Responding beyond the informative content: Pupils conforming their answers to question expectations in whole-class interaction

Piera Margutti; Daniele Urlotti; Elisa Rossi

doi:10.60923/issn.1970-2221/22567

Authors

Piera Margutti University of Modena and Reggio Emilia

Piera Margutti is Associate Professor of Linguistics and Conversation Analysis at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia. Her research spans from the study of talk in classrooms, clinical encounters and mundane interaction. She investigated both teachers’ conducts such as questioning, evaluating and reproaching, and students’ responses and initiatives. She studied medical interaction in various settings. She studied interaction among family members in telephone calls and face-to-face encounters, focusing on word-searches, teasing, apologies and invitations.
Daniele Urlotti University of Modena and Reggio Emilia

Daniele Urlotti is a research fellow and adjunct professor at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia. His work focuses on Conversation Analysis applied to institutional interactions in healthcare and education, including monolingual contexts and cases in which intercultural mediators assist service users with limited proficiency in the service language.
Elisa Rossi University of Modena and Reggio Emilia

Elisa Rossi is Associate Professor of Sociology of Cultural and Communicative Processes at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, where she teaches sociology courses focused on gender relations, conflicts and dialogue. She carried out extensive research on dialogic facilitation of children’s agency and gender narratives in educational contexts. She participated as author at several local, national and international conferences; she is author of two monographs and (co)author of several essays in books and reviews.

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.60923/issn.1970-2221/22567

Keywords:

children interactional competence, classroom interaction, whole-class sessions, children answers, self-repair

Abstract

The article explores a type of pupils’ answers to teachers’ questions in whole-class instruction activities in three primary schools in one Northern Italian region. Our aim is to document the pupils’ competence in overcoming situations when, owing to the highly competitive setting of plenary classes, they realise that the projected answer is not anymore consistent with the requirements of the question. The research is based on a corpus of video-recorded classes that we collected in third-year class groups, with children aged 8-9. The analysis focuses on a specific set of answers: those that go beyond the mere provision of the requested information. By looking at the material that children add to the informative item, the analysis shows how children master a sophisticated interactional competence enabling them to designed appropriate answers in situations where, owing to unexpected contextual conditions, they do not align (anymore) with the expectation of the question they aimed to respond.

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Responding beyond the informative content: Pupils conforming their answers to question expectations in whole-class interaction

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