“we !MUST! have a first aid kit” – On the argumentative potential of prosody in consensual discussions among primary school childrenProsody has proved to be an important means of contextualising and marking statements as argumentatively meaningful – and therefore persuasively functional – for the process of reaching an agreement in group discussions. This paper shows how primary school children use prosodic devices to mark implicit arguments through accentuation, to compensate for missing reasoning, to enhance the persuasive strength of an argument or to mark collaborative reasoning. In contrast to explicit lexical markers, prosody is understood as an implicit resource, which allows younger children to engage in discussions and to successfully persuade others.
In a growing number of schools, class councils are a regularly practiced interactional format to support pupils’ participation in decision making processes as well as the development of social competence. Whether class councils should also be used to resolve social conflicts, however, is controversial. While the class council is viewed as a suitable opportunity to discuss the pupils’ diverging views in many studies, others are highly critical of this idea, citing the potential effects of conflicting requirements. In this article, we take a conversation analytical approach to how the rhetorical practices and social competence of 9- to 15-year-old pupils and the teacher involvement affect the ways in which conflicts are resolved. Focusing on practices of addressing and social positioning, we analyse how the complex requirements of collective conflict resolution are interactionally dealt with during class councils. Our analysis shows that, on a structural level, the participants are confronted with three facets of processing and resolving social conflicts: reconstruction, resolution and organization. Against the backdrop of these core categories, we propose several practical considerations aimed at increasing teachers’ awareness of the interactional requirements of collaborative conflict resolution.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.