The research reported in this document shows how two junior college counselors perform "explaining what we are doing now" differently, depending on the social personage or identity of the student, and identifies the social meaning of different forms of "explaining what we are doing now." It shows how in formulating, counselors can say more than they mean or mean more than they say, implicitly communicating to the student the counselor's expectations regarding the student's ability to do what he is told to do during the encounter, to understand advice given, or to achieve a desired future goal. This report is divided into three sections. Section 1 defines key terms and issues. Section 2 illustrates two types of formulation--"explicit" and "implicit"--by examples of utterances and by quantitative summaries of differences in the form of doing formulation. Section 3 presents implications of our "micro-ethnographic" analysis of school talk for a general theory on interethnic relations. (SW)