling him now to be under
his control is re-cast (with corrections) in direct speech: Now you are
under my command, with the embellishment You have to do
whatever I want you to do. In F7, the teacher replaces the students
fall down with the more acceptable crash. The teachers
reformulations act as a way of ensuring that the content of an
individual students contribution is availableand also audibleto
the rest of the class. In a sense, the teacher is converting the students
attempts at output into comprehensible input for the whole class. As
Edwards and Mercer (1987: 147) put it:
These reconstructive paraphrases [their term for reformulations]
demonstrate another function of the feedback stage of I-R-F
sequences; they provide an opportunity for the teacher not only to
conrm what the pupils say, but to recast it in a more acceptable
form, more explicit perhaps, or simply couched in a preferred
terminology.
2 Elaboration: In follow-ups 6, 7, 8, and 9, and in part of 10, the teacher
embellishes her reformulations of the students responses by
elaborating on them in some way, as was noted in F6 above. In F8, she
elaborates on the students response that she will pray my God
because it is my nal time by suggesting what she will actually say in
her prayer (shes going to kneel down and say Please God, forgive my
sins). In F10, her elaboration is simply the sound of the student
shouting: Aagh! This device of representing the students ideas in
direct speech is one she uses in four of her ve elaborate acts, and is
clearly designed to help ensure understanding, as well as to add
humour to the proceedings. In addition, by adding to and extending

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the students original responses, the teachers elaborations provide a
linguistically richer source of input for the class, while, at an aective
level, they serve to show that she listens to what the students have to
say with interest.
3 Comment: In the last two follow-ups in the transcript (F10 and 11), the
teacher picks up on a students response (by repeating it) and then
adds a comment of her own, e.g. I dont know if Heaven will hear you
in F11. This is dierent from elaborating in that the teacher is not
directly trying to embellish the meaning of what the student has said
but is simply adding a spontaneous comment of her own. This type of
follow-up seems in fact to be identical to the comment acts noted in
the examples of conversational follow-up taken from Francis and
Hunstons (1992) data. The rst speaker uses the F-move to make a
personal, often humorous response to what the interlocutor has just
said in response to the question in the Initiate move. In the context of
promoting natural and communicative language use in the classroom,
comment acts in teachers F-moves clearly have a signicant part to
play.
4 Repetition: Repetition of individual students contributions, sometimes
derogatorily described as echoing, is used in a number of ways in this
extract. To begin with, it is used as a time-honoured way of
acknowledging a student response, and conrming it as acceptable
(as in F-moves 1, 3, and 4), and in the process, ensuring that all the
students have heard it. In F7, the teacher repeats the students
contribution (the plane would fall down) to conrm the idea but not
the form in which it was expressed. The repetition acts as a way of
contrasting the dispreferred with the preferred item (it would crash),
thus drawing the students attention more directly to it. Finally, in two
of her follow-ups, the teacher uses repetition with rising intonation
patterns for dierent communicative purposes: in F-move 4 she
repeats the students response with a low rising tone to query the
students choice of lexis, and in Move 11, she repeats the students
remark (that shell collapse) with a high rising tone to express surprise
or interest. What is clear from this classroom sequence is that whether
repeating students contributions to conrm, question, or express
surprise, the teacher is making use of a strategy which has sound
pedagogical foundations (see Cullen 1998), and which critics of the
practice might do well to reappraise.
5 Responsiveness: I have taken this term from Jarvis and Robinsons 1997
paper to refer to the general quality the teacher exhibits of listening
and responding meaningfully, and with genuine interest, to the
content of what the student is saying. The follow-up move thus
becomes an authentic, rather than a ritualized response (Thornbury
1996: 282). Jarvis and Robinson (1997: 219) refer to two kinds of
responsiveness: the rst is the minute-by-minute choice of contingent
response to what the pupils have to say, and the ability to use it and
build on it. The second refers to the ability to identify potential
problems and raise them as topics for discussion: Jarvis and Robinson
(ibid.) dene this as the responsiveness that is based on a teachers

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tacit knowledge of her pupils, and her planning and structuring the
learning by decision-making in the classroom. In the Tanzanian
transcript we see both types of responsiveness in evidence in the
teachers follow-up moves. Her various reformulations, elaborations,
and comments are clear examples of the rst kind, while her reaction
in F-move 4 to the students inappropriate choice of the word robber,
and her decision not to introduce the new vocabulary item hijacker at
this particular point in the lesson, seems to be a good example of the
second.

Conclusion In this paper, I have attempted to show the pedagogical importance of


the teachers follow-up move in the context of classroom interaction, by
examining a snapshot of a fairly traditional secondary school classroom
which is perhaps typical of many where English is taught as a foreign or
second language. The snapshot reveals a sequence of classroom
interaction which consists of a chain of I-R-F exchanges led by the
teacher from the front of the class. In this interaction, the teachers
follow-up moves play a crucial part in clarifying and building on the ideas
that the students express in their responses, and in developing a
meaningful dialogue between teacher and class. In doing so, the teacher
supports learning by creating an environment which is rich in language
and humour. Further classroom studies of this nature would be useful to
corroborate the ndings of this particular study with a view to
determining what makes for eective follow-up, and identifying the
salient features of responsiveness. Greater understanding and
knowledge in this area will have important implications for teacher
training and development.
Revised version received November 2000

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Jarvis, J. and M. Robinson. 1997. Analysing Richard Cullen is a Senior Lecturer in the
educational discourse: an exploratory study of Department of Language Studies at Canterbury
teacher response and support to pupils learning. Christ Church University College, where he
Applied Linguistics 18/2: 21228. directs the Diploma TESOL programme. He has
Mercer, N. 1995. The Guided Construction of worked for the British Council on teacher

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education projects in Egypt, Bangladesh, and discourse, phonology, and the teaching and
Tanzania, and has also taught and trained teachers learning of grammar.
in Nepal and Greece. His professional interests Email: rmc1@cant.ac.uk
include teacher and trainer training, classroom

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