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.
This paper reports on a conversation analytic study of problem-solving interactions during shared reading at three kindergartens in the Netherlands. It illustrates how teachers and pupils discuss book characters' problems that arise in the events in the picture books. A close analysis of the data demonstrates that problem-solving interactions do not only occur when directly asked for by the teacher; more importantly, pupils are found to be oriented to problem-solving without being explicitly invited to do so. Our analyses show that shared reading offers pupils room for hypothesising where teachers and pupils can discuss possible solutions for the problems experienced by the book characters. By using problem-solving to talk and think about problematic book-related events, pupils from 4 to 6 years old practise basic elements of problem-solving that are important from a developmental perspective.
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