Amelia Church
Email: achurch@unimelb.edu.au
Amelia is a Senior Lecturer and Research Fellow at the REEaCh Centre at the Melbourne Graduate School of Education.
Questions asked by teachers – and by children – are central to learning interactions in ECEC interactions. Yet we know surprisingly little about how these questions are designed in productive learning sequences. Research that has looked at the structure of questions in interactions in early childhood settings (e.g. Siraj & Manni, 2008), has typically focused on single utterances (the question itself) rather than the subsequent sequence, beyond the third turn feedback (Bateman, 2013; Cohrssen & Church, 2017; Lee, 2009). ‘Asking open-ended questions’ as a strategy, for example, does not identify where and how these questions might be most effective. Depending on the (conversational) context, closed questions can extend concept development (e.g. “what’s the opposite of this one?” in exploring bilateral symmetry, see Hedge and Cohrssen, 2019). We need to understand more about how question and answer sequences are constructed. How can CA contribute to a richer understanding of question design, and, perhaps more importantly, to re-frame our understanding of questions-in-interaction rather than as isolated utterances?
Selected readings
Bateman, A. (2013). Responding to children's answers: questions embedded in the social context of early childhood education, Early Years: An International Research Journal, 33(2), 275-289.
Bateman, A. (2015). Conversation analysis and early childhood education: The co-production of knowledge and relationships. London: Ashgate/Routledge.
Cohrssen, C. & Church, A. (2017). Mathematics knowledge in early childhood: Intentional teaching in the third turn. In A. Bateman & A. Church (Eds.) Children’s knowledge-in-interaction: Studies in conversation analysis (pp. 73-89). Singapore: Springer.
Dalgren, S. (2017). Questions and answers, a seesaw and embodied action: How children respond in informing sequences. In A. Bateman & A. Church (Eds.) Children’s Knowledge-in-Interaction: Studies in Conversation Analysis (pp. 37–56). Singapore: Springer.
Houen, S., Danby, S., Farrell, A., & Thorpe, K. (2019). Adopting an unknowing stance in teacher–child interactions through ‘I wonder…’ formulations. Classroom Discourse, 10(2), 151-167. https://doi.org/10.1080/19463014.2018.1518251
Lee, Y-A. (2007). Third turn position in teacher talk: Contingency and the work of teaching. Journal of Pragmatics, 39(6), 1204-1230.
Mondada, L. (2018) Multiple temporalities of language and body in interaction: Challenges for transcribing multimodality, Research on Language and Social Interaction, 51:1, 85-106.
Pursi, A. (2019), Play in adult-child interaction: Institutional multi-party interaction and pedagogical practice in a toddler classroom. Learning, Culture and Social Interaction, 21, 136-150
Sacks, H. (1995). Lectures on conversation, Volume 1 and 2. Oxford: Blackwell.
Theobald, M., & Kultti, A. (2012). Investigating child participation in the everyday talk of a teacher. Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 13 (3), 210–225.
Thorpe, K., Houen, S., Rankin, P. et al. (2022) Do the numbers add up? Questioning measurement that places Australian ECEC teaching as ‘low quality’. Australian Educational Researcher, DOI 10.1007/s13384-022-00525-4.