Reported thought as (hypothetical) assessment

This conversation analytic study examines the use of reported thought in advice-giving sequences. In particular, the study focuses on how the writing instructor uses reported thought as an interactional resource to provide a critical assessment on student writing. The target practice takes the following format: quotative (e.g., be like) + response particle (e.g., oh, okay, well) + clause (e.g., there's this random image here). The analyses show how the reported thought depicts a reader's real-time reaction to the current issue in student writing as well as to the potential issue to be avoided. Such a depiction provides a case for the instructor's accompanying advice for revision. As the practice of embedding reported thought allows the instructor to displace speakership and respond to student writing as an intended reader, it is used as an instructional tool to “bend space and time” (Barnes and Moss, 2007, p. 142) and substantiate the here-and-now advice. This study has implications for conversational analytic work on reported speech and thought and advice-giving in educational discourse.