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.