Audience Design in Collaborative Dialogue between Teachers and Students

ABSTRACT

When two people interact, reference presentation is shaped with the intention of supporting addressee understanding, allowing for ease of acceptance, thus minimizing overall collaborative effort. To date, analysis of such audience design has focused largely on adult–adult or adult–child interaction but seldom on adult–teenager interaction, including teacher–student interaction. An experiment was conducted in a British school in which teachers and students interacted to establish a reference for abstract tangram figures. Teachers were able to account for the students’ increased ability to behave in a more adult-like collaborative way with dialogue features similar to those in adult–adult contexts. Set apart was dialogue with young students, where teachers continued to guide the interaction by producing lengthier descriptions and by encouraging participation. Dialogue with young students differs from that with other teachers in terms of the amount of effort put into the interaction and in how this effort is distributed and shared among dialogue partners.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1. It is important to highlight here that whereas year 7 students are required to wear a uniform, year 12 students are not. This might have made the difference between both age groups more salient to the teachers playing the role of directors in the current study. We return to this point in the discussion.

2. As highlighted here, we tried to make sure that the participants did not know each other well before the experiment. Nonetheless, this was not always possible, as the participants worked or studied in the same school. Thus, in the ST/ST condition, 6 pairs knew each other before the experiment; in the ST/Y12 condition, 5 pairs knew each other before the experiment; in the ST/Y7 condition, one pair knew each other before the experiment. To check that this did not affect the results of the experiment, a series of additional analyses was conducted in parallel to the main analyses reported hereafter, with prior knowledge as an additional independent variable. Only the data from the ST/ST and ST/Y12 conditions were included in the analyses. Indeed, there were not enough pairs who knew each other prior to the experiment in the ST/Y7 condition to include the data from this condition in the analysis. We found that only the probability of the director introducing the reference was influenced by prior knowledge: in the ST/ST condition, the director was less likely to introduce the reference when he or she knew the matcher beforehand. However, this cannot explain the results obtained in this study. Indeed, as detailed below, directors were less likely to introduce the reference in the ST/Y7 condition (where most pairs did not know each other prior to the experiment) than in the ST/ST condition, especially in later trials. Thus, these results cannot be attributed to the fact that more participants knew each other in the ST/ST condition, as this would have led the directors in this condition to introduce the references less often than in the ST/Y7 condition.

3. No double-coding was performed on the other DVs included in this study, as they were computed automatically (i.e., number of words and speech turns produced and time taken to complete the task).