Tacit Communicative Style and Cultural Attunement in Classroom Interaction

Abstract

This article examines the effect of a teacher's cultural representations and tacit communicative style on interactive practices in the classroom. We compare two second-grade classrooms constituted predominantly by Latino immigrant children and teachers with differing cultural representations of education. Through video and acoustic analyses of matched samples of classroom activities we document a discourse style that is more group oriented in one of the classrooms and more individual oriented in the other classroom. Our analyses show that the group-oriented communicative style is characterized by greater cooperative overlap and chorusing, more student self-selection, less teacher selection and less arm raising, less confirmatory repetition by the teacher, more frequent collaborative completion and more criticism, and less praise. Using both quantitative and qualitative methods, we go on to describe evidence of greater cultural attunement between teacher and students when they share a common tacit communicative style. The principal index of attunement highlighted by our results is student participation. We also suggest that patterns of interactive timing in classroom discourse provide insight into processes of cultural attunement and conflict.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This research was supported in part by a postdoctoral fellowship awarded to the first author at the FPR-UCLA Center for Culture, Brain and Development at the University of California, Los Angeles. We thank the Foundation for Psychocultural Research for the funding that made this fellowship and research possible. We are also grateful to the teachers, students, and parents whose videos were analyzed. These data were collected by Maricella Corea-Chavez and Adrienne Isaac for their honors theses in the UCLA Department of Psychology. We also thank Sarah Dodd for her research assistance and express our appreciation to Marjorie H. Goodwin, Frederick Erickson, and Laura Sterponi for substantial input and guidance in this study.