Introduction to the Special Issue

Piera Margutti; Rosa Pugliese; Daniela Veronesi

doi:10.60923/issn.1970-2221/23348

Autori

Piera Margutti Università di Modena e 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.
Rosa Pugliese Università di Bologna

Rosa Pugliese is Associate Professor of Modern language teaching at the Department of Modern Languages, Literatures and Cultures of the University of Bologna, where she teaches Teaching Italian as a Second Language, Literacy in L2 Italian, and Foreign language teaching. Her research focuses primarily on classroom interaction, language socialization in a second language, language teacher training in the area of L2 Italian, academic writing. Her current studies concern peer interactions and child language brokering at school, as well as plurilingualism in adult basic education.
Daniela Veronesi Libera Università di Bolzano

Daniela Veronesi is assistant professor of linguistics at the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano (Italy). Her main interest lies in the study of social interaction from the perspective of conversation analysis and interactional linguistics, particularly in primary education and music settings, and with a focus on multimodality. Her work on talk-in-interaction includes investigations on multilingual communication, language biographies, radio interviews, and non-professional language mediation.

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.60923/issn.1970-2221/23348

Abstract

This introductory paper to the special issue of Ricerche di Pedagogia e Didattica. Journal of Theories and Research in Education illustrates the overall design of the project ChICaS (Children’s Interactional Competence at School: Conversational Social Norms, Forms of Participation, and Language Structures) and revises the first results of the research presented in the articles here included. The project was coordinated by Piera Margutti and carried out by four research units across Italy (University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, University of Bologna, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, University Roma Tre) over more than two years (October 2023-February 2026). The object of the project was the pragmatic and interactional abilities of primary school children, which were studied by analyzing authentic video-recorded data. By establishing the children’s visible conducts in the class as the analytical focus of the research, the project, and this special issue, pay close attention to the often overlooked and neglected party in the classroom, offering a more complex picture of classroom interaction than portrayed in prior research. In fact, the perspective we adopted here looks at the classroom from the point of view of pupils: what they do, their agency, their inferences, the rules with which they display compliance, the initiatives they take and the actions they perform beyond responding to the teacher’s initiatives and solicitations, discovering new dimensions and interactional dynamics. The initial section introduces the overall purpose and methodologies of the project, while the following section reviews the contributions, highlighting the main themes across the articles.

Riferimenti bibliografici

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Margutti, P., De Roberto, E., Pugliese, R., & Veronesi, D. (2025). What authentic data tell us about pupils’ interactional competence: A video-based interdisciplinary study. Ricerche di Pedagogia e Didattica – Journal of Theories and Research in Education, 20(2). https://doi.org/10.60923/issn.1970-2221/22577

Margutti, P., Urlotti, D., & Rossi, E. (2025). Responding beyond the informative content: Pupils conforming their answers to question expectations in whole-class interaction. Ricerche di Pedagogia e Didattica – Journal of Theories and Research in Education, 20(2). https://doi.org/10.60923/issn.1970-2221/22567

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Veronesi, D., & Simone, M. (2025). Primary school children and cooperative interaction: Recruitments and offers of assistance in small-group activities. Ricerche di Pedagogia e Didattica – Journal of Theories and Research in Education, 20(2). https://doi.org/10.60923/issn.1970-2221/22544

Introduction to the Special Issue

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