Positive evaluation of student answers in classroom instruction

Abstract

Within the context of teacher/whole-class instruction sequences, researchers have associated teacher evaluation of pupils’ answers to forms of traditional pedagogic discourse, also referred to as ‘triadic dialogue’, ‘monologic discourse’, ‘recitation’ and ‘Initiation-Response-Evaluation (IRE) sequences’. Teacher evaluation has also been associated with pupils’ low levels of participation. Explanations and solutions offered by prior research are mainly based on functional categories of actions, characterizing forms and functions of teacher questions and follow-up moves in IRE sequences. Using Conversation Analysis to investigate collections of positive evaluations in video-recorded lessons in two primary school classes, we propose an interactional explanation of the phenomenon and of its predominant use. We show that teachers systematically select the formats of their positive third-turn receipts not only to evaluate pupils’ answers for their abstract truth value, but also with respect to the role of each question–answer in the whole activity. We demonstrate that, in this way, teachers convey judgements about the question within the activity; thus, adding a constitutive property to the pedagogic practice and providing students with interpretive resources for a common understanding of pedagogic goals and procedures.

Keywords:

• classroom interaction
• Conversation Analysis
• primary teaching
• teacher–student interaction
• teacher talk
• teacher evaluation

Notes

1. ‘We define uptake as occurring when one conversant, for example, a teacher, asks someone else, for example, a student, about something the other person said previously (Collins 1982, quoted in Nystrand et al. 2003, 145).

2. With ‘eh’ is rendered in Italian an interjection that accomplishes many functions (Laurentia Dascalu and Vanelli 1996).

3. There was a small group of miscellaneous formats, including reformulations, which were so infrequent as not to warrant attention in this report.

4. Reasons for the different prosodic packaging of teacher repetitions to convey positive assessment might be associated to language-specific uses of prosody or, also, to the organization of the whole domain of practices involved in conveying positive/negative evaluation of students’ answer. With regard to the latter, in our data, lexical repetition or repetition-involved practices are used to provide a routine positive evaluation of the answer, whereas other non-routine treatments of the answers that convey a milder affiliation or judgements of the answer as wrong, incomplete, inappropriate or vague employ other resources than repetition. Hellermann's study (2003) is different because it compares the prosodic and phonetic realization of repetitions used to do positive evaluations with those conveying judgements other than positive. It would be also wrong to compare our findings to those in Hellermann's paper because the two studies have different purposes: the import of prosody in the IRE exchange in Hellermann's vs. the organization of the domain of positive evaluation in IRE-shaped instruction sequences in our work. Another variable that might be responsible for the differences of our findings in comparison to Hellermann's is the different ages of the students who were recorded.

5. It is worth adding that these observations on the phonetics of teacher positive repeats are also in line with findings from a study by Ogden (2006) on the phonetic resources used to convey agreement/disagreement in ordinary conversation, where the author provides evidence for the existence of a distinct phonetic pattern for agreement in second assessments.

6. In this example the teacher repeats the answer with slightly rising intonation (as indicated by the symbol ¿). In Italian, not differently from English and other languages, repeating the answer with rising intonation might be heard as prompting self-correction. However, attention has to be drawn here to two contextual properties of the interaction, which suggest to exclude this function. First, the fact that the teacher is eliciting responses in a round (see background information provided); the rising intonation indicates suspension and characterizes the answer as one in a series, with other answers to come. Second, and in support of that, it is worth noticing that the same intonation contour is consistently used also to deliver the second unit of the turn, in which the teacher further ratifies the correctness of the answer by announcing that it will be written on the blackboard.

7. The interrogative adverb ‘when’ refers back to prior question in line 1; therefore, here, ‘when’ is elliptical for ‘when he did he change direction?’.

8. See also McHoul who observes that whilst there is no explicit evaluation, ‘(the) answer is nevertheless shown to be acceptable by virtue of the teacher doing a thematic continuation of it’, in McHoul (1990, 357).

9. To our knowledge, there are no studies available on the use of ‘va bene’ in Italian interaction, on which to ground a characterization of this use. However, from a very cursory inspection of a collection of ordinary interaction in Italian telephone calls, we register a very high density of ‘va bene’ in the closing of the calls, especially when speakers make final arrangements.

10. We use here the terms ‘evaluation format’ and ‘evaluation practice’ as referring to the same type of analytical object, to include also ‘zero-evaluation’ cases, in which the teacher does not produce any explicit (lexical) or implicit (phonetic) evaluation-dedicated turn or component, but moves to next question. Thus, although otherwise specified, here we consider these two terms interchangeable.

11. It is worth noting that a study by Koole (2012) based on a corpus of Dutch dyadic teacher–students interaction (ages 12–13) shows very different proportions. In that study, overt evaluations outnumber the other formats by covering the 57% of the 170 teacher evaluations of the sample. We do not have enough evidence to suggest that these different findings might indicate a cultural variation in the distribution of overt evaluation of student answers; especially if we consider that the Italian and Dutch contexts presents also variations concerning variables other than cultural background, such as the setting (dyadic vs. teacher/whole-class) and the students’ age (8/7 vs. 12/13). In our corpus, we did not register any individual variation among the four teachers on this respect. Therefore, we can affirm that this is a commonly used practice.

12. Two studies in particular – Nassaji and Wells (2000) and Nystrand et al. (2003) – have addressed the relationship between the function of teacher third turn in IRE sequences and type of classroom discourse. As argued by Lee (2007), however, in that study, the function of the teacher third turn is defined by means of a predetermined and abstract coding system, whereby a fixed and limited repertoire of possible actions are identified (for instance, evaluation, justification, clarification, etc.) and related to a specific teacher role (primary knower vs. not-knowing interlocutor), types of questions (known-answer vs. genuine or exploratory questions) and classroom discourse modes (monologic vs. dialogic).

13. Note that examples 7 and 8 are variations of the full, verbatim and freestanding format through which teachers may deliver positive evaluations. In those cases, non-vocal conduct accompanied the (verbal) repetition – which, therefore, is otherwise freestanding (i.e. verbally).

14. Here, it is important to understand that ‘girato’ (Cristina's answer in line 28) is a verb (past participle of the verb ‘to turn’), whilst the teacher's question in line 29 concerns the action ‘giro’ (noun, in English ‘a turn’) that has therefore been performed.