This article takes a conversation analytic approach to the often employed notions of 'openended or authentic questions' in classroom interaction. We analyzed the, as we called them, open invitations teachers utter after reading a piece of text during whole-class discussions in 4 Dutch upper primary school classes, of which 2 were followed for a longer period of time. Our data show that these invitations vary in openness. We found 4 different types: 1) invitations projecting (a series of) objectively true or false answers, 2) invitations projecting specific response types, 3) invitations that have a restricted referent but do not project specific response types, and 4) topic soliciting invitations giving room to various contributions. Virtually all invitations resulted in fitted responses. The subsequent interactions following the less open invitations typically resulted in series of parallel responses, whereas the more open invitations typically yielded discussions or the collaborative answering of clarification questions.
This paper reports on a conversation analytic study into the pass-on turns that teachers produce to return the floor to the class following one student's contribution, in the context of whole-class discussions around texts in 4 th grade history and geography lessons. These pass-on turns are remarkable, as the teachers take the turn in order to convey that they will not be responding, but are instead giving their students the opportunity to do so. Our bottom-up analyses allowed us to identify different practices and their projections, and revealed their effects on the ensuing responses. Whereas minimal pass-on practices do not alter the sequential implications of the preceding student turn and typically lead to responses to the student turn, more elaborate practices do slightly alter the sequential implications and mostly lead to responses to the pass-on turn itself, or to an earlier turn produced by the teacher. The analyses show that, although the pass-on turns seem to sustain the Teacher-Student-Teacher-Student participation pattern, this does not hinder the activity of having a whole-class discussion in which students discuss the topic at hand and critically consider and challenge the contributions of their classmates.
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Data from whole-class discussions in Dutch upper primary school show that teachers occasionally explicitly take downgraded epistemic stances through epistemic disclaimers such as 'ik weet het niet' (English: I don't know (it)), which contrasts with their institutionally assigned epistemic authority. In the current study, we have collected turns in which such epistemic disclaimers occur, and analysed them using conversation analysis. In our analyses, we focused on the positions of the turns in which epistemic disclaimers occur, and on the varying ways in which these turns influence the subsequent course of interaction. We have found that teachers' epistemic disclaimers occur in initiating turns, facilitating student participation, but also in responsive turns. The latter vary in the extent to which they facilitate participation, ranging from facilitating student participation in a similar way to the initiating turns, to blocking further student contributions altogether. This study furthermore demonstrates that teachers employ epistemic disclaimers to navigate two teacher roles, namely those of a teacher with epistemic authority, and of a facilitator of whole class-discussions.
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