Members in society make ubiquitous use of examples as a resource to engage in their everyday and specialized activities. This paper takes the resourcefulness of exemplification as a topic of inquiry by focusing on the formulative phrase “for example,” investigating its interactional work within the analytic framework of ethnomethodology and conversation analysis. The data used consists of 11 h of video-recordings of English as a Foreign Language classroom lessons over a semester. We conceptualize exemplification as a holistic configuration (gestalt) where its work consists in the production and recognition of a pair, namely the exemplifying component and the exemplified component. We demonstrate how the teacher and students position the formulative phrase as a recognizable practice for the organization of two distinct actions: accounting for one’s opinion and confirming an understanding. Our findings also present the different forms of exemplification, including elaborate narrative constructions, single terms or phrases, and specimen performances.

社会成员普遍使用例子作为参与日常和专业活动的资源。本文以例证的足智多谋为探究主题，重点关注表述性短语“例如”，在民族方法论和对话分析的分析框架内研究其互动工作。使用的数据包括一个学期 11 小时的英语作为外语课堂课程的视频记录。我们将例证概念化为一种整体配置（格式塔），其工作在于生成和识别一对，即例证成分和被例证成分。我们展示了教师和学生如何将表述性短语定位为组织两种不同行动的可识别实践：解释自己的观点和确认理解。我们的研究结果还呈现了不同形式的例证，包括精心设计的叙事结构、单个术语或短语以及样本表演。