Piera Margutti

On Designedly Incomplete Utterances: What Counts as Learning for Teachers and Students in Primary Classroom Interaction

The article analyzes a variety of Koshiks (2002) Designedly Incomplete Utterances (DIU) as they are produced in whole-class, teacher-led instruction sequences held in 2 third-year groups in an Italian primary school. This device, one of whose basic pedagogic functions is to solicit displays of knowledge from students in the shape of utterance completion, is a recurrent feature of teacher–student interaction in this setting. The study focuses on one specific and locally managed use of the device, whereby the teachers orientation to the pedagogic goals of the organization of interaction surfaces in features of talk. I found systematic features in the construction of what I call main-clause DIUs, which teachers recurrently use to cast students as learners, by treating their verbal behavior as providing evidence that some type of learning has occurred in prior talk. The findings provide grounds for a critique of the Initiation-Response-Evaluation model and for a characterization of questioning in instruction sequences, both of which account for the specific institutional relevancies of interaction in this setting.

Positive evaluation of student answers in classroom instruction

Within the context of teacher/whole-class instruction sequences, researchers have associated teacher evaluation of pupils’ answers to forms of traditional pedagogic discourse, also referred to as ‘triadic dialogue’, ‘monologic discourse’, ‘recitation’ and ‘Initiation-Response-Evaluation (IRE) sequences’. Teacher evaluation has also been associated with pupils’ low levels of participation. Explanations and solutions offered by prior research are mainly based on functional categories of actions, characterizing forms and functions of teacher questions and follow-up moves in IRE sequences. Using Conversation Analysis to investigate collections of positive evaluations in video-recorded lessons in two primary school classes, we propose an interactional explanation of the phenomenon and of its predominant use. We show that teachers systematically select the formats of their positive third-turn receipts not only to evaluate pupils’ answers for their abstract truth value, but also with respect to the role of each question–answer in the whole activity. We demonstrate that, in this way, teachers convey judgements about the question within the activity; thus, adding a constitutive property to the pedagogic practice and providing students with interpretive resources for a common understanding of pedagogic goals and procedures.

Introduction to the Special Issue on Apologies in Discourse

Apologies are perhaps one of the most ubiquitous and frequent “speech acts” in public discourse and in social interactions. The newspapers daily carry reports of apologies sought and given, avoided...