Engaging ‘silent’ students in classroom discussions: a micro-analytic view on teachers’ embodied enactments of cold-calling practices

Abstract

Cold-calling has been proposed as an effective engagement strategy to enhance student participation in whole-class discussions. However, calling on students who did not volunteer can also be understood as a face-threat. The ways in which teachers accomplish cold-calling could prove critical as to how cold-calling is received. The linguistic, interactive, and bodily enactment of cold-calling though has not yet been studied. Drawing on multimodal interaction analysis, this paper aims to examine how actual cold-callings are brought about by teachers and students. Based on a collection of 86 instances of cold-calling recorded in two German middle-schools (grade 5) we analyse the linguistic, interactive, and embodied details of teachers’ cold-calling. We show how these serve to frame verbal participation in classroom discourse in two fundamentally different ways: either as collaborative thinking or as a moral obligation. These different enactments of cold-calling are also distinctive with respect to how they position the non-participating students (as more or less competent). Students’ interactive responses to the cold-calling suggest that the different enactments are not equally successful in engaging students in cognitively and discursively challenging tasks.

Keywords:

• Classroom discourse
• engagement
• participation
• conversation analysis
• multimodality
• talk-based pedagogy

Acknowledgments

The research project SPRINT (Interactive language education) was funded by the RAG Stiftung. The research project INTERPASS (“Interactive procedures of establishing matches and divergences for linguistic and microcultural practices”) was funded by the German ministry BMBF (grant 01JC1112; principal investigators: Uta Quasthoff, Susanne Prediger). We thank Marian Morek for anonymising the video stills.

Ethical statement

Ethical review and approval was not required for the study on human participants in accordance with the local legislation and institutional requirements. Written informed consent to participate in this study was provided by the participants’ legal guardian/next of kin.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).