Displays of Epistemic Access: Student Responses to Teacher Explanations

Abstract

This article presents an analysis of classroom encounters in which teachers explain mathematics problems to individual students. In these encounters, the students produce different displays of epistemic access, including displays of knowing and displays of understanding. This article argues in the first place that displays of knowing and displays of understanding are different interactional objects that come in different sequential positions. In the second place, it argues that some sequences have a preference for a claim of epistemic access, while others have a preference for a demonstration.

I thank two anonymous reviewers for their comments and generous suggestions on an earlier draft of this article.

Notes

¹ All names of students have been anonymized.

² Students' repair initiations tend to be answered not with another teacher discourse unit, but seem to change the interaction into a dialogue organization in which the teacher asks the student questions.

³ Within the wider fields of education and educational psychology, these preexpansion questions are often analyzed as “scaffolds” (e.g., Mercer, 1995).

⁴ This extract shows that explanation activities can also have postexpansions (Schegloff, 2007). If the base sequence in this extract is the teacher's question and the student's correct answer to the assignment (lines 16–18), then the first postexpansion is the teacher's positive assessment of this answer (line 19). A second postexpansion is the teacher's teasing comment on the difficulty of this assignment (line 21).

⁵ Another good reason why one should take care not to let external logic decide whether an answer in interaction is correct is that teachers may be wrong. When Utrecht University colleagues in mathematics education started to collect videorecorded classroom data, they found to their horror that many teachers teach incorrect math.

⁶ In Margutti's data, teacher questions with two candidate answers always have the preferred answer in final position (2006, p. 329), which seems to be in line with Sacks's (1987) “preference for contiguity.” In Extract 24, however, the preferred answer (“up” ) is in first position. It is conceivable that this order shows an orientation to another constraint which has up precede down, in the same way that left precedes right.