Chapter 9. Creating involvement in a large Japanese lecture

In this paper, I investigate how a professor fits her story of a famous haiku into the structure of a large lecture and adapts verbal/ nonverbal resources to create involvement. I demonstrate how she uses (1) knowledge questions to establish the tellability of her story, (2) final particles yo ne ‘I tell you, you know’ and ne ‘isn’t it’ and the epistemic modal desyo? ‘right?’ together with pictorial and deictic gestures to request confirmation of common knowledge necessary to understand the circumstances of the haiku, and (3) internal evaluation (including contrasting real events with hypothetical ones, repetition, onomatopoeia, changes in pitch, iconic and beat gestures, and co-construction) to involve her students in the story. Finally, she gives her students a variety of perspectives to consider in their interpretation of the haiku, using quotation on several levels including the haiku itself, the voice of the character in the haiku, her own personal evaluation of the haiku (shifting from distal to direct style) and the voice of hypothetical characters in events that did not actually occur. She also involves her students and gets them to evaluate the events on their own by not making the point of her story/ the haiku explicit until the end of her story.