Cécile Petitjean

Laughing and smiling to manage trouble in French-language classroom interaction

This article deals with communicative functions of laughter and smiling in the classroom studied using a conversation analytical approach. Analysing a corpus of video-recorded French first-language lessons, we show how students sequentially organise laughter and smiling, and use them to preempt, solve or assess a problematic action. We also focus on the link between laughter and smiling in this context, showing how these resources differently index seriousness of trouble. The article highlights the fact that students adapt their interactional competences (i.e. laughter and smiles) to a specific institutional context (i.e. trouble in classroom interaction). Through laughter and smiling, students display the actions they consider appropriate or inappropriate for the classroom, and produce and monitor their institutional identities moment by moment. This is an illustration of institutional adjustment of interactional competences, since knowing how and when it is appropriate to laugh and smile in an institutional context is relevant for students not only at an educational level but also for their future integration into the workforce. This study also offers pedagogical outputs for teachers’ practice, since it helps them to better understand the interactional functions of students’ laughter/smiles and how students thus manage troubles in learning settings.

Social Representations of Turn-Taking in Classrooms: From Compulsory to Post-Compulsory Schooling in French-Speaking Switzerland.

This study focuses on the interactional processes by which participants make institutionally relevant some ways to take turns in the classroom, which is one of the first places where youth have to respect institutional constraints regarding their interactional practices. These constraints, which are reconfigured online through conversationalists’ activities, create expectations in terms of interactional competences notably concerning turn-taking, which is important because of the intrinsic link between opportunities for participation and opportunities for learning. I aim to complement the extensive literature which describes turn-taking in the classroom by focusing on the social knowledge that participants interactionally co-produce to place turn-taking strategies on an institutional value-scale and to agree with the ‘right’ way to take a turn in the classroom, in compulsory and post-compulsory schooling (i.e. do competences deployed at the lower level satisfy those promoted at the upper one?). I propose to apply conversation analysis to the study of social representations. By observing the confrontation between the opportunities for participation proposed by the teacher and how students interpret them, I shed light on the recurrent processes of evaluation that participants co-produce and thus social representations of turn-taking which emerge from them.

Expressing Personal Opinions in Classroom Interactions: The Role of Humor and Displays of Uncertainty

We set out to uncover how young people deal with the challenges of expressing personal opinions in the classroom. Based on a corpus of video-recorded French L1 lessons in a secondary school in Switzerland, we scrutinize the interactional resources students put to use to do so, among which humor and claims of uncertainty feature as a means of dealing with the potentially delicate nature of opinion expression. We show how the expression of personal opinions and related resources are responded to in the classroom, both by teachers and by peers. The study sheds light onto students’ interactional competence by documenting the accountable ways in which, when expressing personal opinions, they subtly balance between assertiveness and uncertainty in response to the local circumstantial details of the ongoing interaction.

Introduction: Interactional Competences in Institutional Settings – Young People Between School and Work

This chapter introduces the main topic of the present volume: the demands that various institutional settings put on young people’s interactional competences. The chapter first offers a critical overview of the existing empirical research on the topic and discusses the relevance of the notion of interactional competence for understanding social interactional practices, larger institutional environments and how people navigate these. The chapter then presents findings of the large-scale interdisciplinary research project that motivated the present collection (i.e., the IC-You project), and which many of the contributions in this volume stem from, addressing the role of interactional competences in a range of emblematic institutional settings on young people’s pathway between school and work. The chapter closes by presenting the contributions to this volume.