The History Boys - Representing Speech

We know that the play is set in a school because Bennett uses words that link to school life such as "classroom", "a schoolmaster", "general studies" and "knowledge". On pages four and five Hector has the most dialogue, this shows he has the most authority, Bennett uses an elliptical style, cutting out certain phrases or words to create spoken colloquial language; he also uses a lot of punctuation, such as full stops or ellipses and the even the word "pause", to create pauses within the speech showing realistic spoken language. There is a lot of back-channeling between the boys and Hector and Bennett uses adjacency pairs to show that the boys are mainly responding to Hector (the first person) or the boys sometimes ask questions. They have a conversation with hector and the minimal overlapping in the conversation shows who has more power between the characters, there seems to be quite a bit of turn taking which makes the speech seem unrealistic however Bennett uses actions (stage directions) to interrupt or flow with speech "points at Posner" and "Posner looks up the word in the dictionary", this creates pauses within the speech. Also the use of repetition from Hector after Akthar shows emphasis on the word "A.E. Houseman" and Hector also repeatedly congratulates them on them passing their A-Levels. Not a lot of conjunctions are used within the speech on page four and five, it is mainly short sentences including pauses however the characters speech is fluent.

In the open dialogue, the spoken language used shows Hector is an authoritative character, As the boys help him take off his motorbike clothing they speak to him in french, from this we learn Hector has a close, friendly relationship with the boys. Through Hector's language we learn he is cynical towards A-Levels, he describes them as "your cheats visa" and belittles them "proudly jingling your A-Levels". You can tell he is a non-conformative teacher. The language Bennett has chosen shows Hector is intelligent as he uses sophisticated polysyllabic lexis such as "euphemistic", also you learn he has a passion for knowledge as he describes it as "precious". Bennett doesn't add any conjunctions in Hectors speech, he mainly uses short sentences to create an affect.