Beginning with a consideration of some commonsense and professional conceptions of what a formal situation might comprise, this paper goes on to ask the question: where along a linear array which has its poles in exemplars of formal and informal speech-exchange systems, can classroom talk be placed? Its answer is given in part in the form of rules for the taking of turns in classrooms, these being modifications of those, already established in the literature, for natural conversation. These rules allow for and require that formal classroom situations be constructed so as to involve differential participation rights for parties to the talk depending on their membership of the social identity-class 'student/teacher'. The analyses which follow examine some of the applications and violations of these rules found in audio and video recordings of naturally occurring classroom talk (and transcripts thereof) for their orderliness as orientations to these rules. It is argued that the rules provide a systematic basis for the 'feelings' of 'formality' that researchers and participants have of such situations and that a decision as to the 'formality' or otherwise of a social situation can be predicated on the degree of pre-allocation involved in the organization of turns at talk in the situation. (Configuration and distance in interaction, conversational analysis, turn-taking systems, classroom language, sociology of education; British and Australian English).

This article is a conversation-analytic investigation of the forms of organization that allow specific items of classroom discourse -words, phrases, up to whole turns at talk -to be altered by subsequent items. Central to the article is an analytic distinction between self-correction and other-correction, that is, between repair sequences in which the speaker of the initial item (the "trouble source") makes the correction and instances in which this is performed by one of her or his interlocutors (cf. Jefferson 1974; Schegloff et al. I977). The classroom case is analytically interesting both for its own sake and also on account of research speculations that other-correction should be more frequent in adult-child talk than in other genres of conversation. However, in order to provide an analysis of the problem sensitive to the particularities of the classroom, it is necessary to look not merely at corrections, but at the larger repair trajectories in which they occur. These trajectories consist of corrections plus their prior initiations, the latter being means by which speakers mark out some item as requiring correction. Once the social identities of teacher and student are mapped against selfand other-forms of initiation and correction, it is possible to discern some of the structural preferences of classroom discourse along the general axis of repair.

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Drawing upon conversation analysis and critical discourse analysis, and in the frame of what is currently called discursive psychology, we open up a significant macro-social problem -indeed a global problem -to inspection at a local level by reference to a naturally-occurring instance of talk-in-interaction. The problem is the documented increase in diagnoses of ADHD (AttentionDeficit/Hyperactivity Disorder) in recent years -particularly for boys, particularly in Anglophone countries, and particularly by reference to schoolbased conduct -and its consequent 'treatment' by amphetamines (including Ritalin [methylphenidate]) and related medications (Singh, 2002a). The local instance of talk-in-interaction is a transcript of a diagnostic session involving a young boy, his parents and a paediatrician. We aim to show that the local instance can shed light on just how routine and mundane it is for children to be positively diagnosed and medicated merely on presentation for the possibility of the 'disorder', even when parents are manifestly sceptical about (even resistive to) the diagnosis and its methodological grounds.