The social interaction concern with the details of interaction practices has not meant that
the societal role of these practices has not been attended to. The critical tradition of
education research has a social interaction counterpart in the work of for example the
German linguists Ehlich and Rehbein. They went into the classroom and analysed their
recordings for ways in which classroom interaction is reproductive of societal relations.
Different from researchers in the same era, their question was not how social class gets
reproduced, but how schooling and classroom interaction as its basic practice, manages to
reproduce societal practices such as modes of production. Not only were they among the
firsts to analyse the Initiation – Response – Evaluation (IRE) sequence discussed above, but
they provided a critical analysis of this sequence.