Pursuing a question: Reinitiating IRE sequences as a method of instruction

When an instructor initiates an Initiation-Response-Evaluation (IRE) instructional sequence, problems may become evident in the recipients’ response to those questions that suggest the source of the trouble may be with how recipients understand the instructor's question rather than the adequacy of the response. One strategy for attending to this problem is for the instructor to pursue a correct response by withholding explicit evaluation in the third slot of the IRE sequence and instead producing a revised version of the sequence-initiating question. Question revision or correction on the part of the instructor affords recipients the opportunity to produce revised responses as evidence that they also properly ‘understand’ what made the revised query relevant in the first place. In our analysis, we show that this strategy of pursuing a correct response by offering successive corrections/revisions of an IRE-initiating query treats understanding as the “convergence between the ‘doers’ of an action or bit of conduct and its recipients, as coproducers of an increment of interactional and social reality” (Schegloff, 1992: 1299).