Displaying knowledge through interrogatives in student-initiated sequences

Abstract

This article presents an analysis of student initiatives in whole-class interactions. While prior research on question–answer sequences in classroom interactions has shown students to be rather passive recipients of knowledge, this article focuses on aspects of classroom interaction where students take a more active role. Following a conversation analytical approach to classroom interaction, this study investigates how students use interrogatives to initiate interactional sequences. The study draws on video recordings of 50 lessons, each about 45 min long, from three different upper secondary classrooms in Norway. It is argued that through the utterance design of the initiating interrogatives, the students present themselves as ‘someone who knows something’. The initiating interrogatives display epistemic stance (e.g. Heritage 2012a, b) in different ways; consequently, the student-initiated interrogative sequences perform different types of actions, from requests for clarifications to potential corrections. Thus, the student-initiating sequences contribute to both the topical and interactional development of whole-class interactions. This study contributes to the research field of classroom interaction as it nuances the interactional and epistemic asymmetry of classroom interaction; it also investigates a less examined interactional structure in classrooms: the student-initiated sequence.

Keywords:

• student-initiated sequences
• classroom interaction
• conversation analysis
• interrogatives
• epistemics

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the students and teachers who allowed me into their classrooms. I would also like to thank Anne Marie Landmark Dalby, Karianne Skovholt and Jan Svennevig for helpful comments on various drafts of this article. A special thanks to the anonymous reviewers for insightful comments that helped me improve this article considerably.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. This is illustrated in this present study’s data by student comments, such as ‘That helped me a lot’ and ‘Don’t you know that, teacher?’, following inconclusive teacher responses to students’ questions (e.g. teacher answers such as ‘I don’t know’ or ‘I’m not sure’).

2. There is actually a follow-up question (‘what about flies’) from one of the other students after the sequence-closing ‘yes’ in line 27, but the teacher does not follow up on this initiative.

3. The minimal responses uttered by the student in Extract 4 are continuers more in line with the confirming statement uttered by the student in Extract 3 (line 27) than the ‘change-of-state-token’ in Extract 1.

4. ‘Det derre’ is not easily translated into English. While ‘det’ on its own could be translated into ‘that’, ‘derre’ is the part of the expression ‘det derre’, which most clearly represents the epistemic hedge (i.e. expresses the psychological distance to the rest of the utterance).

5. The two-second gap between the teacher’s assertion and the student’s initiating interrogative indicates that the student orients to the preference for self-correction in classrooms (see also Kääntä 2014).

6. The frequency of student initiatives compared to teacher initiatives is not investigated here, but my data does not indicate that teachers’ interactional authority is generally weakened. A possible exception to this might be self-selections by students, which are far more extensive in my data than shown – for example in Mchoul’s (1978) research, and also pointed out by Sahlström (1999). However, more than 30 years has elapsed between Mchoul’s (1978) research and the present study.

Additional information

Funding

My research, as a part of my PhD thesis, was funded by Buskerud and Vestfold University College.