In "Language, the Learner and the School", Douglas Barnes recognised that intonation was important to classroom interaction but also acknowledged that his own research team did not choose to analyse it. This article presents instances of classroom talk about poetry and reflects on them using Barnes' concepts of pupil participation, exploratory…

This article considers an exchange between pupils in response to heard poetry, approaching it through a "conversation analytic mentality" informed by the theories of Basil Bernstein. Using his terms, it describes an existing "pedagogic device" of poetry study for schools, to which responses under discussion do not easily correlate. This is more…