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A discourse analysis of teacher-student classroom interactions

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A discourse analysis of teacher-student classroom interactions

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Content A DISCOURSE ANALYSIS OF TEACHER-STUDENT CLASSROOM INTERACTIONS by Michael Andrew Shepherd A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (LINGUISTICS) August 2010 Copyright 2010 Michael Andrew Shepherd ii Dedication To my mother, who notes that you’ll never see a five-year-old who isn’t thrilled about starting kindergarten, and wonders why so many of them lose that along the way. iii Acknowledgments I would like to thank my advisor, Ed Finegan, for introducing me to linguistic research whose potential goes beyond the satisfaction of intellectual curiosity. His good humor, endless patience, and invaluable guidance in all aspects of academic and non- academic life have made this journey one of my most rewarding. I would also like to express my gratitude to the other members of my dissertation committee—Robert Rueda and Carmen Silva-Corvalán—whose thought-provoking questions and suggestions have helped me view my project in new ways and have made my work much broader and richer than it otherwise would have been. Special thanks are due to the principal, teachers, parents, students, and school district officials who made it possible for me to video-record classroom interactions for this project. It is my sincere hope that this line of research will ultimately benefit them and others like them in the years to come. Finally, I would like to acknowledge the support of my friends and colleagues. I am especially grateful to Ya-Shu Liang, who encouraged me to embrace my identity as a linguist; Sarah Ouwayda, who would read what I wrote and give me the feedback I would have given if I were an outside reader; Joyce Perez, who supplied me with all the advice, information, and candy I could ever ask for; and Michal Temkin Martínez, who reminded me never to lose sight of what’s really important. Last but not least, thanks are due to my parents for always loving and supporting me and for being proud of me even though I’ll probably never be a “real” doctor. iv Table of Contents Dedication........................................................................................................................... ii Acknowledgments.............................................................................................................. iii List of Tables ..................................................................................................................... vi List of Figures......................................................................................................................x Abstract.............................................................................................................................. xi Chapter 1 – Introduction ......................................................................................................1 Chapter 2 – Literature Review.............................................................................................7 2.1 Teacher-Initiated Interactions................................................................................7 2.1.1 Floor allocation methods and their adjacency-pair structure.......................8 2.1.2 Relative prevalence of the three floor-allocation methods ........................10 2.1.3 Teacher control and triadic dialogue..........................................................11 2.1.4 Criticisms of triadic dialogue.....................................................................13 2.1.5 Teacher control versus student participation .............................................15 2.2 Student-Initiated Interactions...............................................................................16 2.2.1 Bidding to speak ........................................................................................16 2.2.2 Calling out..................................................................................................20 2.3 Overview of the Present Study ............................................................................24 Chapter 3 – Method ...........................................................................................................27 3.1 Participants...........................................................................................................27 3.2 Materials..............................................................................................................28 3.3 Recording Procedures..........................................................................................28 3.3.1 Mitigating the observer effect....................................................................29 3.3.2 Other considerations in recording..............................................................30 3.4 Transcription Procedures.....................................................................................31 3.4.1 Macro-level considerations in transcription...............................................31 3.4.2 Micro-level considerations in transcription ...............................................34 3.4.3 Summary of transcript layout and content.................................................35 3.5 Coding Procedures...............................................................................................38 3.5.1 Coding teacher-initiated interactions .........................................................38 3.5.2 Coding student-initiated interactions.........................................................42 3.6 Analysis Procedures.............................................................................................47 3.6.1 Analysis of teacher-initiated interactions...................................................47 3.6.2 Analysis of student-initiated interactions...................................................47 v Chapter 4 – Results Concerning Teacher-Initiated Interactions ........................................49 4.1 Individual Nominations, Invitations to Bid, and Invitations to Reply.................49 4.1.1 From individual nominations to invitations to bid.....................................50 4.1.2 Making invitations to bid work..................................................................57 4.1.3 The role of invitations to reply...................................................................63 4.2 More on the Adjacency-Pair Structure of Teacher-Initiated Interactions............65 4.2.1 Insertion sequences....................................................................................67 4.2.2 Preference organization of students’ responses .........................................74 4.2.3 Preference organization of teachers’ third turns ........................................77 4.3 Chapter Summary ................................................................................................83 Chapter 5 – Results Concerning Student-Initiated Interactions.........................................84 5.1 Hypothesis 1 and Bids to Speak...........................................................................84 5.1.1 Bids to speak accepted with constraining discourse..................................87 5.1.2 Bids to speak accepted openly ...................................................................97 5.1.3 Unacknowledged bids to speak................................................................102 5.2 Hypothesis 2 and Calling Out............................................................................107 5.2.1 The numbers.............................................................................................109 5.2.2 Requests, repairs, relevant contributions, and ‘others’............................111 5.2.3 Tacit acceptance of rule violation............................................................121 5.3 Chapter Summary..............................................................................................122 Chapter 6 – Conclusions ..................................................................................................124 6.1 Theoretical Relevance and Effectiveness of the Discourse Strategies ..............124 6.1.1 The change from individual nominations to invitations to bid................124 6.1.2 Students’ linguistic marking of uncertain responses ...............................126 6.1.3 Teachers’ tacit acceptance of classroom rule violation ...........................127 6.2 Looking toward the Future.................................................................................129 References........................................................................................................................131 Appendices: Appendix A – Seating Charts ....................................................................................137 Appendix B – Key to Transcript Notations and Symbols..........................................140 vi List of Tables Table 2.1 Adjacency-pair analysis of Lemke’s (1990: 28-29) example........................19 Table 2.2 Example of a called-out contribution (from Mehan 1979: 146)....................20 Table 2.3 Example of a called-out contribution (from Mehan 1979: 147)....................21 Table 2.4 Example of a called-out contribution (from Mehan 1979: 142)....................22 Table 2.5 Example of a called-out contribution (from Mehan 1979: 142-143).............23 Table 3.1 Schedule of Observation and Recording Sessions.........................................29 Table 3.2 Excerpt showing the layout and content of the four transcript columns........36 Table 3.3 Excerpt showing an individual nomination ...................................................39 Table 3.4 Excerpt showing an invitation to bid .............................................................41 Table 3.5 Excerpt showing an invitation to reply ..........................................................41 Table 3.6 Excerpt showing a bid to speak .....................................................................43 Table 3.7 Excerpt showing audible bids to respond ......................................................44 Table 3.8 Excerpt showing a student’s calling out ........................................................45 Table 3.9 Excerpt showing a non-verbal reprimand ......................................................46 Table 3.10 Excerpt showing a reprimand that references the violation...........................46 Table 3.11 Excerpt showing a reprimand that references the preferred behavior ...........46 Table 3.12 Excerpt showing a reprimand for not paying attention..................................46 Table 4.1 Excerpt showing a teacher’s framing bidding to answer as a form of participation .............................................................................................53 Table 4.2 Excerpt showing a teacher’s framing bidding to answer as a display of knowledge............................................................................................54 vii Table 4.3 Excerpt in which a teacher frames students’ bidding to speak as indicating that they have formulated responses.......................................55 Table 4.4 Excerpt showing a teacher’s monitoring students’ understanding through bids .............................................................................................56 Table 4.5 Excerpt showing the teacher’s reminding students to bid non-verbally........58 Table 4.6 Excerpt showing students’ awareness that audible bids are not accepted....................................................................................................60 Table 4.7 Excerpt showing students’ awareness that audible bids are not accepted....................................................................................................62 Table 4.8 Excerpt showing a teacher’s monitoring students’ engagement through their (lack of) response to an invitation to reply.........................64 Table 4.9 Excerpt showing an insertion sequence within an individual nomination ...............................................................................................68 Table 4.10 Excerpt showing an insertion sequence within the first adjacency pair of an invitation to bid...............................................................................69 Table 4.11 Excerpt showing an insertion sequence within the second adjacency pair of an invitation to bid........................................................................70 Table 4.12 Excerpt showing one type of insertion sequence within the second adjacency pair of the triadic-dialogue macrostructure.............................72 Table 4.13 Excerpt showing another type of insertion sequence within the second adjacency pair of the triadic-dialogue macrostructure.................73 Table 4.14 Excerpt showing a student’s giving a dispreferred (incorrect) response....................................................................................................75 Table 4.15 Excerpt showing a student’s giving a preferred (correct) response...............75 Table 4.16 Excerpt contrasting dispreferred and preferred third turns............................79 Table 4.17 Excerpt showing students’ bidding in response to a dispreferred third turn ...........................................................................................................81 viii Table 4.18 Excerpt showing a teacher’s using a request for confirmation to expose the problem with a student’s response.........................................82 Table 5.1 Adjacency-pair analysis of Lemke’s (1990: 28-29) example........................87 Table 5.2 Excerpt showing the first bid to speak accepted with constraining discourse ..................................................................................................88 Table 5.3 Excerpt showing the teacher’s response to Kayla’s contribution ..................91 Table 5.4 Excerpt showing the second bid to speak accepted with constraining discourse ..................................................................................................93 Table 5.5 Excerpt showing the third bid to speak accepted with constraining discourse ..................................................................................................95 Table 5.6 Excerpt showing a frame-shift.......................................................................96 Table 5.7 Excerpt showing the first openly accepted bid to speak................................98 Table 5.8 Excerpt showing the second openly accepted bid to speak ...........................99 Table 5.9 Excerpt showing the teacher’s explicitly postponing a bid to speak ...........100 Table 5.10 Excerpt showing the third openly accepted bid to speak.............................101 Table 5.11 Excerpt showing an unacknowledged bid to speak .....................................104 Table 5.12 Excerpt showing a random, irrelevant, disruptive bid to speak...................106 Table 5.13 Excerpt showing a student’s calling out a request for information .............111 Table 5.14 Excerpt showing the only reprimanded request or repair ............................112 Table 5.15 Excerpt showing a student’s calling out a repair .........................................113 Table 5.16 Excerpt showing a student’s calling out a repair .........................................114 Table 5.17 Excerpt showing a student’s calling out a relevant contribution .................115 Table 5.18 Excerpt showing a student’s calling out a relevant contribution .................116 Table 5.19 Part 1 of an excerpt showing acknowledgment of an ‘other’ call-out .........118 ix Table 5.20 Part 2 of an excerpt showing acknowledgment of an ‘other’ call-out .........120 x List of Figures Figure 2.1 Visualization of a round of triadic dialogue as two coupled adjacency pairs..........................................................................................................13 Figure 4.1 Pie charts showing the relative proportion of teacher-initiated versus student-initiated interactions (left) and the relative frequencies of the three types of teacher-initiated interactions (right)............................50 Figure 4.2 Visualization of a round of triadic dialogue as two coupled adjacency pairs..........................................................................................................67 Figure 4.3 Application of the adjacency-pair analysis of triadic dialogue to an individual nomination ..............................................................................67 Figure 5.1 Pie chart showing the relative proportion of bids to speak accepted with constraining discourse, accepted openly, and unacknowledged ....................................................................................103 Figure 5.2 Pie charts showing the relative number of call-outs acknowledged, unacknowledged, and reprimanded (left) and the relative frequencies of the four types of acknowledged call-outs (right) ...........110 xi Abstract This dissertation explores the role of classroom discourse in balancing teacher control over lesson content and student participation in educational interactions. The results of a discourse analysis of teacher-student interactions in video-recordings of eight third-grade math and language arts lessons reveal that the role of discourse in this balance has changed during the last 35 years. Teachers used to call on whichever student they wished to, while teachers today generally call on students who bid for a turn by raising a hand. Consequently, control over the right and obligation to speak is now shared between teacher and students. Students individually decide whether to make themselves available for nomination by bidding, and teachers choose which bidding students to nominate. Just as teachers encourage student participation in educational interactions by asking questions, the results of the present study show that students recognize and facilitate teacher control over lesson content by prefacing responses they suspect may be incorrect with hesitation markers and ending them with rising intonation. With these discourse strategies, students emphasize that their responses are submitted for teacher evaluation and also hedge their claims of knowledge as a way of mitigating the face threat associated with their responses’ potentially being rejected. As for student-initiated participation, the results show that teachers avoid calling on students who bid to speak outside of teacher-controlled discussions, ignoring 17 of 23 such bids in the present study. Moreover, in three of the six instances in which they accept unsolicited bids, teachers use discourse strategies to constrain the bidding student’s contribution by encouraging a brief question. On the other hand, although in xii general teachers ignore or reprimand over 80 percent of called-out utterances (which technically violate classroom rules), they fulfill nearly 90 percent of called-out utterances that request information or clarification and address nearly 90 percent of those correcting perceived errors, making no reference to rule violation in these special cases. As a result, the most reliable way for students to request information or clarification and to correct perceived errors is to call out. 1 Chapter 1 – Introduction Given the unique importance of formal education in children’s intellectual and social development and eventual success in life, it comes as no surprise that classrooms have attracted the attention of such a wide range of scholars over the past several decades. Researchers from education to linguistics to sociology have all brought their particular perspectives to bear on the inner workings of schools (e.g., Bellack et al. 1966, Barnes et al. 1969, Sinclair & Coulthard 1975, Griffin & Humphrey 1978, Mehan 1979, Cazden 1988, O’Connor & Michaels 1993, Gee 2004), and with good reason. Almost all of us pass through their doors, acquiring not only academic knowledge and skills, but all manner of socialization. In fact, most of us spend a significant portion of our early lives inside of schools, learning to read, write, and answer teachers’ questions, learning how to respond when we don’t know the answers, learning classroom rules, learning how and when to break those rules, and so on. At the heart of all of these activities are interactions among teachers and students, the currency of which is discourse (both verbal and non-verbal). Teachers use discourse strategies for patently important functions, including communicating information and instructions, but they also use them in more subtle ways, such as retaining control of interactions by initiating them with questions (Mishler 1975). Of course, students too use discourse strategically. For instance, they raise their hands to appear to have had answers to their teachers’ questions, but do so at just the right time to minimize the risk of actually being called on (Sahlström 2002). They also vary the intonation of their responses so as 2 to gain attention when they believe they are correct and save face when they suspect they are not. The goal of the present research is to understand the discourse strategies that teachers and students use in another aspect of classroom interaction, namely, negotiating a balance between teacher control over lesson content and student participation in educational interactions (Emanuelsson & Sahlström 2008). In this way, the project advances Hymes’s vision of a “socially constituted” linguistics—one that begins with the identification of social functions (e.g., that of balancing teacher control and student participation) and then works to discover the linguistic structures that serve those functions (Hymes 1974: 196ff). The study of discourse strategies underlying the balance between teacher control and student participation is also closely related to work in educational linguistics on the balance of teachers’ and students’ interactional rights, which include the roughly parallel concepts of setting the topic of discussion and having turns at talk (e.g., Au & Mason 1983). Research in this tradition postulates that a proper balance of these rights is a necessary feature of an ideal classroom. A review of the literature on classroom interactions suggests that student-initiated interactions play a dramatically important role in this balance and leads to two hypotheses concerning students’ initiating interactions by bidding to speak and by calling out: Hypothesis 1 – In accepting students’ bids to speak, teachers prefer questions over statements or comments (particularly questions requesting lesson- related information or clarification). 3 Hypothesis 2 – Teachers decide whether to acknowledge unauthorized contributions based not on their timing but on the manifest relevance of their content. The first hypothesis is relevant to balancing teacher control and student participation in that students’ questions are a way for them to request lesson-related information and clarification—an essential function of their participation (Emanuelsson & Sahlström 2008). Such questions also provide for teacher control over lesson content by facilitating teachers’ determining what is ultimately added to the class’s shared knowledge-base. The second hypothesis also relates to the balance of control and participation in that teachers focus on content, rather than timing, in determining which unauthorized student contributions to acknowledge as legitimate acts of participation and which to ignore. These hypotheses are addressed through a discourse analysis (e.g., Gee 2005) of teacher-student interactions in third-grade math and language arts lessons, a choice based on several factors. To begin with, analyzing interactions across academic subjects adds breadth and generality. Math and language arts are particularly good in this respect because, while both are fundamental skills, they are quite different in nature. There may also be systematic differences between interactions in math and language arts lessons, so studying these interactions in elementary school classes avoids confounding such subject- related differences with teacher-related differences, because elementary school students are typically taught math and language arts by the same teacher. Ultimately, though, the decision to look at third-grade classes has to do with the importance of this grade in the 4 educational process; it is during the third grade that students are expected to go from ‘learning to read’ to ‘reading to learn,’ and those who fail in making this transition have little hope of future academic success (Barone & Morrow 2003). The data for the study were collected at an elementary school in a lower-middle- class neighborhood in Southern California. Roughly half of the students were White and the other half were Hispanic, with 41.7% receiving free or reduced-price meals. Two other classroom discourse analyses of similar type and scale are known to exist, both from the 1970s. One is Griffin and Humphrey’s (1978) study of 10 basic-skills lessons taught by two kindergarten teachers. The other is Mehan and Cazden’s collaboration, in which Mehan studied Cazden’s teaching a combined first-, second-, and third-grade class in an impoverished San Diego school while Cazden was on leave from the Harvard School of Education during the 1974-1975 academic year (Mehan et al. 1976, Mehan 1979, Cazden 1988, 2001). The findings of the present study reveal that the role of discourse in balancing teacher control and student participation has changed in the 35 years since Mehan and Cazden’s and Griffin and Humphrey’s projects. According to these earlier studies, teachers used to call on whichever student they wished to, while teachers today generally call on students who bid for a turn by raising a hand. As a result, control over the right and obligation to speak is now shared between teacher and students. Students individually decide whether to make themselves available for nomination by bidding, and teachers choose which bidding students to nominate. 5 Just as teachers encourage student participation in educational interactions by asking questions, the results of the present study show that students recognize and facilitate teacher control over lesson content by prefacing responses they suspect may be incorrect with hesitation markers and ending them with rising intonation. With these discourse strategies, students emphasize that their responses are submitted for teacher evaluation and also hedge their claims of knowledge as a way of mitigating the face threat associated with their responses’ potentially being rejected. As for student-initiated participation, the results show that teachers avoid calling on students who bid to speak outside of teacher-controlled discussions, ignoring 17 of 23 such bids in the present study. What’s more, in three of the six instances in which they accept unsolicited bids, teachers use discourse strategies to constrain the bidding student’s contribution by encouraging a brief question. On the other hand, although in general teachers ignore or reprimand over 80 percent of called-out utterances (which technically violate classroom rules), they fulfill nearly 90 percent of called-out utterances that request information or clarification and address nearly 90 percent of those correcting perceived errors, making no reference to rule violation in these special cases. As a result, the most reliable way for students to request information or clarification and to correct perceived errors is to call out. The remainder of this dissertation is divided into five chapters. Chapter 2 contextualizes and motivates the current study through a review of the relevant literature. Chapter 3 describes the teachers and students who participated in the research and details the methodology through which their interactions were recorded, transcribed, coded, and 6 analyzed. Chapter 4 discusses findings related to teacher-initiated interactions in the resulting transcripts (known as the SoCal classroom corpus). Chapter 5 examines results related to student-initiated interactions. Chapter 6 concludes with a discussion of the effects of the discourse strategies that the study identifies, theoretical implications of the findings for sociolinguistics and educational linguistics, and directions for future research. 7 Chapter 2 – Literature Review The purpose of this chapter is to contextualize and motivate the current study through a survey of relevant past work. It is divided into three sections. Section 2.1 introduces classroom discourse and reviews the literature on teacher-initiated interactions, proposing adjacency pair analyses of the ways in which teachers allocate the floor to students and of the interaction structure known variously as IRE, IRF, and triadic dialogue, followed by some criticisms of this interaction structure. The section concludes with a discussion of the need for students to participate in the construction of lessons and for teachers to maintain control over lesson content, from which emerges the primary goal of the present study: to understand the role of discourse in balancing these conflicting needs. Section 2.2 reviews the somewhat more limited literature on student- initiated interactions, with subsections on bidding to speak and calling out. In each of these two subsections, inconsistencies in prior analyses lead to the formation of a novel hypothesis. Section 2.3 concludes the chapter with an overview of the present study. 2.1 Teacher-Initiated Interactions In analyses of classroom discourse, one of the first things that stand out is how teacher-student interactions differ from ordinary conversations, particularly in terms of turn-taking. Although in both situations, generally only one speaker holds the floor at a time (Sacks et al. 1974), in conversations the number of participants tends to equal the number of individuals. In the classroom, on the other hand, while there may be as many as two dozen or more individuals, there are essentially only two participants: the teacher 8 and the class (Payne & Hustler 1980, Lerner 1993, 1995, Sahlström 2002). Thus, the teacher speaks to the class as a single, collective partner, and the class (most often represented by one student) speaks to the teacher. Another difference between classroom interactions and ordinary conversations is how participants get the floor to speak. In a conversation, any participant can potentially gain the floor at the end of any other participant’s turn (i.e., at a transition relevance place or TRP) either by being selected by that participant or, if the participant who had the floor did not select anyone, by beginning to speak before anyone else does, i.e., by self- selecting (Sacks et al. 1974). In classrooms, by contrast, the floor is controlled by teachers, even when they allocate it (temporarily) to students (McHoul 1978). As Cazden (1988: 54) puts it, “teachers have the right to speak at any time and to any person; they can fill any silence or interrupt any speaker.” Thus, it is from their teachers that students gain the right (and, in some cases, the obligation) to speak in class. 2.1.1 Floor allocation methods and their adjacency-pair structure Mehan (1979: 84-95) identifies three ways in which teachers give students the floor to respond to questions and other cues—individual nominations, invitations to bid, and invitations to reply—all of which can be usefully described in terms of adjacency pairs (Schegloff 1968, Goffman 1971, Schegloff & Sacks 1973, Levinson 1983). Individual nominations consist of a single adjacency pair. In the first pair part, the teacher extends a response opportunity to a specific student (identified by name or by nonverbal means such as pointing, nodding, or eye contact), and in the second pair part the selected 9 student responds. Consider the example in (1), adapted from Sinclair and Coulthard (1975: 37): (1) TEACHER: What time is it, Susan? SUSAN: Three o’clock. Thus, the teacher extends a response opportunity to Susan, and Susan responds. Invitations to bid are similar, but consist of two adjacency pairs. In the first part of the first adjacency pair, the teacher extends a response opportunity but, rather than nominating a student, solicits students to make themselves known—typically by raising a hand quietly (Sahlström 2002)—if they are able and willing to respond. In the second part of the first adjacency pair, one or more students bid to respond. The second adjacency pair then resembles an individual nomination—in the first pair part, the teacher selects one of the bidding students, and in the second pair part, the selected student responds. The example in (2) illustrates this: (2) TEACHER: Who can tell me what time it is. STUDENTS: [Raise hands] TEACHER: Susan? SUSAN: Three o’clock. The teacher extends a response opportunity, and students bid to respond by raising hands. Then, the teacher selects Susan from among the bidding students, and Susan responds. Invitations to reply, like individual nominations, consist of a single adjacency pair; however, they forgo the nomination process, allowing one or more students to speak without the need to be selected. In the first pair part, the teacher extends a response 10 opportunity and opens the floor for any contextually relevant response, and in the second pair part one or more students call out their responses. This is illustrated in (3): (3) TEACHER: Is Susan right? Is it three o’clock? STUDENTS: Yes! Thus, the teacher extends a response opportunity, and students call out the response in chorus. Student contributions made in violation of these turn-allocation procedures are typically ignored, which serves as a “mild sanction” (Mehan 1979: 111) and effectively strikes the unauthorized material from the official record (Mercer 1992). Alternatively, the teacher may reprimand the offending student (Lemke 1990: 70) or even individually nominate the student and insist that the contribution be repeated as a way of reaffirming both the rule and the teacher’s authority to allocate the floor (Lemke 1990: 10). 2.1.2 Relative prevalence of the three floor-allocation methods According to Griffin and Humphrey (1978: 88), the most common floor allocation method in their corpus and in Mehan et al.’s (1976) corpus is the individual nomination, which accounts for more than 70 percent of all teacher-initiated interactions. They explain this on the basis that individual nominations make it easy to ensure that every student gets a turn (1978: 88) and take less time than invitations to bid (1978: 90). Moreover, Mehan et al. (1976: 152) note that teachers’ nominating students is better than students’ attempting to gain the floor by being the first to begin speaking, which can lead to chaos. 11 Griffin and Humphrey (1978: 90) also mention some advantages to invitations to bid, including the fact that students who bid are more likely to have a response and that even those who are not selected to say their responses are “actively involved in assembling the lesson” (1978: 98) by virtue of bidding. As Sahlström (2002) explains, raising a hand in response to a teacher’s invitation to bid communicates more than just a willingness to respond. It is a visible claim of knowledge, available to both the teacher and the other students. Requiring that students bid to respond by raising a hand thus helps the teacher monitor the class’s understanding while continuing to explain until the students have had sufficient time to think about the question and arrive at a response. As for invitations to reply, these are frequent at the beginnings of lessons, where they serve as warm ups to new topics (Mehan et al. 1976: 153). Griffin and Humphrey (1978: 89) further note that teachers have a better chance of getting a response when students are allowed to self-select. They also explain how teachers avoid the problem of having up to 20 students (or more) vie for the floor by using this allocation technique primarily with questions that have only one correct answer (1978: 89), noting that elicitations with more than one possible response are particularly likely to be treated as invitations to bid rather than invitations to reply (1978: 105). 2.1.3 Teacher control and triadic dialogue Note that all three floor-allocation methods necessarily begin with questions or other cues from teachers, with which they both initiate the interaction and indicate what sort of response is expected. Thus, as Poole puts it, “talk between student (novice) and 12 teacher (expert) reveals itself to be organized in such a way that the student is sanctioned to speak only within an extensive framework of teacher utterances” (1990: 186). This framework allows teachers to control not only who gets the floor and when, but what that individual is authorized to say. Another way that teachers constrain student contributions is by asking questions to which they already have specific answers in mind, a practice discussed as early as Barnes et al. (1969: 22-26). Consider the exchange in (4), adapted from Sinclair and Coulthard (1975: 37): (4) TEACHER: What time is it, Susan? SUSAN: Three o’clock. TEACHER: Good. As Sinclair and Coulthard point out, the same sequence outside the classroom would more likely end with an acknowledgment, such as “Thanks.” The crucial difference is that the teacher is both the initiator and the primary knower (Berry 1981). As a result, the exchange is not complete until the third turn, in which the teacher validates the student’s response. In a genuine request for information, on the other hand, the initiator and the primary knower are distinct, so the exchange is arguably complete as of the second turn. This most basic, three-part teacher-student interaction—first described by Bellack et al. (1966: 193-219)—is known variously as Initiation-Reply-Evaluation (IRE; Mehan 1979: 37), Initiation-Response-Feedback (IRF; Sinclair & Coulthard 1975: 21), and triadic dialogue (Lemke 1990: 8). Lemke’s term will be used here in recognition of the fact that teachers use the third turn not only to evaluate and to provide feedback, but to 13 make comments (McHoul 1978) and to repeat, rephrase, or expand upon students’ contributions (O’Connor & Michaels 1993), among others things (Lee 2007). Griffin and Mehan sum up a typical round of triadic dialogue as follows: “The first part, spoken by the teacher, is a question about an academic topic and an indication of who should answer it. The second part is a child’s reply to the question. The third part is the teacher’s expression of approval or rejection of the response to the elicitation” (1981: 193). Mehan (1979: 54) describes a round of triadic dialogue as consisting of two coupled adjacency pairs, as illustrated Figure 2.1. Figure 2.1. Visualization of a round of triadic dialogue as two coupled adjacency pairs In the first of the two adjacency pairs, the teacher extends a response opportunity to one or more students, who then respond (as detailed in section 2.1.1). This entire first adjacency pair then forms the first pair part of a second adjacency pair, the second part of which is the teacher’s multifunctional third turn. 2.1.4 Criticisms of triadic dialogue Despite the continued ubiquity of triadic dialogue, which has “permeated classroom instruction broadly and for at least half a century” (Bloome et al. 2008: 36), opinions of its effectiveness and appropriateness vary considerably. Oftentimes, though, First adjacency pair Second adjacency pair Teacher’s third-turn Student(s) respond Teacher extends response opportunity 14 these differences of opinion are not about the interaction sequence per se, but about qualitative aspects of its implementation. Wood (1992: 205), for instance, criticizes teachers for asking an excessive number of questions, particularly ones to which they already have specific answers in mind, claiming that such questions “not only fail to promote intellectual activity in pupils but serve, if anything, to inhibit it.” Mercer (1992), however, argues that constant questioning is necessary in order for teachers to monitor students’ learning and, thereby, make their teaching as effective as possible. Griffin and Humphrey (1978: 87) likewise explain that, compared with the alternative of using only informatives (i.e., lecturing), constructing lessons using elicitations allows students to participate in the exchange of academic information and helps the teacher tailor information to the students. Barnes et al. (1969: 22-26) note the predominance of factual questions and the extreme rarity of truly open ones. Such findings ultimately led the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (1991: 35) to recommend that teachers regularly follow student responses—regardless of their accuracy—with “Why?” or other requests for reasoned explanation. Note, however, that this does not constitute an attack on triadic dialogue per se but merely proposes a more process-centered version thereof, as is evident in examples of its implementation (e.g., Hiebert et al. 1996, Lampert et al. 1996, Beck et al. 1998). Thus, as Nassaji and Wells conclude, triadic dialogue can be used to perform a range of functions, making it “an appropriate operationalization of a wide variety of tasks, even across quite different teaching philosophies” (2000: 400). 15 2.1.5 Teacher control versus student participation Another criticism of triadic dialogue has been that it serves to reinforce the power differential between teachers and students (e.g., Lemke 1990). Indeed, such interactions reaffirm teachers’ authority as “primary knower” (Berry 1981) and gives them the last word (Macbeth 2004). However, as Emanuelsson and Sahlström (2008) discuss, although participation is essential for learning, teachers need to maintain a measure of control over the content of the class’s shared knowledge-base, the development of which is one of the primary functions of classroom discourse (Bloome et al. 2008: 96). The use of triadic dialogue for this purpose is consistent with Newman et al. (1989: 125), in which it is described as a collaborative construction technique—an alternative to lecturing in which a teacher’s question and student’s response combine to form a single proposition and the teacher’s third turn can serve as a repair mechanism in case the student’s contribution is incorrect or incomplete. Thus, the key ends up being balance. On the control extreme are techniques such as piloting (Lundgren 1977: 202-204), in which the teacher uses triadic dialogue to lead one or more students to a desired response through a chain of simple questions. Although the correct response gets said, this technique does not promote students’ understanding of the principles underlying the response. Of course, the participation extreme turns out not to be any better, as truly unmediated discussions are typically dominated by a small number of students (Allen 1992) and tend to be more superficial with regard to academic content than more traditional teacher-fronted lessons (Emanuelsson & Sahlström 2008). 16 Understanding the role of discourse in balancing content control and student participation is the primary goal of the present study and is pursued further in Chapter 4 and Chapter 5. 2.2 Student-Initiated Interactions Since the majority of classroom exchanges are teacher-initiated (Mehan 1979: 139), it is perhaps not surprising that student-initiated interactions have received considerably less attention in the literature, particularly in early research. In their book, Barnes et al. (1969: 45) spend less than two pages on the subject, and McHoul’s (1978) rules for classroom turn-taking do not even allow for student-initiated interactions. Nevertheless, such interactions represent students’ most direct form of participation, so understanding them is essential in exploring the balance between teacher control and student participation. Of particular interest here are the two ways that students can initiate interactions: bidding to speak and calling out, discussed by Lemke (1990: 28-29) and Mehan (1979: 139-159), respectively. 2.2.1 Bidding to speak The conventional wisdom is that students need the teacher’s permission to speak in class (Lemke 1990: 72). Indeed, as was discussed in section 2.1, unauthorized utterances are typically ignored, if not reprimanded (Mehan 1979: 111, Lemke 1990: 70, Mercer 1992). Of course, to have even a chance of being granted the floor, a student would have to bid for it, preferably by raising a hand (Sahlström 2002). Lemke discusses just such a scenario—where a student raises a hand without the teacher’s having asked a 17 question or otherwise solicited bids—calling it a “bid to speak” (1990: 28-29). The relevant excerpt appears in (5). (5) ERIC: [Raises hand] TEACHER: Eric, you have a question? ERIC: Yeah, how can it be the ground that creates the heat energy if the sun creates the heat energy? TEACHER: Well, on the sun, and in the sun, the sun is... (adapted from Lemke 1990: 28) Interestingly, in accepting Eric’s bid, the teacher says his name followed by “you have a question?” Lemke’s (1990: 29) explanation for this is that teachers assume students’ bids are bids to question, but this account seems incorrect for two reasons. The first is that students bid to speak for a variety of reasons (as Lemke himself immediately goes on to note), a fact that teachers would well understand. The second is that if teachers genuinely believed all students’ bids were bids to question, this would militate against their adding “you have a question?” (rather than simply nominating the student to speak) in accepting such bids. Work by other researchers suggests an alternate explanation. Griffin and Humphrey call student questions “a powerful and valued mode for the exchange of academic information” (1978: 87), but make no mention of statements or comments by students. Moreover, one of Barnes et al.’s analysis questions asks, “If [there] were unsolicited statements or comments, how did the teacher deal with them? [emphasis added]” (1969: 18). This implies that unlike student questions, which are potentially useful, unsolicited statements and comments can be problematic for teachers. This, in 18 turn, leads to the first hypothesis of the present study: In accepting students’ bids to speak, teachers prefer questions over statements or comments. This preference for questions arguably derives from the need to balance teacher control and student participation. A student’s primary role is as a learner, so the unmarked act of unsolicited student participation is a teacher-directed question, ideally one with which the student requests lesson-related information or clarification (Emanuelsson & Sahlström 2008). Statements and comments, on the other hand, with which a student would seek to inform the teacher or class, are marked in that they fall outside this primary role. Questions are also preferred from the perspective of teacher control, as they elicit a response from the teacher, allowing him/her to determine what is ultimately added to the class’s shared knowledge-base. Conversely, statements and comments are dispreferred as they put ‘on the record’ (at least temporarily) whatever potentially random, irrelevant, disruptive thing a student might say, leaving the teacher to “deal with” it. In terms of adjacency pairs, a student’s bid to speak—the raising of a hand in Lemke’s (1990: 28-29) example 1 —is the first part of a summons-acknowledgement sequence (Schegloff 1968). Such sequences are nonterminal in that the summoner, if acknowledged, has the right and obligation to speak again. Knowing this, a teacher may seek to constrain such an unsolicited contribution by following acknowledgement of the student’s summons with an insertion sequence requesting confirmation that the student’s 1 In enumerating ways of summoning, Schegloff (1968) mentions, in addition to physical devices, such as the raising of a hand or a tap on the shoulder, terms of address (e.g., “John?”), courtesy phrases (e.g., “Pardon me.”), and mechanical devices, such as telephone rings. 19 bid is a bid to ask a question. This discourse strategy constrains the bidding student’s next turn in two ways. First, because the teacher’s request opens an insertion sequence, the bidding student is forced to respond to it before proceeding. Second, the teacher’s requesting confirmation that the student’s bid is a bid to ask a question makes disconfirmation marked, thus serving as a reminder (to the bidding student and the rest of the class) of the preference for questions and forcing the bidding student to either ask a question or give an explanation for doing otherwise (Levinson 1983: 332ff). This analysis is applied to Lemke’s (1990: 28-29) example in Table 2.1. Table 2.1 Adjacency-pair analysis of Lemke’s (1990: 28-29) example ERIC: [Raises hand] Summons TEACHER: Eric, Acknowledgement TEACHER: you have a question? Request for confirmation Insertion sequence ERIC: yeah, Confirmation ERIC: how can it be the ground that creates the heat energy if the sun creates the heat energy? Request for clarification TEACHER: Well, on the sun, and in the sun, the sun is... Clarification The preference for questions and its manifestations in classroom discourse are explored further in Chapter 5. 20 2.2.2 Calling out Mehan (1979: 139-159) argues that students can call out contributions provided they do so between sequences of triadic dialogue, citing the examples in Table 2.2 and Table 2.3. Table 2.2 Example of a called-out contribution (from Mehan 1979: 146) Initiation Reply Evaluation T: (holding up name card) Everett: Everett. Carolyn: Edward. T: Edward, good for you, Carolyn. Jerome: That’s what I was going to say. T: Everett, it begins like your name, doesn’t it? That’s why at first you thought it was yours and then you knew, corrected it. (lowers card) 21 Table 2.3 Example of a called-out contribution (from Mehan 1979: 147) Initiation Reply Evaluation T: But I think we out to wait and let Leola, until Leola (prints Leola’s name) comes and / /Carolyn: (spells) L-E-O-L-A / / T: Let her put her house, right? Many: (nod yes) J: I should put in my house. T: Um, what color should we make the street? (touches street on map) According to Mehan (1979: 146-147), these examples show Jerome’s calling out contributions that, due to their appropriate timing, are “not negatively evaluated.” In reality, though, the teacher ignores both and, according to Mehan himself, ignoring a contribution constitutes not an acceptance but a “mild sanction” and a refusal to incorporate the contribution into the lesson (1979: 111). Mehan (1979: 142-143) also gives two examples of inappropriately timed called- out contributions, shown in Table 2.4 and Table 2.5. 22 Table 2.4 Example of a called-out contribution (from Mehan 1979: 142) Initiation Reply Evaluation T: Now, Jerome, tell us what you put on the map yester- day. Jerome: The office, the office. T: Jerome, put the steps and the door/ /Carolyn: and the door/ /T: right up to the office. Carolyn: It ain’t open. Jerome: It is open. T: He made it, he wanted to show it open/ /Carolyn: I know/ /T: and it’s just in the right place. 23 Table 2.5 Example of a called-out contribution (from Mehan 1979: 142-143) Initiation Reply Evaluation T: Uh, all right, we’ve got three words left. Who could put one of those . . . (points to cards) Everett: (raises hand) T: Um, which one, go ahead, which one can . . . Everett: (moves toward board) T: All right. T: Where’s that word? Everett: (places word card on board) Edward: He can’t find it. T: He’ll find it, he’ll find it. According to Mehan (1979: 142-143), these examples show how Carolyn’s called-out contribution in Table 2.4 and Edward’s in Table 2.5 are “rebuffed” due to their inappropriate timing. While the teacher does seem to disagree with the content of the called-out contributions, a teacher’s disagreeing with something a student says (unlike ignoring it) is not a reprimand but treats it as a valid contribution. Given Mehan’s (1979) data, a better hypothesis is that teachers decide whether to acknowledge unauthorized contributions based not on their timing but on the manifest 24 relevance of their content. Under this view, a student’s criticizing another’s performance of a lesson-related task—arguably an attempt to initiate a repair—is relevant and worth addressing, as it reflects the criticizing student’s understanding of the lesson and task. Students’ attempting to claim credit for having known an answer or to gain a turn by writing themselves into an activity are not relevant to the lesson, so teachers ignore them. This hypothesis is consistent with Lemke’s observation that teachers sometimes tolerate students’ calling out and validate contributions they consider “valuable” (1990: 58). Crucially, it is also consistent with teachers’ need to balance student participation with control over the content of the class’s shared knowledge-base. This is explored further in Chapter 5. 2.3 Overview of the Present Study The goal of the current research is to understand the role of discourse in balancing teacher control over lesson content and student participation in educational interactions (Emanuelsson & Sahlström 2008). A review of the relevant literature suggests that student-initiated interactions play a particularly important role in this balance and leads to the development of the following two hypotheses concerning students’ initiating interactions by bidding to speak and by calling out: Hypothesis 1 – In accepting students’ bids to speak, teachers prefer questions over statements or comments (particularly questions requesting lesson- related information or clarification). 25 Hypothesis 2 – Teachers decide whether to acknowledge unauthorized contributions based not on their timing but on the manifest relevance of their content. The first hypothesis is relevant to balancing teacher control and student participation in that student-initiated questions are a way for students to request lesson- related information and clarification—an essential function of student participation (Emanuelsson & Sahlström 2008). Moreover, such questions provide for teacher control over lesson content by facilitating teachers’ determining what is ultimately added to the class’s shared knowledge-base. The second hypothesis likewise relates to balancing control and participation in that teachers focus on content, rather than timing, in determining which unauthorized student contributions to acknowledge as legitimate acts of participation and which to ignore. These hypotheses are addressed through a discourse analysis of teacher-student interactions in third-grade math and language arts lessons, a choice based on several factors. First of all, analyzing interactions across academic subjects adds breadth and generality. Math and language arts are particularly good in this respect because, while both are fundamental skills, they are quite different in nature. Moreover, given that there may well be systematic differences between interactions in math and language arts lessons, studying these interactions in elementary school classes will avoid confounding such subject-related differences with teacher-related differences, insofar as elementary school students are typically taught math and language arts by the same teacher. Finally, the decision to look at third-grade classes, in particular, is based on the importance of this 26 grade in the educational process; it is the grade during which students are expected to go from ‘learning to read’ to ‘reading to learn’ (Barone & Morrow 2003). The methodology employed in the present study is detailed in Chapter 3, and its results discussed in Chapter 4 and Chapter 5. 27 Chapter 3 – Method This chapter describes how the data for the present study were obtained and processed. It is divided into five sections. Section 3.1 introduces the teachers and students whose interactions were recorded and analyzed. Section 3.2 describes the equipment used in recording them. Section 3.3 reviews the theoretical and practical considerations that went into preparing to make and making the recordings. Section 3.4 explains how the recordings were transcribed, including the theoretical and practical considerations underlying the layout and content of the transcripts. Finally, section 3.5 details how the relevant actions and interactions in the transcripts were defined and coded for analysis. 3.1 Participants The data were collected at an elementary school in a lower-middle-class neighborhood in Southern California. Roughly half of the students were White and the other half Hispanic; 41.7% were receiving free or reduced-price meals. Three third-grade teachers at the school participated in the study. They will be referred to by the pseudonyms Mrs. McDonald, Mrs. Anderson, and Mrs. Johnson. All three were White females. Mrs. McDonald was in her 11th year of teaching, Mrs. Anderson in her 24th, and Mrs. Johnson in her 13th. They were not paid for their participation. Of the approximately 20 third-grade (8- to 9-year-old) students in each teacher’s class, parent permission and child assent were obtained for 17 of Mrs. McDonald’s students, 12 of Mrs. Anderson’s, and 12 of Mrs. Johnson’s. Those without permission or not wishing to be video-recorded were assigned seats outside of the camera’s field of 28 view. Due to technical limitations, some students who were eligible to participate were also outside of the camera’s field of view (see Appendix A for diagrams). 3.2 Materials The investigator recorded each lesson onto a new, 60-minute mini digital video cassette tape (Panasonic model AY-DVM60EJ) using a tripod-mounted digital video camera (Panasonic model NV-GS300) with an attached 0.45x wide-angle lens. Supplemental audio recordings were made simultaneously using a digital audio recorder (Olympus model DM-10) with a stereo microphone (Olympus model ME-51S). 3.3 Recording Procedures A primary concern in any study of human behavior is what psychologists call the observer effect (first described by Francis Galton in the 1870s), which refers to people’s tendency to behave differently—typically in a way that they expect will improve how they are perceived—when they believe they are being observed (Webb et al. 1966). This has been applied to sociolinguistic research as the “observer’s paradox,” formalized as follows: “the aim of linguistic research in the community must be to find out how people talk when they are not being systematically observed; yet we can only obtain these data by systematic observation” (Labov 1972: 209). For Labov, the challenge was studying people’s casual/spontaneous speech—“the vernacular,” as he called it—given their tendency to shift to a more formal register whenever they believed their speech was being observed. While it is not clear exactly how this might manifest itself in the case of 29 teachers, any observer-induced deviation from the norm would threaten the validity of the data, so several steps were taken to mitigate it. 3.3.1 Mitigating the observer effect One factor that has long been known to mitigate the observer effect is time. In fact, over time, subjects’ consciousness of being observed has been found to diminish to the point of being undetectable (Deutsch 1949). In order to take advantage of the effect of time in mitigating the teachers’ and students’ consciousness of being video-recorded, observation-only visits were made to each classroom one week prior to recording (see Table 3.1). As the teacher and students prepared for each lesson, the video camera and supplemental audio recorder were set up exactly as they would be during the recording sessions, after which the investigator sat quietly making fieldnotes. At the end of each lesson, the equipment was taken down as the teacher and students prepared to leave the classroom (for morning recess following language arts and for lunch following math). Table 3.1 Schedule of Observation and Recording Sessions Class Observation Recording Mrs. McDonald’s 12/02/2008 (Tuesday) 12/09/2008 (Tuesday) 12/16/2008 (Tuesday) Mrs. Anderson’s 12/03/2008 (Wednesday) 12/10/2008 (Wednesday) Mrs. Johnson’s 12/04/2008 (Thursday) 12/11/2008 (Thursday) 30 Another way of minimizing the observer effect in a study such as this one is to place the video camera as unobtrusively as possible and not move it while recording. Besides not drawing attention to the camera, a fixed position helps to minimize the influence of the observer’s perspective with respect to what is and is not worth focusing on from moment to moment (Erickson 2006). With these considerations in mind, the video camera was placed in a back corner of each classroom—out of the teacher’s and students’ immediate lines of sight—and was not moved during the lessons (see Appendix A for diagrams). As it worked out, the teachers and students seemed to pay virtually no attention to the investigator or the camera, and there were no apparent differences in teacher or student behavior between the observation and recording sessions. As a final check, the investigator asked each teacher, after recording, how conscious she had been of his and the camera’s presence and whether she had noticed any differences in the students’ behavior. All three indicated that they and their students were quite accustomed to having visitors and that there had been no deviations from the norm. 3.3.2 Other considerations in recording Another important consideration in obtaining a consistent, representative sample of teacher-student interactions was the timing of the recording sessions themselves. As the schedule in Table 3.1 indicates, all observation and recording sessions took place on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays. This was done at the recommendation of the school’s principal, who noted that standardized testing is scheduled in the same way, 31 because students are more likely to be absent, as well as generally less focused, on Mondays and Fridays. The timing of the lessons themselves was determined by the school and was the same in all three classrooms; language arts ran from approximately 9:15 a.m. to 10:05 a.m., and math from approximately 11:15 a.m. to 12:10 p.m. Finally, given the inevitability of quiet, unclear, and otherwise difficult-to- transcribe speech, particularly in a room with 20 children, an audio recorder was placed in the corner of each classroom opposite where the video camera was set up (see Appendix A for diagrams). The role of these recordings in the transcription process is discussed in section 3.4.3. 3.4 Transcription Procedures Although audio and video recorders are fairly objective in what they capture, the transcripts used in the linguistic analysis of recorded interactions are necessarily (and usefully) selective in ways that reflect the researcher’s theoretical goals (Ochs 1979). As a result, there are a number of different transcription systems, but all share certain core similarities. For instance, all record what was said and organize this information, as well as whatever else they may include, chronologically. Exactly how the information is laid out, however, as well as what additional information (if any) is included, differs from system to system. 3.4.1 Macro-level considerations in transcription Most transcription systems indicate the speaker of each utterance (although cf. Sinclair & Coulthard 1975). Some do this by placing the speaker’s name or title (e.g., 32 “Teacher”) or an abbreviated version thereof (e.g., “PA” for “prosecuting attorney”) to the left of the transcribed speech followed by a colon (e.g., Mehan 1979, Matoesian 1993), as illustrated in (6) and (7), respectively. (6) Teacher: Is this your namecard? (7) PA: Objection your honor she’s already testified to that. Others indicate who said what by placing the transcribed speech into one or more columns (e.g., Ochs 1979), as shown in (8). (8) David Toby should we?! yeah Of course, a system such as the one illustrated in (8) is really only practical for transcribing interactions involving a relatively small number of individuals, so the transcripts for the present study (henceforth the SoCal classroom corpus) use speaker labels. Another macro-level difference among transcription systems concerns the representation of non-verbal discourse. In some, actions—such as students’ raising hands, pointing, and nodding—are written between parentheses but otherwise transcribed the same as speech (e.g., Mehan 1979), as shown in (9). (9) Patricia: Mine Carolyn: (raises hand) In others, verbal and non-verbal discourse are transcribed into separate columns (e.g., Ochs 1979), as illustrated in (10). 33 (10) David Toby Non-Verbal Verbal Non-Verbal Verbal moves rabbit OH! holds monkey The system in (9) is adequate for adding occasional non-verbal items to a primarily verbal transcript (or vice versa), but placing detailed transcriptions of simultaneous verbal and non-verbal discourse into a single-column could make both quite difficult to follow. To avoid this, the SoCal classroom corpus has separate columns for verbal and non- verbal discourse. The decision to use a multi-column format of any kind raises the question of spatial organization, i.e., which column should be to the left or right of which other. This has been discussed in terms of how layout may affect the salience or perceived importance of the material in each column (Ochs 1979). Essentially, literate English speakers are accustomed to seeing information presented from left to right, so the farther left a column is on the page, the greater its relative salience. To counteract the possible tendency to interpret the verbal without taking the non-verbal into account, it has been recommended that non-verbal discourse be transcribed to the left of the verbal (Ochs 1979), and this recommendation was followed in making the SoCal classroom corpus. Of course, transcription decisions are theoretical as well as practical. Transcribing both verbal and non-verbal discourse, for instance, reflects the theoretical assumption that both play important roles in classroom interactions. Likewise, transcribing these two into separate columns reflects the view that, although linked in important ways, they are separable. Lastly, transcribing every word of verbal discourse while only selectively 34 transcribing the non-verbal, as was done in making the SoCal classroom corpus (see section 3.4.3), reflects the assumption that verbal discourse is the principal medium through which classroom business is carried out. 3.4.2 Micro-level considerations in transcription An important micro-level difference among transcription systems is the use of either standard orthography or some form of phonetic transcription. Some have advocated phonetic transcription for representing the discourse of very young children, noting that the use of standard orthography forces the researcher to interpret the child’s utterances in terms of adult words and may obscure interesting behaviors such as sound play (e.g., Ochs 1979). Although these are reasonable concerns, particularly when transcribing utterances by children who are just learning to speak, making accurate phonetic transcriptions is extremely time-consuming. Moreover, transcribing the same word in multiple ways to reflect pronunciation differences makes it difficult to locate instances of that word using a computer. For these reasons, standard orthography was used throughout the SoCal classroom corpus. Another important micro-level matter is the representation of pauses. Given the dramatic impact of teacher wait times on classroom dynamics (e.g., Rowe 1986), the SoCal classroom corpus follows the convention of representing all periods of verbal silence to the nearest 10th of a second (e.g., Matoesian 1993). In this case, the role of theory is evident in the very definition of a pause, namely, a period of verbal silence. The fact that pauses are defined in terms of (the lack of) verbal discourse again reflects the 35 theoretical view that the verbal is primary and the non-verbal secondary (thus, the duration of periods lacking non-verbal discourse is not recorded). Since pause durations represent periods during which no verbal discourse took place, they were placed in the verbal column. This also made it possible to align items of non-verbal discourse with the concurrent verbal discourse or silence. 3.4.3 Summary of transcript layout and content Following earlier research on teacher-student interactions (Sinclair & Coulthard 1975, Mehan et al. 1976, Griffin & Humphrey 1978, Mehan 1979), the SoCal classroom corpus focuses on teacher-fronted lessons, excluding periods of individual and group work, as well as times when the teachers read to the students without asking them questions. A total of approximately 4.5 hours of math and language arts lessons (out of about 6.5 hours of classroom video) were transcribed (into about 15,000 lines) in a four- column format. The columns, from left to right, are as follows: Non-Verbal, Line, Speaker, and Verbal. The excerpt in Table 3.2—from Mrs. Anderson’s 12/10 language arts lesson—illustrates the layout and content of these four columns. 36 Table 3.2 Excerpt showing the layout and content of the four transcript columns Non-Verbal LineSpeaker Verbal 0001TEACHER she had such a good time? 0002 (0.9) Rick is talking to Zachariah 0003 that she said, " 0004 she hadn't had a better time in all of her life. " 0005 (1.4) 0006 what did she do while she was at the fair. Rick raises hand 0007 (1.1) Olivia, Anita raise hands 0008 OLIVIA oh! Jane raises hand 0009 (2.1) Tyler raises hand 0010 TEACHER what did she do Anita. Anita, Olivia, Rick, Jane, Tyler lower hands 0011 (0.8) 0012ANITA she went on a Ferris wheel? 0013TEACHER she did in this chapter, 0014 she went on a Ferris wheel. Into the Non-Verbal column was transcribed the following non-verbal discourse, along with the name or title (e.g., “Teacher”) of the producer: the teacher’s pointing, gaze direction, and other relevant non-verbal discourse; all visible instances of students’ raising hands, lowering hands, standing up, sitting down, leaving their desks, and returning to them; any non-verbal discourse (e.g., pointing) that accompanied a student’s turn at talk; and all other instances of non-verbal student discourse that the teacher responded to. 37 The Line column aligns consecutive, four-digit reference numbers (e.g., 0001, 0002, 0003, etc.) with each intonation unit (IU)—defined as “a stretch of speech uttered under a single coherent intonation contour” (Du Bois et al. 1993: 47)—or pause. In the Speaker column was recorded the name or title (e.g., “Teacher”) of the producer of the utterance on the same line of the adjacent Verbal column. When the speaker of an utterance was the same as that of the previous utterance, the speaker column was left blank. When the identity of a student speaker was uncertain, the name of the suspected speaker was written followed by a question mark. The speaker-label “S” was used when the identity of a student speaker could not even be guessed. Finally, when multiple students produced the same utterance simultaneously (e.g., in response to an invitation to reply), the speaker-label “Ss” was used. Into the Verbal column were transcribed all audible utterances, in standard orthography, along with all other audible vocalizations (e.g., laughter) and the durations of all periods of verbal silence (timed to the nearest 10th of a second). Also indicated are intonation, overlap, and latching, as well as notable deviations in length, volume, and speed (see Appendix B for a complete key to transcript notations and symbols). The verbal portion of the corpus was based primarily on the audio picked up by the video camera’s built-in microphone, with the supplemental audio recording being consulted only in cases of quiet, unclear, or otherwise difficult-to-transcribe speech. 38 3.5 Coding Procedures Once the transcription process was completed, relevant actions and interactions were identified and coded for analysis. Each of these codings was recorded in an adjacent “Codes” column, generally on the same line as the first relevant item in the transcript. The items coded included the three types of teacher-initiated interactions and the two ways that students can potentially initiate interactions. 3.5.1 Coding teacher-initiated interactions As was discussed in section 2.1.1, there are three ways in which teachers initiate interactions with students—individual nominations, invitations to bid, and invitations to reply (Mehan 1979: 84-95). Individual nominations involve selecting a specific student— by name or by nonverbal means such as pointing, nodding, or eye contact—to respond to a question or other cue. Invitations to bid solicit students to make themselves known if they are able and willing to respond, after which the teacher nominates one of them. Lastly, invitations to reply involve the teacher’s opening the floor for any contextually relevant response, allowing students to speak without the need to be selected. Both individual nominations and invitations to bid end with the teacher’s nominating an individual student; the crucial difference lies in whether that student bid. Therefore, individual nominations were defined as in (11) for the purposes of coding. (11) individual nomination – An interaction in which the teacher nominates a student who had not raised a hand or otherwise bid. 39 The excerpt in Table 3.3—from Mrs. Anderson’s 12/10 math lesson—exemplifies such an interaction. Table 3.3 Excerpt showing an individual nomination Non-Verbal LineSpeaker Verbal Teacher holds up graph paper 1093 TEACHER what will you do <with this>, 1094 uh, 1095 (0.3) Anita raises hand 1096 piece of graph paper that has little tiny squares on it. 1097 (0.8) Rodrigo's hand was not raised 1098 Rodrigo. Anita lowers hand 1099 (1.4) 1100RODRIGOum, 1101 (0.4) 1102 do the same thing as what, Rodrigo lifts his graph paper 1103 (0.6) 1104 you did with this?= Teacher nods slightly 1105 TEACHER =°exactly°. 1106 °you're going to use the strategy of using an array°, Although Anita takes the teacher’s question as initiating an invitation to bid and raises a hand (line 1096), the teacher makes it an individual nomination by calling on Rodrigo, whose hand was not raised (line 1098). As for invitations to bid and invitations to reply, teachers do not typically mark the latter in any particular way. However, consistent with the need for multi-party responses to be simple in order to avoid the risk of disorderly outbreaks (Griffin & 40 Humphrey 1978: 89, McHoul 1978), an analysis of the SoCal classroom corpus reveals that the teachers and students basically treated all (and only) yes/no questions (n = 33) and directives to read or recite responses (n = 33) as invitations to reply. Consequently, invitations to bid and invitations to reply were defined as in (12) and (13) for the purposes of coding. (12) invitation to bid – An interaction in which the teacher directs to the class a response opportunity other than an invitation to reply and subsequently nominates a student who bid to respond. (13) invitation to reply – An interaction in which the teacher directs to the class a yes/no question or a cue requiring reading or recitation. The excerpts in Table 3.4 and Table 3.5—from Mrs. McDonald’s 12/09 language arts lesson and Mrs. Johnson’s 12/11 language arts lesson, respectively—exemplify such interactions. 41 Table 3.4 Excerpt showing an invitation to bid Non-Verbal Line Speaker Verbal 0031 TEACHER we're going to be using our reading strategies, 0032 to help us strengthen comprehension. 0033 (0.8) Kayla raises hand 0034 <what does that mean>. Rodrick raises hand 0035 <what does comprehension mean>. 0036 that's a really big word. 0037 (0.5) 0038 <comprehension>. Kayla lowers hand 0039 Kayla. Rodrick lowers hand 0040 what's comprehension. 0041 KAYLA the understanding of something. 0042 TEACHER yeah. 0043 understanding of something. 0044 good. Table 3.5 Excerpt showing an invitation to reply Non-Verbal Line Speaker Verbal 0218TEACHER AND DON'T CROSS THE RACETRACK when the horses are coming. 0219 said Missus Zuckerman, 0220 (0.4) 0221 sound like parents? 0222 (0.4) 0223Ssyeah. 42 3.5.2 Coding student-initiated interactions As was discussed in section 2.2, there are essentially two discourse strategies that students can use to initiate interactions with teachers: bidding to speak and calling out. A bid to speak has been described as a student’s raising a hand without the teacher’s having asked a question (Lemke 1990: 29). However, students in the SoCal classroom corpus sometimes raised hands in anticipation of an imminent invitation to bid, particularly once the teacher had asked one or more other questions, as in an ongoing teacher-led discussion. In order to avoid overcounting, the more conservative definition in (14) was used instead. (14) bid to speak – An unsolicited student hand-raise occurring outside of any teacher- led discussion. The excerpt in Table 3.6—from Mrs. McDonald’s 12/09 language arts lesson— exemplifies such an interaction. 43 Table 3.6 Excerpt showing a bid to speak Non-Verbal LineSpeaker Verbal (Kayla raised hand in line 0461) 0473 TEACHER when you're telling your friend about a really great movie you saw? 0474 you got to tell them all those funny details, 0475 you're retelling it. 0476 (0.6) 0477 but, 0478 when we're summarizing, 0479 we're just saying the big ideas. 0480 Kayla. Kayla lowers hand 0481 you have a question, 0482 (0.9) 0483KAYLAuh:::, 0484 no. 0485 (0.4) 0486 but, 0487 usually on the back of a book, 0488 it has a summary. 0489 (0.3) 0490TEACHERyou're right! 0491 (0.3) 0492 they do! In defining calling out, it was essential to distinguish called-out utterances from audible bids to respond—defined as in (15)—and from responses to invitations to reply. (15) audible bid to respond – A student vocalization, made in response to an invitation to bid, whose aim is not to provide a response, but to seek nomination. 44 The excerpt in Table 3.7—from Mrs. Johnson’s 12/11 language arts lesson—illustrates audible bids to respond (lines 0181, 0182, and 0184). Table 3.7 Excerpt showing audible bids to respond Non-Verbal LineSpeaker Verbal 0178TEACHER Mister Arable gave Fern two quarters, 0179 and two dimes. Tucker raises hand 0180 how much is that? Jake raises hand 0181 TUCKER? °ooh°! 0182°ooh°! Kimberley raises hand 0183 TEACHER sh[:: 0184 S [°ooh°! Melissa raises hand 0185 TEACHER raise your hand, With this understanding of audible bids to answer (and the discussion of invitations to reply in section 3.5.1), calling out was defined as in (16) for the purposes of coding. (16) calling out – Directing an utterance toward the teacher without having been nominated, except as an audible bid to respond or in response to an invitation to reply. 2 The excerpt in Table 3.8—from Mrs. Johnson’s 12/11 math lesson—shows a student’s calling out (lines 1434-1436). 2 Note that this definition also excludes student-to-student speech, which was not reliably transcribable due to low volume. 45 Table 3.8 Excerpt showing a student’s calling out Non-Verbal LineSpeaker Verbal Katherine, Jake, Tucker, Kimberley, Amelia raise hands 1430 TEACHER how many miles does he have to drive, Felicia raises hand 1431 from work. 1432 (0.6) Maureen raises, lowers hand 1433 how many miles does he [have to drive. 1434MAUREEN[where <where>-- 1435 where does he work again, 1436 where,= Maureen raises hand 1437 TEACHER =he works at the car wash. Finally, called-out comments are sometimes subject to reprimand (Lemke 1990: 70). For the purposes of coding, reprimands were defined as in (17). (17) reprimand – Any teacher action whose purpose is to correct a violation of classroom rules. As this definition aims to capture, reprimands in response to called-out comments took on many forms, including the teacher’s raising a finger to her lips in a “shush, be quiet” gesture (Roberts & Harpley 2007: 41), verbally referencing the violation, or verbally referencing the preferred behavior. Of course, students were also reprimanded for things other than calling out, such as talking with other students or failing to pay attention during a lesson. The excerpts in Table 3.9—from Mrs. McDonald’s 12/09 language arts lessons—and Table 3.10 through Table 3.12—from Mrs. McDonald’s 12/09 math lesson—illustrate these four types of reprimands. 46 Table 3.9 Excerpt showing a non-verbal reprimand Non-Verbal LineSpeaker Verbal 0466TEACHER <all> those intere[sting little de[tails, 0467 ROSS [x, 0468 [xxxxxx (saying it). 0469 TEACHER so a lot of times, Teacher raises finger to lips facing Ross 0470 (0.6) Table 3.10 Excerpt showing a reprimand that references the violation Non-Verbal LineSpeaker Verbal 0831TEACHERTony? 0832 °put your box down°. Table 3.11 Excerpt showing a reprimand that references the preferred behavior Non-Verbal LineSpeaker Verbal Teacher turns off overhead 1028 TEACHER I would have to be really careful-- 1029 (1.8) 1030 eyes are up here, Table 3.12 Excerpt showing a reprimand for not paying attention Non-Verbal LineSpeaker Verbal 0913TEACHER°Jonah and°, 0914 °Ross°. John lowers hand, hitting desk 0915 °please pay attention°. 47 3.6 Analysis Procedures Following the identification and coding of relevant actions and interactions in the SoCal classroom corpus, these were then analyzed with an eye to understanding the role of discourse in balancing teacher control over lesson content and student participation in educational interactions (Emanuelsson & Sahlström 2008), as well as addressing the two hypotheses concerning student-initiated interactions that were developed in section 2.2. 3.6.1 Analysis of teacher-initiated interactions To determine what roles each of the three types of teacher-initiated interactions— individual nominations, invitations to bid, and invitations to reply (see sections 2.1.1 and 3.5.1)—play in balancing teacher control and student participation, these were first counted, to determine their relative frequencies in the SoCal classroom corpus, and then analyzed qualitatively. The results of these analyses are discussed in section 4.1. To evaluate the proposed adjacency-pair structure of the three types of teacher- initiated interactions and of the triadic-dialogue macrostructure (see section 2.1), examples of these in the SoCal classroom corpus were examined for evidence of insertion sequences and preference organization (Levinson 1983: 307ff). The results of these analyses are discussed in section 4.2. 3.6.2 Analysis of student-initiated interactions To address Hypothesis 1—that in accepting students’ bids to speak, teachers prefer questions (particularly those requesting lesson-related information or clarification) over statements or comments—teachers’ responses to all instances of students’ bidding to 48 speak (defined in section 3.5.2) were examined for evidence of such a preference, e.g., of the sort discussed in section 2.2.1 in connection with Lemke’s (1990: 28-29) example of a student’s bidding to speak. The results of these analyses are discussed in section 5.1. To address Hypothesis 2—that teachers decide whether to acknowledge unauthorized contributions based not on their timing, but on the manifest relevance of their content—all acknowledged instances of students’ calling out (defined in section 3.5.2) were compared with all unacknowledged and reprimanded ones to determine whether relevance of content is indeed the basis of acknowledgement and, if so, which types of content teachers deem relevant. The results of these analyses are discussed in section 5.2. 49 Chapter 4 – Results Concerning Teacher-Initiated Interactions This chapter examines findings related to teacher-initiated interactions in the SoCal classroom corpus. It is divided into two sections. Section 4.1 discusses results concerning the three types of teacher-initiated interactions—individual nominations, invitations to bid, and invitations to reply—and their relative merits in balancing teacher control and student participation. Section 4.2 presents findings in support of the adjacency-pair analyses of teacher-initiated interactions proposed in section 2.1.1, examining insertion sequences, as well as the preference organization of students’ responses and teachers’ third turns. Section 4.3 concludes with a brief summary. 4.1 Individual Nominations, Invitations to Bid, and Invitations to Reply There are 406 teacher-student interactions in the SoCal classroom corpus. Of these, 80.8 percent (n = 328) are teacher-initiated. Individual nominations—where a student is selected to respond without having bid—make up 9.1 percent (n = 30) of the teacher-initiated interactions; invitations to bid—where those students who are able and willing to respond are solicited to make themselves known, after which the teacher nominates one of them—make up 70.7 percent (n = 232); and invitations to reply—where the teacher briefly opens the floor and allows students to speak without being selected— make up 20.1 percent (n = 66). Figure 4.1 illustrates these findings. 50 Figure 4.1. Pie charts showing the relative proportion of teacher-initiated versus student-initiated interactions (left) and the relative frequencies of the three types of teacher-initiated interactions (right) See sections 2.1.1 and 3.5.1 for further discussion, definitions, and examples of the three types of teacher-initiated interactions. 4.1.1 From individual nominations to invitations to bid Perhaps the most remarkable fact about these results is that individual nominations—which, according to Griffin and Humphrey (1978: 88), account for over 70 percent of teacher-initiated interactions in their corpus and in Mehan et al.’s (1976) corpus—accounted for less than 10 percent in the SoCal classroom corpus. Likewise, invitations to bid, which played a correspondingly minor role in Mehan et al.’s (1976) and Griffin and Humphrey’s (1978) corpora, serve as the primary floor allocation method in the SoCal classroom corpus. In fact, invitations to bid in the SoCal classroom corpus account for over 70 percent of teacher-initiated interactions—roughly the same Teacher initiated 80.8% Student initiated 19.2% Invitations to reply 20.1% Invitations to bid 70.7% Individual nominations 9.2% All teacher-student interactions Teacher-initiated interactions 51 percentage that individual nominations accounted for in Mehan et al.’s (1976) and Griffin and Humphrey’s (1978) corpora. Given that both earlier studies and the present one all focused on teacher-fronted lessons in early elementary school classrooms (Mehan et al.’s on a combined first-, second-, and third-grade class and Griffin and Humphrey’s on two kindergarten classes), this difference is striking. One possible explanation is a change in the role of discourse in balancing teacher control and student participation now as compared with 35 years ago. Constructing lessons with “elicitations” (Griffin & Humphrey 1978: 87) arguably sacrifices some measure of control compared with the alternative of using only “informatives” (i.e., lecturing), particularly over lesson content. On the other hand, lesson content is irrelevant if the students are not listening and understanding, so some amount of interaction is necessary to keep them engaged and, crucially, to help them follow the lesson. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that elementary school teachers initiate interactions with their students quite often (an average of once every 49 seconds in the SoCal classroom corpus). To understand why teacher-initiated interactions have gone from being over 70 percent individual nominations to over 70 percent invitations to bid, it will first be necessary to understand the former predominance of individual nominations. Individual nominations make it easy for teachers to ensure that every student gets a turn and allow teachers to avoid the time-consuming and sometimes chaotic bidding process (Griffin & Humphrey 1978: 88). Indeed, in terms of balancing teacher control and student participation, individual nominations arguably afford teachers more control over who 52 gets the floor than any other allocation method, allowing them to nominate whichever student they wish to. Of course, nominating students without their having bid can be risky, as they may be unprepared or unwilling to respond (Griffin & Humphrey 1978: 90, McHoul 1978). Evidently, though, teachers were able to manage this risk to their satisfaction, perhaps by asking the right types of questions and directing them to the ‘right’ students (Good 1970). In light of this, the change from individual nominations to invitations to bid can be seen as part of a larger shift away from the authoritarian classroom of old and toward a more egalitarian model (see, e.g., Cazden 2001). In an invitation to bid, the teacher chooses to nominate a student from among those who make themselves available by bidding. Consequently, control over who gets the floor is shared between the teacher, who gets to choose which of the bidding students to nominate, and the students, who can decide whether or not they wish to make themselves available for nomination by bidding. Most importantly, though, invitations to bid encourage more students to participate (by formulating responses to the teacher’s questions and bidding for the opportunity to voice those responses) and allow teachers to monitor understanding and engagement through the students’ bids (or lack thereof) (Sahlström 2002). The excerpts in Table 4.1 and Table 4.2—from Mrs. McDonald’s 12/09 language arts lesson—and in Table 4.3—from Mrs. Anderson’s 12/10 math lesson—illustrate various aspects of this. 53 Table 4.1 Excerpt showing a teacher’s framing bidding to answer as a form of participation Non-Verbal LineSpeaker Verbal Kayla raises hand 0075 TEACHER who can give me some examples of those reading strategies. 0076 (0.5) 0077 oh, Kayla lowers hand 0078 I see the same two hands. Anne, Jonah raise hands 0079 I need <everybody>, Jared raises hand 0080 focusing on their learning right now, 0081 which means your eyes are up on me, 0082 (0.3) Emma raises hand 0083 and you're participating in our discussion please, 0084 (1.6) Rodrick raises hand 0085 who can tell me what are some of our reading strategies. Kayla raises hand 0086 what is it that we're going to work on. The teacher initiates an invitation to bid by asking for examples of reading strategies (line 0075). Receiving only two bids—both from students who have bid recently—she nudges the class to bid by explicitly referencing the fact that bidding is a form of participation (lines 0077-0083), a move which succeeds in getting five additional students to bid (lines 0079-0086). The excerpt in Table 4.2—from about five minutes later in the same lesson— illustrates a similar scenario. 54 Table 4.2 Excerpt showing a teacher’s framing bidding to answer as a display of knowledge Non-Verbal LineSpeaker Verbal Kayla raises hand 0349 TEACHER and what does it mean to summarize. 0350 when I summarize something, 0351 what am I doing. 0352 (0.3) 0353 hmm. 0354 (1.3) 0355 oh I know more than one person knows this. Emma raises hand 0356 (0.6) John raises hand 0357 because we summarize in here all the time, Rodrick, Jonah, Erica raise hands 0358 what does it mean when you summarize something, As in Table 4.1, the teacher initiates an invitation to bid by asking what it means to summarize (line 0349). Receiving only one bid, she rephrases the question (lines 0350- 0351). Then, receiving no additional bids, she prods the students to bid by explicitly referencing another of the main functions of bidding, namely, for students to show their teachers what they know (line 0355). This move is successful in getting five more students to bid (lines 0356-0358). In the excerpt in Table 4.3—from Mrs. Anderson’s 12/10 math lesson—the teacher mentions a similar function of bids. 55 Table 4.3 Excerpt in which a teacher frames students’ bidding to speak as indicating that they have formulated responses Non-Verbal LineSpeaker Verbal Anita raises hand; Jane stands 0698 TEACHER how many cookies are in each row. 0699 (0.8) Zachariah raises hand 0700 raise your hand when you have an answer. After initiating an invitation to bid (line 0698), the teacher reminds the students that they should each raise a hand upon arriving at an answer (line 0700). Their doing so will help her decide how long to let the class think about the question before nominating one of the bidding students to respond. It is also possible, if a sufficient number of bids are not forthcoming, for the teacher to change strategies entirely. The excerpt in Table 4.4—from Mrs. McDonald’s 12/09 math lesson—illustrates such a scenario. 56 Table 4.4 Excerpt showing a teacher’s monitoring students’ understanding through bids Non-Verbal LineSpeaker Verbal 0496 TEACHER how would I make this, 0497 a multiplication problem. Jared raises hand 0498 what can we do, Kayla raises hand 0499 to reword this, 0500 to make it a multiplication problem. 0501 (1.6) 0502 there's something that I can do, 0503 with this sentence. Jared lowers hand 0504 ready? 0505 (0.8) 0506 so here's what I'm going to do. 0507 I want all of you? Kayla lowers hand 0508 (0.3) 0509 °oh°! 0510 °my goodness°! 0511 (1.5) Teacher marks second sentence 0512 °I need some new overhead pens°. " 0513 (0.5) " 0514 RODRICK [I'll buy you-- " 0515TEACHER[<this sentence>, " 0516 <right here>, " 0517 (0.5) " 0518 <they bought>, " 0519 <six>, " 0520 <more>, " 0521 <sets>. 0522 (0.7) 0523 I want you, 0524 as a table group, 0525 to think. 57 (Table 4.4, Continued) Non-Verbal LineSpeaker Verbal 0526 (0.3) 0527 TEACHER how can I reword, 0528 (0.7) 0529 <this sentence>, 0530 to turn this into a multiplication problem. The teacher initiates an invitation to bid in connection with an ill-formed word-problem on the overhead projector (lines 0496-0497). Receiving no bids (at least from students who are visible on-camera), she rephrases the question and waits 1.6 seconds (lines 0498- 0501). With only two bids visible on camera, the teacher then changes her approach, effectively withdrawing the invitation to bid (line 0502-0506). Jared and Kayla realize this and withdraw their bids to answer (lines 0504 and 0508, respectively). The teacher then reiterates the task and instructs the students to work on it in their table groups (lines 0515-0530). 3 4.1.2 Making invitations to bid work A crucial element in making such a classroom work well is managing the bidding process. In Griffin and Humphrey’s (1978: 95) corpus, verbal bids “apparently do not violate the rules: they are not sanctioned or otherwise noticed by the participants.” Similarly, while hand raising is the preferred method of bidding for the floor in Mehan’s corpus, “on some occasions, students bid for the floor by saying, ‘I do,’ ‘I know,’ ‘me, me,’ by calling ‘teacher, teacher’ or the teacher’s name, by finger clicking, or by heavy 3 The table groups can be seen in the diagram of Mrs. McDonald’s classroom in Appendix A. 58 breathing. Each of these student procedures was successful in gaining access to the floor” (Mehan 1979: 91). Teachers’ acceptance of audible bids probably contributed to the sometimes chaotic nature of the bidding process. In the SoCal classroom corpus, by contrast, all three teachers routinely remind their students that audible bids are strongly dispreferred. A representative example—from Mrs. McDonald’s 12/16 language arts lesson—appears in Table 4.5. Table 4.5 Excerpt showing the teacher’s reminding students to bid non-verbally Non-Verbal LineSpeaker Verbal 0431 TEACHER so we [have character[s? 0432 S1 [°<uh>°! 0433 S2 [°uh°! 0434S1°<uh uh>°? 0435 (0.4) 0436 °<uh>°, 0437 JARED they stole [x[xxx Teacher not facing class 0438 TEACHER [oh, 0439 [I'm looking for quiet hands, 0440 it doesn't help to yell out, 0441 because you know I'm not going to call on you if you yell out. During an ongoing review of the elements of stories, the teacher initiates an invitation to bid by beginning to enumerate, with rising intonation, the elements the class has come up with thus far (line 0431). Following audible bids to speak by two unidentified students (lines 0432-0436), the teacher reminds the class that audibly bidding will not only be ineffective in gaining the floor, but will lead to disqualification. 59 Despite some 200 audible bids to answer in the SoCal classroom corpus (typically accompanied by, rather than in place of, hand-raising), only seven times did a teacher nominate a vocalizing student to respond. Of course, not calling on students who bid audibly will discourage them from doing so only if they understand what the teacher is doing. The excerpts in Table 4.6 and Table 4.7—from Mrs. Johnson’s 12/11 math lesson—confirm that students are well aware of the rule and the consequences of bidding audibly. 60 Table 4.6 Excerpt showing students’ awareness that audible bids are not accepted Non-Verbal LineSpeaker Verbal 1514 TEACHER what about the next one. Jake raises hand 1515 (0.8) Maureen raises hand 1516 S oh! Tucker, Katherine raise hands 1517 TUCKER ooh! Kimberley raises hand; Amelia raises, lowers hand 1518 TEACHER how many miles, 1519 is it, 1520 from 1521 <the library>, 1522 (1.1) 1523 to the beauty shop. 1524 so we're over here, Amelia raises hand 1525 we want to go to the beauty shop. Jose raises hand 1526 [how many miles is it from the library to the beauty shop. 1527AMELIA?[oh! 1528 (0.3) 1529TEACHERKatherine. Katherine, Tucker, Jake lower hands 1530 (0.6) 1531S<xx>[xx, Maureen, Jose lower hands 1532 S [aw::::? 1533 (0.4) 1534FELICIA well you were making noises. Amelia lowers hand 1535 (1.3) 61 (Table 4.6, Continued) Non-Verbal LineSpeaker Verbal Kimberley lowers hand 1536 S I wasn't. 1537 (0.9) 1538 S I wasn't going ooh. When the teacher indicates that another invitation to bid—to solve the next math problem in the set—is imminent (line 1514), several students non-verbally bid to answer (each raising a hand), and at least three bid audibly (lines 1515-1526). After the teacher nominates Katherine to solve the problem (line 1529), an unidentified girl expresses disappointment (line 1532). Notably, Felicia responds to the disappointed girl by pointing out that she bid audibly, thus becoming ineligible for nomination (line 1534). The fact that the girl in question then denies having bid audibly (lines 1536-1538) confirms that she recognizes doing so as a disqualifying violation. The excerpt in Table 4.7 shows a similar sequence of events, which takes place about 11 minutes later in the same lesson. 62 Table 4.7 Excerpt showing students’ awareness that audible bids are not accepted Non-Verbal LineSpeaker Verbal 2149 TEACHER HOW FAR is it, Maureen, Jake raise hands 2150 to the ICE cream SHOP, 2151 (0.3) 2152 from, Tucker, Jose raise hands 2153 the soccer field. 2154S ooh. 2155 (0.3) 2156S ooh.= Kimberley raises hand 2157 TEACHER =from the soccer field. 2158 (0.4) 2159S X?! 2160 xxx,= 2161TEACHER=Priscilla? Maureen, Jake, Tucker lower hands 2162 (0.9) Kimberley lowers hand 2163 TUCKER? let's go Priscilla! Jose lowers hand 2164 (0.4) 2165 MAUREEN did she already do it? 2166 (0.3) 2167JAKE you're [supposed to be quiet, 2168 S2 [no?! 2169 JAKE if you want, 2170 to go up. 2171 (0.6) 2172 S I didn't even talk. As in Table 4.6, the teacher’s invitation to bid is met with several non-verbal bids and a few audible ones (lines 2150-2160). After the teacher nominates Priscilla (line 2161), Jake explains (presumably to another disappointed student) the need to bid quietly. As 63 before, the subsequent denial confirms awareness that bidding audibly is a disqualifying violation of classroom rules. There are a couple of advantages to insisting that students bid non-verbally. One is that verbal bids undermine the teacher’s control of the floor (McHoul 1978) and violate the rule that only one participant should speak at a time (Sacks et al. 1974). A more important advantage is that students’ beginning to vocalize as soon as they have an answer can be distracting and even discouraging to those who are still attending to the teacher’s explanation, thinking about the question, and formulating responses. 4.1.3 The role of invitations to reply As for invitations to reply, allowing students to self-select improves the chance of getting a response (Griffin & Humphrey 1978: 89), so teachers often use this allocation method at the beginnings of lessons, where it serves as a warm up to new topics (Mehan et al. 1976: 153). In terms of balancing teacher control and student participation, though, invitations to reply arguably afford teachers the least control over who gets the floor of any allocation method, allowing any number of students to respond (or not) during the brief period when the floor is open. Moreover, the only way of achieving any measure of content control with this allocation method is to ask questions with only one right answer (Griffin & Humphrey 1978: 89). Thus, in the SoCal classroom corpus, only yes/no questions and cues for reading and recitation were treated as invitations to reply (see section 3.5.1). This need for simplicity arguably makes invitations to reply the least interactive floor-allocation method, as well. 64 Between their basic utility and serious limitations, invitations to reply occupy a minor but stable position among the three floor-allocation methods available to teachers, forming the basis for approximately 20 percent of teacher-initiated interactions in the SoCal classroom corpus. Moreover, although they may never be the predominant means of initiating interactions with students, the excerpt in Table 4.8—from Mrs. Johnson’s 12/11 math lesson—shows how a teacher can monitor students’ engagement through their responses (or lack thereof) to an invitation to reply. Table 4.8 Excerpt showing a teacher’s monitoring students’ engagement through their (lack of) response to an invitation to reply Non-Verbal LineSpeaker Verbal 2212 TEACHER Sean says it's, 2213 ten times three. 2214 thumbs up or thumbs down. 2215 (2.4) 2216 Daniela? 2217 you're not watching, 2218 so you're not, 2219 agreeing. After Sean solves a math problem on the overhead projector, the teacher checks whether the rest of the class has followed along by directing them to judge the accuracy of the student’s solution through an invitation to reply (lines 2212-2214). The teacher allows 2.4 seconds for the students to respond (line 2215), after which she reprimands Daniela for not paying attention as evidenced by the fact that she has not presented her judgment of the proposed solution (lines 2216-2219). 65 4.2 More on the Adjacency-Pair Structure of Teacher-Initiated Interactions As was discussed in section 2.1.1, the three floor-allocation methods—individual nominations, invitations to bid, and invitations to reply (Mehan 1979: 84-95)—can be usefully described in terms of adjacency pairs (Schegloff 1968, Goffman 1971, Schegloff & Sacks 1973, Levinson 1983). Individual nominations, for instance, consist of a single adjacency pair. In the first pair part, the teacher extends a response opportunity to a specific student (identified by name or by nonverbal means such as pointing, nodding, or eye contact), and in the second pair part, the selected student responds, as shown in the example in (18). (18) TEACHER: What time is it, Susan? SUSAN: Three o’clock. Thus, the teacher extends a response opportunity to Susan, and Susan responds. Invitations to bid are similar, but consist of two adjacency pairs. In the first part of the first adjacency pair, the teacher extends a response opportunity. However, rather than nominating a student, the teacher solicits students to make themselves known—typically by raising a hand quietly (Sahlström 2002)—if they are able and willing to respond. Then, in the second part of the first adjacency pair, one or more students bid to respond. The second adjacency pair resembles an individual nomination—in the first pair part, the teacher selects one of the bidding students, and in the second pair part, the selected student responds. The example in (19) illustrates this: 66 (19) TEACHER: Who can tell me what time is it. STUDENTS: [Raise hands] TEACHER: Susan? SUSAN: Three o’clock. The teacher extends a response opportunity, and students bid to respond by raising hands. Then, the teacher selects Susan from among the bidding students, and Susan responds. Invitations to reply, like individual nominations, consist of a single adjacency pair; however, they forgo the nomination process, allowing one or more students to speak without the need to be selected. In the first pair part, the teacher extends a response opportunity and opens the floor for any contextually relevant response. Then, in the second pair part, one or more students call out their responses. This is illustrated in (20): (20) TEACHER: Is Susan right? Is it three o’clock? STUDENTS: Yes! Thus, the teacher extends a response opportunity, and students call out the response in chorus. As was discussed in section 2.1.3, triadic dialogue—the default macrostructure for teacher-initiated interactions—has been described as consisting of two coupled adjacency pairs (Mehan 1979: 54). In the first of these pairs, the teacher extends a response opportunity to one or more students, who then respond (as detailed in section 2.1.1). 4 The entire first adjacency pair then forms the first pair part of a second adjacency pair, the second part of which is the teacher’s multifunctional third turn. This was 4 In order to capture this generalization about the triadic-dialogue macrostructure, it is necessary to treat the two adjacency pairs that make up invitations to bid as equivalent to the single pairs of individual nominations and invitations to reply. 67 illustrated visually in Figure 2.1 (repeated here as Figure 4.2 for the reader’s convenience) and is applied to an individual nomination in Figure 4.3. Figure 4.2. Visualization of a round of triadic dialogue as two coupled adjacency pairs TEACHER: What time is it, Susan? Adjacency pair 1 SUSAN: Three o’clock. TEACHER: Good. Figure 4.3. Application of the adjacency-pair analysis of triadic dialogue to an individual nomination Thus, the teacher’s extending a response opportunity to Susan and Susan’s response form the first adjacency pair, and that first pair combines with the teacher’s third turn to form the second. 4.2.1 Insertion sequences These adjacency-pair analyses of teacher-initiated interactions are bolstered by the fact that the SoCal classroom corpus contains examples of insertion sequences within individual nominations, within each of the two adjacency pairs that make up invitations to bid, and within the second adjacency pair of the triadic-dialogue macrostructure. 5 The 5 No insertion sequences are attested within invitations to reply in the SoCal classroom corpus, probably due to their being rather fast-paced and requiring relatively simple responses. First adjacency pair Second adjacency pair Teacher’s third-turn Student(s) respond Teacher extends response opportunity Adjacency pair 2 68 excerpt in Table 4.9—from Mrs. Anderson’s 12/10 math lesson—shows an insertion sequence within an individual nomination. Table 4.9 Excerpt showing an insertion sequence within an individual nomination Non-Verbal LineSpeaker Verbal 0675TEACHER COUNT how many rows of cookies does she have, 0676 on this tray. 0677 (0.5) Rodrigo's hand was not raised 0678 Rodrigo. 0679 (0.4) 0680RODRIGOhm? 0681 (0.6) 0682 TEACHER how many rows. 0683 (0.9) 0684RODRIGOthree. During a discussion of a book illustration on the overhead projector, the teacher extends a response opportunity (lines 0675-0676). Rather than inviting bids, she nominates Rodrigo (whose hand was not raised) by calling his name (line 0678), making this the first pair part of an individual nomination. The second pair part is Rodrigo’s response (line 0684). However, as is one of the risks of individual nominations (Griffin & Humphrey 1978: 90, McHoul 1978), Rodrigo is initially unprepared to respond. As a result, Rodrigo opens an insertion sequence in which he requests (line 0680) and the teacher provides (line 0682) clarification. The excerpt in Table 4.10—from Mrs. Johnson’s 12/11 math lesson—shows an insertion sequence within the first adjacency pair of an invitation to bid. 69 Table 4.10 Excerpt showing an insertion sequence within the first adjacency pair of an invitation to bid Non-Verbal LineSpeaker Verbal Katherine, Jake, Tucker, Kimberley, Amelia raise hands 1430 TEACHER how many miles does he have to drive, Felicia raises hand 1431 from work. 1432 (0.6) Maureen raises, lowers hand 1433 how many miles does he [have to drive. 1434MAUREEN[where <where>-- 1435 where does he work again, 1436 where,= Maureen raises hand 1437 TEACHER =he works at the car wash. The teacher extends a response opportunity and several students bid to answer by raising hands (lines 1430-1431), a sequence that completes the first adjacency pair of an invitation to bid for these students. Maureen begins to raise a hand as well but then quickly withdraws her bid (line 1433) and initiates an insertion sequence by requesting information (lines 1434-1436). The teacher provides the requested information, and Maureen renews her bid to answer (line 1437), thus completing her part of the first adjacency pair of the invitation to bid. The excerpt in Table 4.11—from Mrs. McDonald’s 12/09 language arts lesson— shows an insertion sequence within the second adjacency pair of an invitation to bid. 70 Table 4.11 Excerpt showing an insertion sequence within the second adjacency pair of an invitation to bid Non-Verbal LineSpeaker Verbal 1293TEACHER<nineteen fifty-two>. 1294 (0.5) Emma raises hand 1295 <how many> >years ago was that<. 1296 okay, 1297 let's think about that, 1298 (0.3) 1299 nineteen fifty-two, Emma lowers hand 1300 JOHN [ooh. John raises hand 1301 TEACHER [we're in two thousand eight, 1302 (0.4) Anne raises hand 1303 ANNE get a piece of paper and write it down, Anne lowers hand 1304 that's the best way you can do it. 1305 (1.3) 1306 JARED? I can write. 1307 (1.5) Anne raises hand 1308 JARED? xxxx Jared raises hand 1309 (0.9) 1310TEACHERJohn. John, Jared, Anne lower hands 1311 JOHN can I write it on the board? 1312TEACHERyou can! John goes to board, begins writing 1313 (2.3) The teacher extends a response opportunity (lines 1293-1301), and students bid to answer (lines 1295-1309), thus completing the first adjacency pair of an invitation to bid. The teacher then nominates John (line 1310), which constitutes the first pair part of the second adjacency pair. However, rather than responding, which would complete the 71 second adjacency pair, John initiates an insertion sequence by requesting permission to write his response on the board (line 1311). The teacher grants permission (line 1312), thus completing the insertion sequence. John then goes to the board and proceeds to write his response, thus completing the second adjacency pair of the invitation to bid. 6 The excerpt in Table 4.12—from Mrs. McDonald’s 12/09 language arts lesson— shows one type of insertion sequence within the second adjacency pair of the triadic- dialogue macrostructure. 6 John’s audible bid (line 1300) also makes this one of only seven times in the SoCal classroom corpus when a student is nominated after bidding audibly (see section 4.1.2). 72 Table 4.12 Excerpt showing one type of insertion sequence within the second adjacency pair of the triadic-dialogue macrostructure Non-Verbal LineSpeaker Verbal Rodrick raises hand 0085 TEACHER who can tell me what are some of our reading strategies. Kayla raises hand 0086 what is it that we're going to work on. 0087(0.6) Kayla, Emma lower hands 0088 Jonah. Jonah, Anne lower hands 0089 JONAH um, Rodrick, Jared lower hands 0090 (1.9) 0091 what's on the board? Kayla raises hand 0092 (0.4) 0093 TEACHER where on the board. 0094(0.6) Jonah points at front board 0095 JONAH right there? 0096TEACHERokay? 0097 where else on the board. Jared, Jonah raise hands; Jared stands 0098 what other board lists our <strategies>. Isaac raises hand 0099 we do have a board in here that lists our strategies- The teacher extends a response opportunity (0085-0086) and nominates Jonah (line 0088), who then responds (lines 0089-0091), an exchange which constitutes both the first adjacency pair of the triadic-dialogue macrostructure and the first pair part of the second adjacency pair. Normally, the teacher’s third turn would follow immediately, completing the second adjacency pair and the corresponding round of triadic dialogue. In this case, 73 however, the teacher wants some additional information before responding to Jonah’s answer, because it is not clear which board Jonah is referring to, and as the teacher later explains (line 0099), there is a board in the classroom that lists the reading strategies. The teacher initiates an insertion sequence by requesting clarification (line 0093), which Jonah provides (0095). The teacher then gives her third-turn response to Jonah’s answer (line 0096) before extending another response opportunity (lines 0097-0098). Lastly, the excerpt in Table 4.13—from Mrs. Johnson’s 12/11 math lesson— shows another type of insertion sequence within the second adjacency pair of the triadic- dialogue macrostructure. Table 4.13 Excerpt showing another type of insertion sequence within the second adjacency pair of the triadic-dialogue macrostructure Non-Verbal LineSpeaker Verbal 1366TEACHERshe's got, 1367 <three times four>. 1368Syep. 1369(0.5) Jake raises hand 1370 TEACHER how many-- Jake lowers hand 1371 if you think she's right, teacher raises thumb 1372 put your thumb up. students raise thumbs 1373 (3.4) 1374good. A student has just responded to a teacher-initiated interaction by writing a math problem on the overhead projector, thus completing both the first adjacency pair of the triadic- dialogue macrostructure and the first pair part of the second adjacency pair. Normally, the teacher’s third turn would follow immediately, completing the second adjacency pair and the corresponding round of triadic dialogue. In this case, however, the teacher reads 74 to the class what the student has written and directs them to evaluate the response in the form of an invitation to reply (line 1371). As instructed (line 1372), the students respond with a show of thumbs (line 1373), thus completing the insertion sequence. The teacher then positively evaluates both the work on the overhead and (implicitly) the students’ evaluation of it (line 1374). 4.2.2 Preference organization of students’ responses Further support for the proposed adjacency-pair analyses of teacher-initiated interactions comes from the preference organization of students’ responses to teachers’ elicitations. The preferred second pair part to a question is an expected answer, while the dispreferred second pair part is an unexpected answer or a non-answer (Levinson 1983: 336). This expectation-based preference structure applies quite literally in the classroom, where (as was discussed in section 2.1.3) teachers routinely ask questions to which they already have specific answers in mind. As a result, the preference status of a student’s response depends on whether the teacher deems it an adequate match for what the original elicitation was seeking, which is typically made clear in the teacher’s third turn. Notably though students often anticipate the preference status of their responses— prefacing those they suspect are dispreferred with hesitation markers (such as “uh” and “um”) and ending them with rising, rather than falling, intonation, despite their being declaratives—which suggests they have a fairly good sense of whether or not their 75 responses are what the teacher is looking for. 7 The excerpts in Table 4.14 and Table 4.15—from about 45 seconds apart in Mrs. McDonald’s 12/16 language arts lesson— illustrate a dispreferred (incorrect) response and a preferred (correct) response, respectively, to the same elicitation. (In the context, the teacher has asked for the part of a story’s plot in which something either goes wrong or creates a challenge for the characters and has indicated that its first two letters are P and R.) Table 4.14 Excerpt showing a student’s giving a dispreferred (incorrect) response Non-Verbal LineSpeaker Verbal 0263TEACHERoh Kevin! Erica, Kayla, Anne, Jonah, Ross, Emma, Rodrick lower hands 0264 nice job raising a [quiet hand. 0265KEVIN[<uh>, 0266preposition? 0267(0.5) 0268 TEACHER oh you're so close! Table 4.15 Excerpt showing a student’s giving a preferred (correct) response Non-Verbal LineSpeaker Verbal Rodrick lowers hand 0315 TEACHER Lauren. Anne, Kayla, Jonah lower hands 0316 (0.6) Jared, Tony lower hands 0317 LAUREN problem. John, Ross lower hands; Emma lowers hand, hitting desk 0318 TEACHER you got it Lauren, 7 Indeed, a regression analysis of 149 invitations to bid from the SoCal classroom corpus confirms that, with an alpha level of .05, hesitation markers ( β = .31, t(146) = 3.88, p < .05) and rising intonation ( β = .20, t(146) = 2.55, p < .05) are both significant predictors of third-turn rejection. 76 As is typical when students suspect that their responses are not what the teacher is looking for, in the excerpt in Table 4.14 Kevin prefaces his answer with a hesitation marker (line 0265) and ends it with rising intonation (line 0266). The teacher’s third turn then indirectly but unequivocally confirms Kevin’s suspicion (line 0268). Conversely, in the excerpt in Table 4.15, Lauren believes that her response is what the teacher is looking for, making it preferred. Consequently, there is no hesitation marker and Lauren ends her answer with falling intonation (line 0317). The teacher then confirms that Lauren has responded correctly (line 0318). Hesitation markers are among the characteristic features of dispreferred second pair parts (Levinson 1983: 334), so it is not surprising that students use them to preface responses they suspect may be incorrect. As for students’ ending such responses with rising intonation, the use of rising intonation in declarative utterances gives an impression of uncertainty (Lakoff 1973). This is not unlike the effect of prefacing responses with hesitation markers and, thus, may well be serving as an additional expression of their suspected dispreferred status. Rising intonation has also been described as a way for speakers to avoid committing too strongly to what they say and thereby mitigating potential conflict with the addressee (Lakoff 1973). Such avoidance has been discussed as a type of ‘face-work’ aimed at defending and protecting the social value one claims in an interaction (i.e., one’s ‘face’) (Goffman 1955). In this sense, students’ use of both rising intonation and hesitation markers in responding to teachers’ elicitations can be interpreted as ways of 77 hedging their claims of knowledge so as to mitigate the face threat associated with their responses’ possibly being rejected. 8 Lastly, it has been noted that a declarative spoken with the rising intonation of a yes-no question gives the impression that the speaker is requesting confirmation from the addressee (Lakoff 1973). While such intonation may seem inappropriate for most declaratives—because the speaker is the primary knower (Berry 1981) and, thus, the only person in a position to evaluate the statement—requesting confirmation is, in some sense, exactly what students are doing in responding to teachers’ elicitations. Recall that triadic dialogue has been analyzed as consisting of two coupled adjacency pairs, and a student’s response serves not only as the second part to the teacher’s elicitation, but as part of the first part to the teacher’s (often evaluative) third turn (Mehan 1979: 54). Thus, a student who ends a response with rising intonation may do so wishing to deemphasize its being a response to an elicitation and emphasize, instead, that it is being submitted for evaluation by the teacher. 4.2.3 Preference organization of teachers’ third turns Final support for the proposed adjacency-pair analyses of teacher-initiated interactions comes from the preference organization of teachers’ third turns, which constitute the second part to an adjacency pair whose first part consists of an elicitation by the teacher and a response from the class (Mehan 1979: 54). As was discussed in section 4.2.2, students respond to teachers’ elicitations, hoping to have what they say 8 Teachers appear to be sensitive to students’ face needs, being marginally more likely to preface rejection of an incorrect response with token agreement when the response is spoken with falling intonation ( β = .283, t(34) = 1.718, p < .10). 78 confirmed as correct. An examination of teachers’ third turns reveals that their disconfirmations exhibit many of the same characteristics as other dispreferred second pair parts, including hesitation, token agreement before disagreement, and explanation (Levinson 1983: 334, MacBeth 2000), suggesting that teachers are not insensitive to their students’ preference for confirmation. The excerpt in Table 4.16—from Mrs. McDonald’s 12/09 math lesson— illustrates how teachers’ preferred and dispreferred third turns differ. (In the context, the teacher is asking for multiplication strategies, of which the students have been taught seven.) 79 Table 4.16 Excerpt contrasting dispreferred and preferred third turns Non-Verbal LineSpeaker Verbal 2759 TEACHER what's another one. Tiffany, Kayla raise hands 2760 (1.0) Kayla lowers hand 2761 Kevin. Tiffany lowers hand 2762 (0.5) 2763KEVINum twos? 2764(1.5) 2765TEACHERuh::,= 2766S=no! 2767(0.5) 2768TEACHERthat-- 2769 if I were to <do>, 2770 something having to do with twos. 2771 but we're not doing twos right now, Kayla raises hand 2772 I want another strategy, 2773 that I could do this-- Jared raises hand 2774 that will solve four times three. 2775Kayla. John raises hand 2776 (0.3) Kayla lowers hand 2777 KAYLA memory. 2778(0.8) Jared lowers hand 2779 TEACHER memory. John lowers hand 2780 <memorize>, 2781(0.5) 2782your facts. As Kevin seems to have anticipated, his response is not what the teacher is looking for (line 2763). In letting him know this (which constitutes a dispreferred third turn), the teacher makes a long pause (line 2764) followed by a long hesitation marker (line 2765). She then describes a context in which the strategy Kevin has suggested would be 80 appropriate (lines 2769-2770)—a form of token agreement—before finally explaining why it is presently inappropriate (line 2771). After all this, the teacher restates the elicitation (lines 2772-2774) and nominates Kayla to respond (line 2775). Kayla, showing no sign that she anticipates a disconfirmation, suggests another strategy (line 2777). The teacher accepts Kayla response as correct with a preferred third turn in which she restates it verbatim and then revoices it in a slightly expanded form (2779-2782). Not only are teachers’ preferred and dispreferred third turns quite different, but students are sensitive to these differences. In particular, knowing that a response’s being rejected typically means another response opportunity is imminent, students often begin bidding as soon as a teacher’s third turn shows signs of being dispreferred. The excerpt in Table 4.17—from Mrs. McDonald’s 12/09 math lesson—illustrates this. (In the context, Erica has just written “4, 3, 12” on the overhead projector.) 81 Table 4.17 Excerpt showing students’ bidding in response to a dispreferred third turn Non-Verbal LineSpeaker Verbal 2239 TEACHER what did she show us. Rodrick lowers hand 2240 what is that called. 2241(2.8) 2242Kevin. Tiffany lowers hand 2243 what is that called. Emma lowers hand 2244 (0.3) 2245KEVINum, 2246times? 2247(1.0) 2248TEACHERuh:, Emma, Tiffany raise hands 2249 it does have to do with multiplication, 2250(0.5) 2251hmm::. 2252(1.4) 2253 there's a poster. 2254 somewhere in our room. 2255 that <shows> it. The teacher nominates Kevin to name what Erica has written on the overhead projector (line 2242-2243). As in previous examples, his hesitation and rising intonation suggest that he is less than confident in his response (lines 2245-2246). Again, the teacher makes a long pause (line 2247) followed by a long hesitation marker (line 2248) and token agreement (line 2249). At the same time, and without the teacher’s having said explicitly that Kevin’s response is not what she is looking for, Emma and Tiffany raise their hands in anticipation of another response opportunity (line 2249). Lastly, when faced with an unacceptable but minimally flawed response from a student, teachers sometimes initiate a repair by using a request for confirmation to expose 82 the problem with it (Jefferson 1987, Lee 2008). The excerpt in Table 4.18—from Mrs. Johnson’s 12/11 math lesson—illustrates this. (In the context, the teacher is going over the ‘picture strategy’ for multiplication, in this case using the number of wheels on a set of cars to illustrate multiplying four times three.) Table 4.18 Excerpt showing a teacher’s using a request for confirmation to expose the problem with a student’s response Non-Verbal Line Speaker Verbal 0829TEACHER how many cars am I making Maureen, 0830 (0.4) 0831 S °I [know.° 0832 MAUREEN [uh[: 0833 S [ME, 0834MAUREENfour, 0835SHARON.hh! Katherine raises hand 0836 OOH! 0837MAUREENfour, 0838 (0.3) 0839TEACHERI'm [making four cars? 0840 S [xxxx. 0841KATHERINEyou can't! 0842 you can't!= 0843MAUREEN=three cars! 0844 °three [cars.° 0845 TEACHER [three cars, 0846 it says three cars here. When the teacher asks Maureen how many cars to draw for four times three (line 0829), and Maureen says “four” (lines 0834 and 0837), the teacher initiates a repair by requesting confirmation of what Maureen has said and strategically emphasizing the trouble source, i.e., the word “four” (line 0839). This allows Maureen to self-correct (lines 0843-0844) and enables the teacher to avoid a dispreferred third turn. 83 4.3 Chapter Summary This chapter examined findings related to teacher-initiated interactions in the SoCal classroom corpus. In section 4.1, a review of results concerning the three types of teacher-initiated interactions (individual nominations, invitations to bid, and invitations to reply) revealed that individual nominations—which account for over 70 percent of teacher-initiated interactions in Mehan et al.’s (1976) and Griffin and Humphrey’s (1978) corpora—account for less than 10 percent in the SoCal classroom corpus, having been replaced by invitations to bid as the primary floor allocation method. This finding was attributed to a change in the role of discourse in balancing teacher control and student participation now as compared with 35 years ago, part of a larger shift away from the authoritarian classroom of old in favor of a more egalitarian model. Section 4.2 presented findings in support of the adjacency-pair analyses of teacher-initiated interactions proposed in section 2.1.1. Drawing examples from the SoCal classroom corpus, insertion sequences were shown to occur within individual nominations, within each of the two adjacency pairs that make up invitations to bid, and within the second adjacency pair of the triadic-dialogue macrostructure. Moreover, students were shown to be sensitive to the preference status of their responses to teachers’ elicitations, prefacing those suspected of being dispreferred with hesitation markers and ending them with rising intonation, apparently in an effort to save face. Lastly, teachers were shown to be sensitive to the preference status of their third turns, marking dispreferred ones with hesitation, token agreement, and explanation. 84 Chapter 5 – Results Concerning Student-Initiated Interactions This chapter examines findings related to student-initiated interactions in the SoCal classroom corpus in light of the two hypotheses from section 2.2: Hypothesis 1 – In accepting students’ bids to speak, teachers prefer questions (particularly those requesting lesson-related information or clarification) over statements or comments. Hypothesis 2 – Teachers decide whether to acknowledge unauthorized contributions based not on their timing, but on the manifest relevance of their content. It is divided into two sections. Section 5.1 discusses results relevant to Hypothesis 1 and the first type of student-initiated interaction, namely, bidding to speak. Section 5.2 then discusses findings related to Hypothesis 2 and the second type of student-initiated interaction—calling out—and concludes by showing how calling out, technically a violation of classroom rules (Lemke 1990: 72), is actually a student’s most reliable means of requesting information or clarification and correcting perceived errors. 5.1 Hypothesis 1 and Bids to Speak The first hypothesis posits that in accepting students’ bids to speak—defined as in (21) for the purposes of the present study—teachers prefer questions (particularly those requesting lesson-related information or clarification) over statements or comments. (21) bid to speak – An unsolicited student hand-raise occurring outside of any teacher- led discussion (from section 3.5.2). 85 This hypothesis was developed in section 2.2.1 based on an example that Lemke (1990: 28-29) discussed of a student’s bidding to speak. The relevant excerpt is repeated in (22). (22) ERIC: [Raises hand] TEACHER: Eric, you have a question? ERIC: Yeah, how can it be the ground that creates the heat energy if the sun creates the heat energy? TEACHER: Well, on the sun, and in the sun, the sun is... (adapted from Lemke 1990: 28) As was discussed in section 2.2.1, the issue is why the teacher, in accepting Eric’s bid, says his name followed by “You have a question?” Lemke’s (1990: 29) explanation was that teachers assume students’ bids are bids to question, but this account seems incorrect for two reasons. The first is that students bid to speak for a variety of reasons (as Lemke himself immediately went on to note), a fact that teachers would well understand. The second is that if teachers genuinely believed all students’ bids were bids to question, this would militate against their adding “You have a question?” (rather than simply nominating the student to speak) in accepting such bids. Work by other researchers suggests an alternate explanation. Griffin and Humphrey (1978: 87) called student questions “a powerful and valued mode for the exchange of academic information,” but made no mention of statements or comments by students. Moreover, one of Barnes et al.’s (1969: 18) analysis questions asked, “If [there] were unsolicited statements or comments, how did the teacher deal with them? [emphasis added].” This implies that unlike student questions, which are potentially useful, 86 unsolicited statements and comments can be problematic for teachers, which in turn, forms the basis for Hypothesis 1. This preference for questions arguably derives from the need to balance teacher control and student participation. A student’s primary role is as a learner, so the unmarked act of unsolicited student participation is a teacher-directed question, ideally one with which the student requests lesson-related information or clarification (Emanuelsson & Sahlström 2008). Statements and comments, on the other hand, with which a student would seek to inform the teacher or class, are marked in that they fall outside this primary role. Questions are also preferred from the perspective of teacher control, as they elicit a response from the teacher, allowing him/her to determine what is ultimately added to the class’s shared knowledge-base. Conversely, statements and comments are dispreferred as they put ‘on the record’ (at least temporarily) whatever potentially random, irrelevant, disruptive thing a student might say, leaving the teacher to then “deal with” it. In terms of adjacency pairs, a student’s bid to speak—the raising of a hand in Lemke’s (1990: 28-29) example—is the first part of a summons-acknowledgement sequence (Schegloff 1968). Such sequences are nonterminal in that the summoner, if acknowledged, has the right and obligation to speak again. Knowing this, a teacher may seek to constrain such an unsolicited contribution by following acknowledgement of the student’s summons with an insertion sequence requesting confirmation that the student’s bid is a bid to ask a question. This discourse strategy constrains the bidding student’s next turn in two ways. First, because the teacher’s request opens an insertion sequence, the 87 bidding student is forced to respond to it before proceeding. Second, the teacher’s requesting confirmation that the student’s bid is a bid to question makes disconfirmation marked, thus serving as a reminder (to the bidding student and the rest of the class) of the preference for questions and forcing the bidding student to either ask a question or give an explanation for doing otherwise (Levinson 1983: 332ff). This analysis was applied to Lemke’s (1990: 28-29) example in section 2.2.1, repeated here as Table 5.1. Table 5.1 Adjacency-pair analysis of Lemke’s (1990: 28-29) example ERIC: [Raises hand] Summons TEACHER: Eric, Acknowledgement TEACHER: you have a question? Request for confirmation Insertion sequence ERIC: yeah, Confirmation ERIC: how can it be the ground that creates the heat energy if the sun creates the heat energy? Request for clarification TEACHER: Well, on the sun, and in the sun, the sun is... Clarification 5.1.1 Bids to speak accepted with constraining discourse Six bids to speak are accepted in the SoCal classroom corpus, three with discourse strategies—such as requests for confirmation as in Lemke’s (1990: 28-29) example— aimed at constraining the bidding student’s contribution. The first of these—from Mrs. McDonald’s 12/09 language arts lesson—appears in Table 5.2. 88 Table 5.2 Excerpt showing the first bid to speak accepted with constraining discourse Non-Verbal LineSpeaker Verbal Kayla raises hand 0461 TEACHER that's the retelling. Jared lowers hand 0462 that's the difference between retelling? 0463 and summarizing. 0464 (0.4) 0465 retelling gives us, 0466 <all> those intere[sting little de[tails, 0467 ROSS [x, 0468 [xxxxxx (saying it). 0469 TEACHER so a lot of times, 0470 (0.6) Teacher raises finger to lips facing Chris 0471 we talk about those movies again, 0472 a lot of times, 0473 when you're telling your friend about a really great movie you saw? 0474 you got to tell them all those funny details, 0475 you're retelling it. 0476 (0.6) 0477 but, 0478 when we're summarizing, 0479 we're just saying the big ideas. 0480 Kayla. Kayla lowers hand 0481 you have a question, 0482 (0.9) 0483KAYLAuh:::, 0484 no. 0485 (0.4) 0486 but, 89 (Table 5.2, Continued) Non-Verbal LineSpeaker Verbal 0487KAYLA usually on the back of a book, 0488 it has a summary. As in Lemke’s (1990: 28-29) example, the teacher accepts Kayla’s bid to speak by saying her name followed by an insertion sequence in which she requests confirmation that Kayla’s bid is (as is expected of students) a bid to question (lines 0480-0481). This discourse strategy constrains Kayla’s next turn in two ways. First, because the teacher’s request opens an insertion sequence, Kayla is forced to respond to it before she can proceed with whatever she originally bid to do. Second, because the teacher has requested confirmation that Kayla’s bid is a bid to question, Kayla cannot use her turn for any other purpose without its being dispreferred. Besides constraining Kayla, this strategy serves to remind the rest of the class of the preferred status of questions. Kayla’s bid is not a bid to question, so her negative response to the teacher’s request for confirmation (line 0484) is preceded by significant hesitation—nearly a full second of silence (line 0482) followed by a lengthy filled pause (line 0483)—which has been identified as typically accompanying dispreferred second pair parts (Levinson 1983: 334). In reality, question form is of less importance to teachers than relevance, although they often encourage the former as a means of keeping unsolicited student contributions on topic and making them easier to deal with when they are not. Kayla, seemingly understanding this, reaffirms the relevance of her contribution, which stands in contrast to its marked status as a non-question, with the discourse marker “but” (line 0486) before 90 saying what she has to say (lines 0487-0488). As the excerpt in Table 5.3 shows, Kayla’s certainty about the relevance of her contribution was not ill-placed. 9 9 Kayla’s confidence in the relevance of her contribution parallels other findings (discussed in section 4.2.2) that suggest students have a good sense of whether their contributions are what the teacher is looking for. 91 Table 5.3 Excerpt showing the teacher’s response to Kayla’s contribution Non-Verbal LineSpeaker Verbal 0489 (0.3) 0490TEACHERyou're right! 0491 (0.3) 0492 they do! 0493 why do you think they put that summary on the back of the book. 0494 (0.4) 0495KAYLAso[:, 0496 TEACHER [and it's not-- Teacher raises index finger to Kayla 0497 let's clarify this. 0498 it's not a summary of the whole entire story, 0499 cause it's not going to tell you the ending of the story, 0500 is it. 0501 (0.5) 0502 cause we don't want to give it away to anybody. 0503 (0.3) 0504 but why do you think it does summarize, 0505 (0.4) 0506 part of the story in here, 0507 why do you think they do that. 0508 (0.5) 0509KAYLAso::, 0510 (0.5) 0511 because, 0512 if you're not sure, 0513 about, Teacher smiles and nods facing Kayla 0514 if you want to read it or not, 92 (Table 5.3, Continued) Non-Verbal LineSpeaker Verbal 0515KAYLA so you have a summary on the back, 0516 (0.6) 0517 so you, 0518 (0.9) 0519 can like, 0520 (0.7) 0521 want to read it. 0522 TEACHER you're exactly right. 0523 (0.3) 0524 it helps us to decide. 0525 is this something I want to read, 0526 (0.3) 0527 it tries and <DRAWS> those readers in. 0528 to make you interested, 0529 in the story. 0530 nice job. The second example of a teacher’s using discourse to constrain the bidding student’s contribution in accepting a bid to speak—from Mrs. McDonald’s 12/16 language arts lesson—appears in Table 5.4. (In the context, the teacher has just finished showing the class how they can use context to make an educated guess that maples and birches are types of trees.) 93 Table 5.4 Excerpt showing the second bid to speak accepted with constraining discourse Non-Verbal Line Speaker Verbal 1302TEACHER if you don't understand the meaning of a word, 1303 if you keep reading that whole sentence, Rodrick raises hand 1304 (0.3) 1305 you use your context clues around you to help you figure out, 1306 (0.5) 1307 um, Rodrick lowers hand 1308 >what that word means<, Rodrick raises hand 1309 I'm still seeing some people with some distractions out. 1310 and I need you to make responsible choices please, 1311 (1.4) 1312 this is our last chapter, 1313 and I want you to do your very best for your learning. 1314 (2.1) Rodrick lowers hand 1315 yes Rodrick, 1316 do you have a [question before we contin[ue? 1317 RODRICK [<xx>, 1318 [I- 1319 I um-- 1320 (0.5) 1321 I already knew one? 1322 uh when we read the sentence? 1323 because we still have maple trees. 94 (Table 5.4, Continued) Non-Verbal Line Speaker Verbal 1324 TEACHER so you have some. 1325 so you already brought that experience with you. 1326 (0.3) 1327 that's called <prior knowledge>, As in the example with Kayla Table 5.2, in accepting Rodrick’s bid to speak, the teacher says his name followed by an insertion sequence in which she requests confirmation that his bid is a bid to question (lines 1315-1316). Like Kayla, Rodrick has not bid to question. As a result, although his disconfirmation is not stated overtly, he hesitates (lines 1319- 1320) before saying what he has to say (1321-1323). The teacher also uses an additional discourse strategy to constrain Rodrick’s contribution, adding “before we continue” (line 1316). This preemptively frames whatever Rodrick says as a possible aside to be dealt with before the lesson continues, rather than a part of the lesson itself, and helps the teacher maintain control over the class’s shared knowledge-base by making it clear in advance that Rodrick is not speaking ‘on the record.’ This strategy also pressures Rodrick to make his contribution brief, as it implies that he is holding up the lesson. Acknowledging this pressure, Rodrick uses rising intonation to hold the floor until his contribution is complete (lines 1321-1323). The third example of a teacher’s using discourse to constrain a bidding student’s contribution—from Mrs. McDonald’s 12/09 math lesson—appears in Table 5.5. 95 Table 5.5 Excerpt showing the third bid to speak accepted with constraining discourse Non-Verbal Line Speaker Verbal 0168TEACHER only the person who wrote the problem, Anne raises hand 0169 is allowed to identify themselves, 0170 if they want to. 0171 (0.6) 0172 all right? Erica raises hand 0173 (0.5) 0174 yes. Anne lowers hand 0175 (0.4) 0176 °Anne°, Anne shows the teacher something 0177 (0.9) 0178 °okay°. 0179 (0.4) 0180 °put it down°, 0181 °we're not going to worry about it right now°. 0182 (0.7) 0183 okay, 0184 here we go, In this case, although the nomination is open in form (making no reference to the preferred status of questions) and the teacher does not explicitly frame the interaction as an aside as she did in accepting Rodrick’s bid to speak in Table 5.4, she accepts Anne’s bid in a relatively quiet voice (line 0176). This lower volume, which is maintained throughout the interaction, is functionally equivalent to the framing that accompanied the teacher’s acceptance of Rodrick’s bid in Table 5.4, insofar as it marks a frame shift from official lesson-related talk relevant to the entire class to non-lesson talk specific to Anne 96 and off the official record. As a discourse strategy, this frame-shift signals to both Anne and her classmates that she has been given the teacher’s attention but has not been given the floor to address the class. After the interaction with Anne is completed, the teacher marks another frame shift—this time back to lesson-related talk—with a 0.7-second pause followed by the transitional discourse marker “okay” and the explicit transition “here we go,” both spoken at her usual teaching volume. 10 This same sort of frame shift occurs when this teacher makes a side-comment about needing new overhead projector pens in the excerpt in Table 4.4, the relevant portion of which is repeated in Table 5.6. Table 5.6 Excerpt showing a frame-shift Non-Verbal LineSpeaker Verbal 0506 so here's what I'm going to do. 0507 I want all of you? Kayla lowers hand 0508 (0.3) 0509 °oh°! 0510 °my goodness°! 0511 (1.5) Teacher marks second sentence 0512 °I need some new overhead pens°. " 0513 (0.5) " 0514 RODRICK [I'll buy you-- " 0515TEACHER[<this sentence>, " 0516 <right here>, 10 Note that this strategy requires the teacher to be in relatively close proximity to the bidding student, as she and Anne are (see Appendix A for a seating chart). 97 The teacher shifts from her usual volume—used in addressing lesson-related material to the entire class—to a lower, side-sequence volume in order to comment (perhaps only to herself) on the fact that she needs new overhead pens (lines 0509-0512). Rodrick attempts to interject a response (line 0514), but the teacher has shifted back into her lesson frame and ignores his remark. 5.1.2 Bids to speak accepted openly The remaining three of the six bids to speak accepted in the SoCal classroom corpus are accepted more or less openly. The first of these—from Mrs. McDonald’s 12/09 language arts lesson—appears in Table 5.7. 98 Table 5.7 Excerpt showing the first openly accepted bid to speak Non-Verbal Line Speaker Verbal 1981RODRICK I know why they said to hang on to those swings tight, 1982 because you can see the swings right here, 1983 and it goes pret[ty high. 1984 ROSS [<yeah>. 1985 TEACHER <oh yeah> so whe- 1986 we look at thos- 1987 you know what Rodrick? 1988 what you just did, 1989 (0.3) 1990 you used your picture, 1991 to help you understand. 1992 you used your [picture to help, 1993ROSS [that's what I did. 1994TEACHERyour comprehension, 1995 ROSS I used [it for the ice-- 1996 TEACHER [and that's, Teacher nods at Ross 1997 (0.4) Anne raises hand 1998 one of [our strategies. 1999ROSS [I used it for the ice thingy. 2000 (0.5) to Ross 2001 TEACHER <nice>! 2002 (0.6) 2003 yes, Anne lowers hand 2004 Anne. Soon after the teacher begins to comment on how Rodrick used a picture in the book to understand something the children in the story were told (lines 1990-1992), Ross resumes calling out comments about a picture he believed was relevant earlier in the lesson (lines 99 1993-1999), at which time he called out no fewer than seven comments on the matter, all of which were ignored (see section 5.2.2 for discussion). The teacher finally acknowledges Ross, rather than reprimanding him for calling out or continuing to ignore him (line 2001), and then openly accepts a bid to speak from Anne (lines 2003-2004), thus ending the possible distraction of Ross’s being right but ignored. The second example of an openly accepted bid to speak—from Mrs. McDonald’s 12/16 math lesson—appears in Table 5.8. Table 5.8 Excerpt showing the second openly accepted bid to speak Non-Verbal Line Speaker Verbal Rodrick raises hand 1373 TEACHER so you need to be working on those facts, 1374 you don't have regular homework this week, 1375 you should really be working on those multiplication facts. 1376 (0.3) 1377 yes Rodrick. A likely reason for the open acceptance here is that the teacher has just completed the official lesson, thus mitigating the need for content control. Evidently, though, time management is still a sufficient concern to postpone another bid to speak that follows Rodrick’s, shown in the excerpt in Table 5.9. 100 Table 5.9 Excerpt showing the teacher’s explicitly postponing a bid to speak Non-Verbal Line Speaker Verbal 1397TEACHERokay, 1398 ladies and gentlemen, 1399 Lauren I'll get your question in just a minute, 1400 I need to get us lined up for, 1401 um, 1402 lunch. 1403 and then I'll come and talk to you about your question. 1404 okay? Here, the teacher postpones acknowledging a bid to speak, citing the need to get the class lined up for lunch (lines 1399-1404), a move that Schegloff called a “motion to defer” (1968: 1083). Interestingly, even in postponing Lauren’s bid to speak, the teacher continues to underscore preferred status of questions by characterizing Lauren’s bid as a “question” (lines 1399 and 1403). The third and final example of an openly accepted bid to speak—from Mrs. Johnson’s 12/11 language arts lesson—appears in Table 5.10. 101 Table 5.10 Excerpt showing the third openly accepted bid to speak Non-Verbal Line Speaker Verbal Jake raises hand 0506 TEACHER what does Wilbur think might happen. Maureen raises hand 0507 S .hh! Melissa raises hand 0508 S oh! 0509TEACHERTucker?= Melissa, Maureen lower hands; Hailey raises hand 0510 TUCKER =he might die. 0511 (0.4) Jake lowers hand 0512 TEACHER yeah, 0513 maybe, 0514 Mister Zuckerman [won't think he's such, 0515 HAILEY [XXXX. 0516TEACHER an extraordinary pig after all. 0517 right? 0518 [and he'll end up as bacon or ham. 0519SS[(yeah). to Hailey 0520 TEACHER yes. 0521 Sor bac[on. Hailey lowers hand 0522 HAILEY [no. 0523 they want him as sausage. 0524 (0.9) 0525 S but I never [xx-- 0526 S [oh, 0527 TEACHER [they want-- 0528 Sbac[on. 0529 TEACHER [they want him as-- 0530 you know-- 0531 (0.7) 0532 Sxx[xxxx. 102 (Table 5.10, Continued) Non-Verbal Line Speaker Verbal 0533 TEACHER [we learned that- 0534 sh::: 0535 (1.0) 0536 when, 0537 (0.6) 0538 Zuckerman originally purchased Wilbur, 0539 (0.3) 0540 from the Arables. 0541 (0.4) 0542 from Fern. 0543 (0.8) Marie raises hand 0544 what do you suppose Zuckerman's original plan was. Blake, Tyler raise hands 0545 (1.1) The teacher accepts Hailey’s bid to speak in the midst of a boisterous discussion (line 0520). Although Hailey raised her hand in line 0510, she uses her turn (lines 0522-0523) to contradict what the teacher said in line 0518. The teacher begins to respond to Hailey’s contribution at least twice (lines 0527 and 0529), but does not complete either utterance. Ultimately, she shushes the class (line 0534) and extends another invitation to bid (lines 0536-0544). 5.1.3 Unacknowledged bids to speak In addition to the 6 accepted bids to speak, another 17 (73.9 percent of those in the SoCal classroom corpus) go unacknowledged. This is illustrated in Figure 5.1. 103 Figure 5.1. Pie chart showing the relative proportion of bids to speak accepted with constraining discourse, accepted openly, and unacknowledged One of these unacknowledged bids to speak begins on line 0173 of the excerpt in Table 5.5, from Mrs. McDonald’s 12/09 math lesson. An extended version of the same excerpt appears in Table 5.11. Unacknowledged 73.9% Accepted openly 13.0% Accepted with constraining discourse 13.0% Bids to speak 104 Table 5.11 Excerpt showing an unacknowledged bid to speak Non-Verbal Line Speaker Verbal 0168TEACHER only the person who wrote the problem, Anne raises hand 0169 is allowed to identify themselves, 0170 if they want to. 0171 (0.6) 0172 all right? Erica raises hand 0173 (0.5) 0174 yes. Anne lowers hand 0175 (0.4) 0176 °Anne°, 0177 (0.9) 0178 °okay°. 0179 (0.4) 0180 °put it down°, 0181 °we're not going to worry about it right now°. 0182 (0.7) 0183 okay, 0184 here we go, 0185 so, 0186 pay attention to the problem, 0187 (0.3) Erica lowers hand 0188 pay attention to the important information, After addressing Anne’s bid off the record (lines 0174-0181), the teacher shifts back into the lesson frame and resumes speaking to the class without acknowledging Erica (line 0183), who then gives up and withdraws her bid to speak (line 0188). Although it is impossible to know whether such bids are unacknowledged because teachers fail to notice them, the fact that Erica’s hand is raised for well over a minute and her desk is 105 adjacent to Anne’s in the center of the classroom (see Appendix A for a seating chart) strongly suggest a conscious choice on the part of the teacher to ignore Erica’s bid. Albeit unexpected, the strikingly high proportion of unacknowledged bids to speak is consistent with the hypothesis that unsolicited statements and comments are dispreferred. This is because the purpose of a student’s bid to speak cannot be determined prior to accepting it, and once a bid is accepted, whatever potentially random, irrelevant, or disruptive statement or comment a student might make is ‘on the record’ (at least temporarily) for the teacher to “deal with.” An example of such a random, irrelevant, disruptive bid to speak—from Mrs. McDonald’s 12/16 math lesson—appears in Table 5.12. 11 11 This bid to speak was excluded from the quantitative analyses because the bidding student was off camera, and there was no way of determining how many off-camera bids to speak went unacknowledged, so including it might have yielded an inaccurate estimate of the relative proportion of accepted versus unacknowledged bids to speak. 106 Table 5.12 Excerpt showing a random, irrelevant, disruptive bid to speak Non-Verbal LineSpeaker Verbal Teacher calls on an off- camera student 0228 TEACHER yes. 0229 (1.1) 0230OFF-CAMum. 0231 I thought that- 0232 Jesse and, 0233 Erica had to go to the thing. 0234 (0.6) 0235 S they already [xxx. 0236TEACHER [they're back. 0237 S they already [did. 0238 TEACHER [good. 0239 they're here. 0240 (0.4) 0241 they're already xx. 0242 (1.7) 0243 SO I'M GOING TO SAY MY TOTAL, 0244 sh sh sh sh, 0245 (0.5) 0246 we're listening? 0247 we're quiet? 0248 (3.1) 0249 I'm going to say my total, It turns out that the purpose of the student’s bid to speak is to point out that Erica and Jesse need to go and do something that, in fact, they have already done. Although the issue itself takes only about 7 seconds to resolve, it interrupts the flow of the lesson, such that the teacher spends another 11 seconds getting the students to stop talking before she continues teaching. One sure way to avoid such distractions is not to accept bids to speak in the first place, just as the teachers in the SoCal classroom corpus do most of the time. 107 It is somewhat disconcerting to note that some students, sitting patiently with a hand in the air, seem not to have understood the teachers’ practice of ignoring most bids to speak. Erica, for instance, has already had her hand up for nearly 30 seconds when the teacher, ignoring her, accepts an off-camera student’s bid to speak in line 0228 of the excerpt in Table 5.12. 12 Erica keeps her hand raised for nearly another 40 seconds after that before finally giving up. In terms of balancing teacher control and student participation, this strategy of not accepting bids to speak strongly favors the former. It helps teachers maintain control over the content of the class’s shared knowledge-base, but it does so at the expense of students’ ability to initiate interactions. Unfortunately, this limits students’ opportunities not only to make statements and comments, which may well be irrelevant to the lesson, but to request information and clarification, which may be crucial to their learning. Fortunately (at least for those students who understand it), there exists an unofficial market for such transactions, which will be examined in section 5.2. 5.2 Hypothesis 2 and Calling Out The second hypothesis posits that teachers decide whether to acknowledge students’ called-out contributions—defined as in (23) for the purposes of the present study—based not on their timing, but on their content. 12 There is, of course, no way of knowing how long the off-camera student’s hand was raised before being acknowledged. 108 (23) calling out – Directing an utterance toward the teacher without having been nominated, except as an audible bid to respond or in response to an invitation to reply (from section 3.5.2). This hypothesis was developed in section 2.2.2, relying on what Mehan (1979: 139-159) presented as examples of appropriately and inappropriately timed student comments. Mehan argued that students could call out contributions provided they did so between sequences of triadic dialogue. In reality, though, his examples of appropriately timed student comments—a student’s claiming to have known the answer that another student just gave and a student’s saying that he should add his house to the map the class was making—were merely “not negatively evaluated” (Mehan 1979: 146-147). In other words the teacher ignored them, and according to Mehan himself, ignoring a contribution constitutes not an acceptance, but a “mild sanction” and a refusal to incorporate it into the lesson (1979: 111), making the examples more consistent with the observation that called-out comments are subject to reprimand (Lemke 1990: 70). Mehan (1979: 142-143) also gave two examples of inappropriately timed contributions’ being “rebuffed” in the form of the teacher disagreeing with their content. Unlike ignoring a comment, however, disagreeing with one is not a reprimand, but rather treats the comment as a valid contribution. Given these inconsistencies, a more plausible hypothesis is that teachers decide whether to acknowledge called-out contributions based on their content. This would account for the observation that teachers sometimes tolerate students’ calling out and validate contributions they consider “valuable” (Lemke 1990: 109 58). Crucially, this hypothesis would also be consistent with the need to balance student participation with teacher control over the class’s shared knowledge-base. 5.2.1 The numbers A total of 362 instances of students’ calling out occurs in the SoCal classroom corpus, of which 19.9 percent (n = 72) are acknowledged, 73.5 percent (n = 266) unacknowledged, and 6.6 percent (n = 24) reprimanded. The considerably higher proportion of unacknowledged call-outs over reprimanded ones is consistent with what is known about the evaluative work of ignoring violations and the fact that if teachers always reacted overtly, there would be no time left for teaching (Mehan 1979: 111). Of primary interest in light of Hypothesis 2 is the content of the 72 acknowledged call-outs. Of these, 44.4 percent (n = 32) are requests for information or clarification, 18.1 percent (n = 13) are repairs of perceived teacher or student errors, and 25.0 percent (n = 18) are statements and comments that the teacher presumably found relevant. It is unclear why the teachers acknowledge the other 12.5 percent (n = 9), although in at least one case the student’s persistence seems to have played a role, as the teacher finally acknowledged his contribution after he called it out no fewer than 10 times. These findings are illustrated in Figure 5.2. 110 Figure 5.2. Pie charts showing the relative number of call-outs acknowledged, unacknowledged, and reprimanded (left) and the relative frequencies of the four types of acknowledged call-outs (right) The other data needed to address Hypothesis 2 are the number of requests and repairs that are unacknowledged or reprimanded. It turns out that only 5 of 38 called-out requests and 2 of 15 called-out repairs go unacknowledged in the SoCal classroom corpus. Moreover, despite the fact that calling out is technically a violation of classroom rules (Lemke 1990: 72), there is only one instance of a student’s being reprimanded in connection with calling out a request or repair (after which his request is fulfilled). Thus, the acknowledgment rates for called-out requests and called-out repairs are 86.8 percent and 86.7 percent, respectively. 13 This strongly supports Hypothesis 2—the content of a student’s called-out utterance is an excellent predictor of whether the teacher will acknowledge it. 13 There is no objective way of determining which of the other 259 unacknowledged call-outs to classify as ‘relevant,’ so it is not possible to calculate an acknowledgment rate for this third category. Acknowledged 19.9% Reprimanded 6.6% Unacknowledged 73.5% Requests 44.4% Repairs 18.1% Relevant 19.9% Others 12.5% Call-outs (n = 362) Acknowledged call-outs (n = 72) 111 5.2.2 Requests, repairs, relevant contributions, and ‘others’ Given the privileged status of requests, repairs, and contributions teachers deem relevant, it is worth examining a pair of examples of each type, after which an example of an ‘other’-type acknowledged call-out will also be discussed. The excerpt in Table 5.13—from Mrs. Johnson’s 12/11 math lesson—shows a student’s calling out a request for information (lines 1434-1436). Table 5.13 Excerpt showing a student’s calling out a request for information Non-Verbal LineSpeaker Verbal Katherine, Jake, Tucker, Kimberley, Amelia raise hands 1430 TEACHER how many miles does he have to drive, Felicia raises hand 1431 from work. 1432 (0.6) Maureen raises, lowers hand 1433 how many miles does he [have to drive. 1434MAUREEN[where <where>-- 1435 where does he work again, 1436 where,= Maureen raises hand 1437 TEACHER =he works at the car wash. Maureen begins to raise a hand in response to the teacher’s invitation to bid but, realizing she needs additional information to answer the teacher’s question, quickly lowers it (line 1433) and calls out a request for information (line 1434-1436). The fact that Maureen’s request opens an insertion sequence (see section 4.2.1) makes its content not only relevant but privileged. Thus the teacher, making no reference to Maureen’s having called out (technically in violation of classroom rules), immediately provides the 112 requested information (line 1437), thus completing the insertion sequence and enabling Maureen to renew her bid by raising a hand again. The fact that Maureen’s request interrupts the teacher mid-sentence provides particularly strong support for the hypothesis that it is not the timing but the content of called-out utterances that teachers attend to in deciding whether to respond. The excerpt in Table 5.14—from Mrs. Anderson’s 12/10 math lesson—shows another instance of a student’s calling out a request. This example is unique, though, as it represents the only time in the SoCal classroom corpus that a student is reprimanded in connection with calling out a request or repair. Table 5.14 Excerpt showing the only reprimanded request or repair Non-Verbal LineSpeaker Verbal Teacher points at Anita's paper 0881 TEACHER this is beautiful. 0882(1.4) Teacher points at Rodrigo's paper 0883 wow! " 0884 (0.6) " 0885 certainly see that. 0886(0.7) 0887DYLAN do we have to do the [last one, 0888TEACHER[sh:::: 0889 °x just asked you to do the last one°. When Dylan calls out his request, the rest of the class has been working individually, and the teacher walking around commenting, since line 0872. The timing of the reprimand, the fact that the other students are all working quietly, and the fact that the teacher subsequently responds to Dylan’s request in a relatively soft voice all suggest that the 113 reprimand refers more to the request’s inappropriate loudness than to its being called out. At any rate, the request is successful, as the teacher provides the requested clarification. The excerpt in Table 5.15—from Mrs. McDonald’s 12/09 language arts lesson— shows a student’s calling out a repair while the teacher is reading to the class. Table 5.15 Excerpt showing a student’s calling out a repair Non-Verbal LineSpeaker Verbal 1691TEACHER Mister Zuckerman poured some milk into Wilbur's trough, 1692EMMAs- 1693 TEACHER pitched clean straw-- 1694 EMMA put [skim milk. 1695 KAYLA [skim milk, 1696 (0.5) 1697EMMAskim. 1698 (0.5) 1699TEACHER°oh°. 1700 (0.6) 1701 °good job Emma°! 1702 °you saw that I skipped over that word°! The trouble source is the teacher’s omission of the word “skim” (line 1691). In response to this error, Emma hesitantly (line 1692), then confidently and with Kayla’s support (lines 1694-1695), and then again (line 1697), corrects the teacher’s mistake. Despite the fact that Emma has called out during reading time—a time the students in all three 114 classes honored with reverent silence—the teacher commends her for having noticed the error, making no mention of the interruption (lines 1701-1702). 14 The excerpt in Table 5.16—from Mrs. McDonald’s 12/16 language arts lesson— shows another instance of a student’s calling out a repair while the teacher is reading. Table 5.16 Excerpt showing a student’s calling out a repair Non-Verbal LineSpeaker Verbal 2292 TEACHER then my name, 2293 is Joy. 2294 °said the spider°, 2295 (1.0) 2296 what was my mother's [middle initial, 2297 RODRICK [said the first, 2298 °spider°, 2299TEACHERasked-- 2300 (0.4) 2301 said the first spider, 2302 (0.3) 2303 what was my mother's middle initial, 2304 asked the second spider, The trouble source in this example is the teacher’s omission of the word “first” (line 2294), which Rodrick repairs by saying the correct phrase (line 2297). Although the teacher does not commend Rodrick, she acknowledges and accepts the called-out repair by going back and re-reading the phrase she misread (line 2301). She does not mention Rodrick’s having interrupted her. Moreover, as in the excerpt in Table 5.13, the fact that 14 The teacher’s lowered volume (lines 1699-1702) marks a frame shift not from official speech to unofficial speech, as in the excerpt in Table 5.5, but from dramatic reading voice to regular speech. 115 Rodrick’s repair interrupts the teacher mid-sentence strongly supports the hypothesis that content, not timing, determines whether a called-out utterance will be acknowledged. The excerpt in Table 5.17—from Mrs. Anderson’s 12/10 math lesson—shows a student’s calling out a relevant contribution in connection with an earlier knocking sound. Table 5.17 Excerpt showing a student’s calling out a relevant contribution Non-Verbal Line Speaker Verbal Evan struggles against wind to open door 0285 EVAN ah, No one is outside the door 0286 (1.6) 0287TEACHERoh, Teacher holds up hands, shrugging 0288 it was just the wind. 0289 (0.8) 0290 thank you [Evan. 0291ZACHARIAH [it could've been the sound of when you tapped on the board.= 0292TEACHER=you're right. 0293 it could've been that. After Evan opens the door and no one is there (lines 0285-0286), the teacher speculates that the wind caused the knocking sound (line 0288). As she thanks Evan for checking (line 0290), Zachariah calls out an alternative conjecture concerning the noise. Despite the statement’s being called out and even overlapping the teacher’s utterance, its relevance to the matter of the apparent knock at the door (perhaps combined with a relaxation of the official rules while such side topics are being addressed) leads the teacher to acknowledge it without making reference to its being called out. 116 The excerpt in Table 5.18—from Mrs. Johnson’s 12/11 language arts lesson— shows another example of students’ calling out a relevant contribution. Table 5.18 Excerpt showing a student’s calling out a relevant contribution Non-Verbal LineSpeaker Verbal 0792 TEACHER so the C, 0793 (0.5) 0794 has to match, 0795 a character trait of Charlotte. 0796 (0.3) 0797MAUREENI know.= 0798 TEACHER =what is she [like. 0799 S [COURAGE! 0800Syeah! Maureen raises hand 0801 S courage! Jake leaves desk 0802 (0.4) 0803 °she's courage°. 0804 (0.9) 0805Sshe's [(crazy). Maureen lowers hand 0806 TEACHER [courageous, 0807 might be a good, Jose raises hand 0808 explanation of her. In response to the teacher’s saying that the “C” has to match one of Charlotte’s character traits (line 0792-0795), two unidentified students call out the word “courage” (lines 0799, 0801, and 0803). The teacher revoices the called-out contributions as the adjective “courageous”—thus correcting the student’s saying “she’s courage”—and incorporates them into the lesson without commenting on the floor violation or reminding the students of the hand-raising rule. 117 Lastly, the excerpts in Table 5.19 and Table 5.20—from Mrs. McDonald’s 12/09 language arts lesson—show the teacher’s acknowledgment of an ‘other’-type called-out contribution. 118 Table 5.19 Part 1 of an excerpt showing acknowledgment of an ‘other’ call-out Non-Verbal LineSpeaker Verbal Ross raises hand 1853 TEACHER a deep <freeze>? 1854 (0.8) 1855 Kayla? 1856 eyes up here? Rodrick raises hand 1857 (1.1) Jared raises, lowers hand 1858 JARED °oh°! Ross lowers hand 1859 ROSS [it shows it right [here picture. 1860TEACHER[okay, 1861 [hands down, Anne lowers hand; Rodrick waves hand 1862 because I want to move on to our reading, 1863 but I want to make sure everybody understands [this. 1864RODRICK[I— 1865 ROSS °right in the [picture°. 1866 RODRICK [I know? 1867 (0.3) 1868 TEACHER a deep freeze-- Rodrick lowers hand 1869 ROSS °shows it right xx the picture°. 1870TEACHERusually, 1871 when you see deep freezes, 1872 <they're>, 1873 <um>, 1874 they're sitting, 1875 across, 1876 kind of almost like a height of the table? 119 (Table 5.19, Continued) Non-Verbal LineSpeaker Verbal Ross seeks teacher's attention 1877 ROSS [uh::, " 1878TEACHER [and the lid is at the <top>. " 1879 and you lift up the lid, 1880 and then you reach down, 1881ROSS[uh::::, 1882 TEACHER [into the freezer, 1883 and they call it a deep freeze, 1884 [because it's deep? 1885ROSS [well then why is it right [there. Teacher glances at picture in Ross's book 1886 TEACHER [you can store a lot of frozen things, 1887 in there. Rodrick raises hand 1888 so, Rodrick lowers hand 1889 [that's what a deep freeze is. 1890ROSS [there's a deep freezer right there. 1891 (0.3) 1892TEACHERokay, 1893 here we go, 120 Table 5.20 Part 2 of an excerpt showing acknowledgment of an ‘other’ call-out Non-Verbal LineSpeaker Verbal 1987 TEACHER you know what Rodrick? 1988 what you just did, 1989 (0.3) 1990 you used your picture, 1991 to help you understand. 1992 you used your [picture to help, 1993ROSS [that's what I did. 1994TEACHERyour comprehension, 1995 ROSS I used [it for the ice-- 1996 TEACHER [and that's, 1997 (0.4) Anne raises hand 1998 one of [our strategies. 1999ROSS [I used it for the ice thingy. 2000 (0.5) to Ross 2001 TEACHER <nice>! In the excerpt in Table 5.19, the topic of discussion has shifted to the meaning of the term “deep freeze,” which came up in the reading a little earlier (line 1744; not shown). Ross raises a hand in a bid to speak (line 1853) but lowers it a short time later (line 1859). At the same time, he begins calling out in an attempt to bring to the teacher’s attention what he considers to be a relevant fact, namely, that there is what he believes to be a picture of a deep freeze in his book. The picture actually shows a vendor’s cart labeled “Ice,” but all available evidence suggests that Ross never finds this out. Instead, he tries no fewer than seven times to bring the picture to the teacher’s attention (lines 1859, 1865, 1869, 1877, 1881, 1885, and 1890). She finally glances at it (line 1886). Later—in the excerpt in Table 5.20—she commends Rodrick for having gleaned information from a different 121 picture in the book (lines 1987-1992), and Ross brings up the deep freeze three more times (lines 1993, 1995, and 1999), after which the teachers finally responds “<nice>!” (line 2001)—an example of a teacher’s acknowledging an ‘other’-type called-out contribution. 5.2.3 Tacit acceptance of rule violation As a discourse strategy for balancing teacher control and student participation, acknowledging selected called-out contributions based on their content—the basis of 93.5 percent of the student-initiated interactions in the SoCal classroom corpus—is arguably ideal. For students, it provides a reliable alternative to bidding to speak, one through which they can request information or clarification and point out perceived errors—the very acts that have been identified as being among the most crucial functions of student participation (Emanuelsson & Sahlström 2008). For teachers, it helps maintain control over the content of the class’s shared knowledge-base by providing an alternative to acknowledging bids to speak. Indeed, the very fact that calling out is technically a violation means that students have no reasonable expectation that what they say will be favorably received. This allows teachers to decide, after hearing what the student says, whether to address it privately, comment upon it publicly, or ignore it, effectively striking it from the official record (Mercer 1992). A potential downside to this strategy is that, being tacit, some students may not understand how to use it, which may impede their ability to participate and, thus, hinder their learning. Students who do not understand how to request clarification, for instance, 122 may be unable to follow lessons fully and end up falling behind. Moreover, students who see their teachers’ acknowledging called-out utterances but fail to recognize that only certain types of called-out utterances are allowed may call out other types, leading to what might be mistaken for willfully disruptive behavior and what the students involved could perceive as their teachers’ unjustly ignoring and reprimanding them for doing what others are allowed to do, resulting in frustration on both sides. Ultimately, the best way to remedy these issues may be to make at least some details of the strategy explicit. 5.3 Chapter Summary This chapter examined findings related to student-initiated interactions in the SoCal classroom corpus. Section 5.1 discussed results relevant to students’ bidding to speak and the hypothesis that in accepting such bids, teachers prefer questions over statements or comments. This hypothesis was supported by the fact that of the six bids to speak that are accepted in the SoCal classroom corpus, three are accepted with discourse strategies aimed at constraining the bidding student’s contribution. The fact that 17 other bids to speak are ignored was taken as further support for this hypothesis, given that the purpose of a student’s bid to speak cannot be determined prior to accepting it. Section 5.2 discussed findings related to students’ calling out and the hypothesis that teachers decide whether to acknowledge such unauthorized contributions based on the manifest relevance of their content. This hypothesis was supported by the fact that while over 80 percent of called-out utterances are ignored or reprimanded in general, nearly 90 percent of called-out requests for information or clarification are fulfilled, and 123 nearly 90 percent of corrections of perceived errors are addressed. Combined with the fact that teachers ignore most bids to speak, this makes calling out—technically a violation of classroom rules—a student’s most reliable means of requesting information or clarification and correcting perceived errors, at least for those students who understand how the system works. 124 Chapter 6 – Conclusions This dissertation has explored the role of classroom discourse in balancing teacher control over lesson content with student participation in educational interactions. In so doing, it has advanced Hymes’s vision of a socially constituted linguistics (Hymes 1974: 196ff) by identifying three main discourse strategies that serve to maintain this balance. Section 6.1 of this chapter reviews these strategies and considers their effectiveness. Section 6.2 discusses potential directions for future research. 6.1 Theoretical Relevance and Effectiveness of the Discourse Strategies The present study has identified three major discourse strategies involved in balancing teacher control with student participation. The first of these—using invitations to bid as the principal means of initiating interactions—is primarily teacher-controlled, but it is dependent on student participation for its effectiveness. Likewise, the second strategy—linguistically marking uncertain responses—is something that students do but which teachers are crucially sensitive to. The final strategy—tacit acceptance of rule violation—is neither teacher-controlled nor student-controlled, but emerges from the interaction between teachers and students as they negotiate the balance between control and participation. 6.1.1 The change from individual nominations to invitations to bid The first finding of the present study is that the role of discourse in balancing teacher control and student participation has changed during the last 35 years. At the time of some earlier studies (Mehan et al. 1976, Griffin & Humphrey 1978), individual 125 nominations were the most common floor allocation method, meaning that teachers called on whichever student they wished to, regardless of whether that student wanted to participate. Conversely, teachers today initiate interactions primarily using invitations to bid, nominating students from among those who willingly bid for a turn. As a result, control over the right and obligation to speak is now shared between the students, who decide whether to make themselves available for nomination by bidding, and the teacher, who chooses which bidding student to nominate. This change from individual nominations to invitations to bid can be seen as part of a larger shift away from the authoritarian, teacher-centered classroom of old and toward a more egalitarian, student-centered model (see, e.g., Cazden 2001). Compared with individual nominations, invitations to bid encourage more students to participate (by formulating responses to the teacher’s questions and bidding for the opportunity to voice those responses) and allow teachers to monitor understanding and engagement through students’ bidding or not bidding (Sahlström 2002). Thus, teachers’ changing their primary floor allocation strategy seems to have effectively altered the culture of the classroom from one in which students were forced to participate, to one where students actively vie for the opportunity. This shift is also reflected in the students’ seating arrangements (shown in the charts and images in Appendix 1), which are not, as they once were, straight rows with all students facing the teacher, in teacher-centered classrooms, but in semicircles or table groups in which students often sit facing each other, some even with their backs to the teacher (cf. Cuban 1983, Rosenfield et al. 1985). 126 6.1.2 Students’ linguistic marking of uncertain responses Just as teachers encourage student participation in educational interactions by asking questions, the results of the present study show that students recognize and even facilitate teacher control over lesson content by prefacing responses they suspect may be incorrect with hesitation markers and ending them with rising intonation. With these discourse strategies, students emphasize that their responses are submitted for teacher evaluation and simultaneously hedge their claims of knowledge as a way of mitigating the face threat associated with their responses’ potentially being rejected. Crucially, teachers appear to be sensitive to these strategies. On the one hand, they tend to be more direct in rejecting incorrect responses that are spoken with rising intonation than falling intonation. This suggests that students’ strategy of marking uncertain responses in this way is successful in facilitating teachers’ rejection of the incorrect ones, which in turn is necessary in order to maintain the integrity of the class’s shared knowledge-base. Conversely, when responses spoken with falling intonation turn out to be incorrect, teachers are more likely to preface their rejections with token agreement, which shows their sensitivity to students’ face needs. These students’ and teachers’ subtle command of the social functions of language use are perfect examples of their communicative competence (Hymes 1972), which is a primary focus of a socially constituted linguistics (Hymes 1974: 196ff). Sadly, in formal linguistic theories, this sort of functional competence is not considered part of a speaker’s linguistic ‘competence’ but is dismissed, along with speech errors, as a feature of 127 ‘performance’ (Hymes 1972). The present study thus bolsters the case for a socially constituted linguistics by highlighting the undeniable systematicity in these data. 6.1.3 Teachers’ tacit acceptance of classroom rule violation Another example of students’ and teachers’ functional command of language appears in the balance of rights that has developed between the teachers, who oversee the content of lessons, and students, who seek to participate in their learning. The results of the present study show that teachers tend to avoid giving the floor to students who bid outside of teacher-controlled discussions. Moreover, in the rare instances in which teachers accept unsolicited bids to speak, they generally use discourse strategies that constrain the bidding student’s contribution by encouraging a brief question. When students call out without having been given the floor, teachers ignore or reprimand them over 80 percent of the time. However, teachers fulfill nearly 90 percent of called-out requests for information or clarification and address nearly 90 percent of called-out utterances that seek to correct perceived errors, making no reference to the rule violation in these special cases. As a discourse strategy for balancing teacher control and student participation, acknowledging selected called-out contributions based on their content is generally quite effective. It provides students with a way of requesting information or clarification and pointing out perceived errors—the very acts that have been identified as being among the most crucial functions of student participation (Emanuelsson & Sahlström 2008). It also helps teachers maintain control over the content of the class’s shared knowledge-base by 128 providing an alternative to acknowledging bids to speak. Indeed, the fact that calling out technically constitutes a violation means that students feel compelled to make their contributions as brief as possible and to hold no reasonable expectation that what they say will be favorably received. This allows teachers to decide, after hearing what the student says, whether to address it privately, comment upon it publicly, or ignore it altogether, effectively striking it from the official record. A potential downside to this strategy is that, being tacit, some students may not understand how to use it, and that lack of understanding of an effective strategy may impede their ability to participate in classroom interactions and, thus, hinder their learning. Students who do not understand how to request clarification, for instance, may be unable to follow lessons and end up falling behind. Moreover, students who see their teachers acknowledging called-out utterances but fail to realize that only certain types of such utterances are allowed may call out other types. This, in turn, could lead to what their teachers mistake for willfully disruptive behavior and what the students involved perceive as their teachers’ unjustly ignoring and reprimanding them for doing what others are allowed to do, resulting in frustration on both sides. Ultimately, the best way to remedy these issues may be to make at least some details of the strategy explicit. The concept of culture congruence (e.g., Philips 1972, Mohatt & Erickson 1981, Van Ness 1981, Au & Mason 1983, Philips 1983) provides an alternate explanation for some students’ not taking advantage of teachers’ tacit acceptance of rule violation. Research on cultural congruence has tended to address issues that arise when classes populated entirely by non-mainstream students are taught in the conventional, teacher- 129 centered way. While the present study found no evidence of gender- or ethnicity-based differences in which students called out requests and repairs and which students did not, it is possible that individual differences are functioning in much the same way. In other words, owing to the peculiarities of their particular life experiences, some students may be less inclined to violate classroom rules in an attempt to obtain information or clarification, even if they have reason to believe that such violations are tacitly tolerated. The recommendation in the literature cited above is to provide students with options. In this case, that might mean taking time periodically to ask whether students have questions, rather than relying on those who have questions to call them out. 6.2 Looking toward the Future The present exploration of teacher-student interactions in third-grade classrooms has identified important discourse strategies involved in balancing teacher control and student participation, but it has also raised some important questions for future research. One is how teacher-student interactions and discourse strategies may be different at other grade levels (e.g., earlier or later in primary school or in secondary school). A related question concerns how such interactions and strategies may vary depending on the sociocultural backgrounds of the teachers and students involved, particularly when members of different groups come together in the same classroom. A final question is how the interactions and discourse strategies of a particular teacher and class develop and change over the course of an academic year together, which could be addressed for any grade level and sociocultural profile through a longitudinal study. 130 Different in substantial ways from those of studies just three decades ago, the findings of the present research underscore the need for renewed and systematic investigation of classroom discourse at all levels. The changes that have taken place in American society over the past generation as we have continued to pursue the elusive goals of racial and gender equality in increasingly multilingual and multicultural schools point to an urgent need for discourse analysts to return to classrooms in an effort to understand how all of this plays out in our nation’s education system. 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Social control and social organization in an Alaskan Athabaskan classroom: A microethnography of "getting ready" for reading. In Henry T. Trueba, Grace Pung Guthrie & Kathryn Hu-Pei Au (eds.), Culture and the bilingual classroom: Studies in classroom ethnography, 120-138. Rowley, MA: Newbury House. Webb, Eugene J., Donald T. Campbell, Richard D. Schwartz & Lee Sechrest. 1966. Unobtrusive measures: Nonreactive research in the social sciences. Chicago: Rand McNally. Wood, David. 1992. Teaching talk: How modes of teacher talk affect pupil participation. In Kate Norman (ed.), Thinking voices: Work of the National Oracy Project, 203- 214. London: Hodder & Stoughton (for the National Curriculum Council). 137 Appendix A – Seating Charts (Showing the placement of the audio and video recorders and the video camera’s field of view in each classroom followed by pixilated images from the corresponding videos.) Mrs. McDonald’s Classroom Whiteboard and Projector Screen Audio Recorder Projector Teacher’s Desk Rodrick Jonah Jared Tony Kayla Anne Ross John Erica Emma Tiffany Daryl Video Camera Peter Kevin Megan Patricia 138 Mrs. Anderson’s Classroom Whiteboard and Projector Screen Audio Recorder Zachary Dylan Teacher’s Desk Tyler Rick Olivia Jane Zachariah Julia Rodrigo Brian Anita Ethan Video Camera 139 Mrs. Johnson’s Classroom Whiteboard and Projector Screen Audio Recorder Teacher’s Desk Projector Hailey Amelia Felicia Jose Jake Daniela Melissa Annette Kimberley Maureen Fernando Gabriela Brandon Priscilla Tucker Katherine Video Camera 140 Appendix B – Key to Transcript Notations and Symbols (0.3), (2.6) durations of timed pauses (in seconds) A: word [word B: [word overlap A: word= B: =word latching (no pause between speakers’ turns) word? rising intonation word, continuing intonation word. falling intonation word! animated intonation word emphasis ºwordº quiet WORD loud >word word< fast <word word> slow wor- truncated word word-- truncated intonation unit wo:rd lengthening of the previous sound (word) uncertain transcription .hh inhalation hh exhalation @@@ laughter (one @ per “syllable”) xxx incomprehensible (one x per syllable) (adapted from Atkinson & Heritage 1984, Jefferson 2004, Hutchby & Wooffitt 2008)

Abstract (if available)

Abstract This dissertation explores the role of classroom discourse in balancing teacher control over lesson content and student participation in educational interactions. The results of a discourse analysis of teacher-student interactions in video-recordings of eight third-grade math and language arts lessons reveal that the role of discourse in this balance has changed during the last 35 years. Teachers used to call on whichever student they wished to, while teachers today generally call on students who bid for a turn by raising a hand. Consequently, control over the right and obligation to speak is now shared between teacher and students. Students individually decide whether to make themselves available for nomination by bidding, and teachers choose which bidding students to nominate.

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Asset Metadata

Creator Shepherd, Michael Andrew (author)

Core Title A discourse analysis of teacher-student classroom interactions

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Linguistics

Publication Date 06/24/2010

Defense Date 05/05/2010

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Classrooms,discourse analysis,education,Linguistics,OAI-PMH Harvest,sociolinguistics,Students,Teachers

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Finegan, Edward (committee chair), Rueda, Robert S. (committee member), Silva-Corvalán, Carmen (committee member)

Creator Email mshepher@usc.edu,shepaado@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m3156

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Identifier etd-Shepherd-3879 (filename),usctheses-m40 (legacy collection record id),usctheses-c127-352013 (legacy record id),usctheses-m3156 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-Shepherd-3879.pdf

Dmrecord 352013

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Shepherd, Michael Andrew

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

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Repository Location Los Angeles, California

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