This study examines how teaching is interactionally accomplished within a vocational program for students studying to become electricians. The data is drawn from video recordings of classroom lectures as well as hands-on instructions at construction work sites. The analysis of the classroom explores how the students exploit poetics and sequential structures of language including especially the Initiative-Response-Evaluation sequence tosupport, challenge or undermine teaching and to build alliances with or against peers. The analysis of the construction work sites focusses on how the teacher and the students use multimodal resources to create situations for teaching and learning. The analysis of the classroom focusses on how students launch different initiatives that compete with the instructional activities in the classroom. These initiatives emerge from and reveal the broad meaning potential inherent in linguistic forms. The analysis shows how structures and roles that are constitutive of the classroom as well as the emergent professional identity of the electrician provide resources for maintaining, challenging or even dissolving instruction.The analysis of the construction work site shows how artefacts, postures, talk, and spatial configurations are handled in relation to place, mobility, and action. In stark contrast with the classroom, students at the construction site compete for the teacher's attention and assistance. The analysis includes descriptions of collaborative moments between the teacher and the students as well situations where the teacher is interrupted and challenged by the students. Three frames are deployed to convey meaning, a professional, a mundane, and an educational. The professional frame involves higher or lesser degrees of manifested professional visions on part of the teacher as well the students. The mundane frame is characterized by playfulness which in turn can jeopardize the professional agenda. Instructions provide a tool for re-establishing an instructional setting where work related tasks can be executed.

This thesis describes a field study in which one teacher and one class in Grade 5, with special focus on four pupils, are observed throughout four lessons of about 80-minutes in Physics. The lessons together deal with a project on Magnetism. The main aim of the thesis is to investigate how the teacher uses texts as a resource when designing and implementing Science lessons (Learning Design Sequences). A further aim is to study what texts are used and produced by both the teacher and the pupils, and how these texts are used. The four lessons were recorded with a video camera and the recordings supplemented by field notes and interviews. All the texts used were copied or photographed. A design theoretical frame and a sociocultural perspective have been applied to analyse both the presence of texts during different stages (activities) of the lessons, and to analyse the text-related interaction and communication that has taken place in the classroom. The results confirm several previous studies and show that the teacher is the main producer and consumer of texts before and during the Science lessons. Textbooks, and texts on the Internet, are only used by the teacher to design the lessons, and are then mediated by the teacher during classroom interaction. The pupils mainly read questions, which they write brief answers to, and also read and copy texts written by the teacher on the white board. One interesting finding is that dialogue concerning texts increases the scientific content, which means more empirical or theoretical descriptions and explanations. To become scientifically literate it is therefore argued that pupils need more practice reading and writing in combination with dialogue and activities in the science classroom.

This study investigates how Swedish pupils meet science (chemistry and physics) and technology in compulsory school. It explores girls' and boys' actions in and thoughts about these subjects. The study has a feminist perspective focusing on girls. Two teaching groups were followed from the start in grade 7 in compulsory school, when the pupils were 13 years old, until they made their choice of study programmes in upper secondary school in grade 9. The main methods were classroom observations and taped interviews. The results have been divided into the following four parts: the pupils' family background and recreation interests, classroom interactions, girls' and boys' approaches to science, and their choices of study programmes in upper secondary school. Girls and boys have different experiences and interests when they first meet science in grade 7 and boys have, thanks to their recreation interests, greater opportunities to participate in or take an interest in science/technology. The pupils come from different worlds determined by gender and social background. In the classroom girls get and take upon themselves the role of keeping the lessons together, thus fostering a responsible rationality, while boys strive to dominate the public arena. The process of shaping diligent, working, responsible girls as opposed to more childish, playful and competing boys continues in grades 7-9. Girls and boys prefer different subject areas. Boys have a practical while girls have a more theoretical approach to science. Even if there are important differences between girls, primarily owing to family background, there are significant differences between girls and boys. Girls seek "connected knowledge" and even the successful girls question their own understanding, which can be interpreted as a result of their learning style but also of their knowledge of the historical construction of women as unfit for science. The majority of the girls have, over the years, come to construct femininity - and maturity - as being opposed to enjoying experiments which are regarded as boys' play and as part of the masculine world. Boys also criticize girls for both failure and success and they try to get power over the subject content and the apparatus. This is interpreted as a reconstruction of the masculinity of the subjects. Girls who, nevertheless, take an interest in physics and chemistry often have supporting scientist fathers or at least parents with a higher education. Technology is rejected by all girls. The mutual construction and reconstruction of gender and of science/technology contribute to gendered choices of study programmes in upper secondary school. / digitalisering@umu

This conversation analytic study basically aimed at unearthing the role of classroom interaction in the construction of classroom order. Rooted in the theoretical and methodological principles of Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis, this study investigated the mechanisms of how the order in the classroom was established, organized and sustained mutually by the teacher and students. From three classrooms in three high schools in Ankara, the study collected a 47 hour video-recording database from 69 different sessions with 15 teachers. The analysis focused on the scenes of trouble that revealed the interactional organization of order with particular reference to the participants&rsquo / demonstrable actions. The scenes of troubles were composed of four particular groups of moments in the classroom life: (a) class beginnings, (b) transitions between activities, (c) post-humor moments, and (d) specific-student calls. The results demonstrated in the details of recordings how the participants in the classroom attributed meaning to order, how they showed their understanding of classroom order through their demonstrable action, and through their actions how they applied their mechanisms of classroom order to other contexts.

The purpose of this study was to describe and explore the nature and frequency of the interaction and the factors affecting interaction in language classrooms. This qualitative study was conducted in a private language course in Ankara, Turkey. The sample consisted of 6 teachers. The data were collected through video-camera, semi-structred interview and demographic information log. To tackle the complexity of the raw data, data were first subjected to constant comparison analysis. Second, all results were tabulated and interpreted. The results indicated the amount of teacher talk outweighed student talk and teachers spent on average one third of the lesson on lecturing. Besides, it was observed teachers spent approximately 3 % of the lesson on questioning and teachers ask more low-level questions than high-level questions. In addition, the results revealed teacher-initiated interaction outweighed student-initiated interaction and both teacher-initiated and student-initiated interactions outweighed student-student interaction. It was also observed male students interact with teacher more than females. Lastly, the results indicated teachers criticized males more than females. In addition, the results about the nature of interaction indicated students used the method of shouting the answer or idea directly most as the way of initiating interaction with teacher. Furthermore, they had most interaction with teachers so as to ask questions related to the lesson. Also, the results showed the teachers used the method of addressing the whole class as the way of initiating interaction with students. Finally, the teachers used the questioning strategy most as a means of initiating interaction with students.

Students’ struggle with learning mathematics is often cast in a negative light. Mathematics educators and researchers, however, suggest that struggling to make sense of mathematics is a necessary component of learning mathematics with understanding. In order to investigate the possible connection between struggle and learning, this study examined students’ productive struggle as students worked on tasks of higher cognitive demand in middle school mathematics classrooms. Students’ productive struggle refers to students’ “effort to make sense of mathematics, to figure something out that is not immediately apparent” (Hiebert & Grouws, 2007, p. 287) as opposed to students’ effort made in despair or frustration. As an exploratory case study using embedded multiple cases, the study examined 186 episodes of student‐teacher interactions in order to identify the kinds and nature of student struggles that occurred in a naturalistic classroom setting as students engaged in mathematical tasks focused on proportional reasoning. The study identified the kinds of teacher responses used in the interaction with the students and the types of resolutions that occurred. The participants were 327 6th and 7th grade students and their six mathematics teachers from three middle schools located in mid‐size Texas cities. Findings from the study identified four basic types of student struggles: get started, carry out a process, give a mathematical explanation, and express misconception and errors. Four kinds of teacher responses to these struggles were identified as situated along a continuum: telling, directed guidance, probing guidance, and affordance. The outcomes of the student‐teacher interactions that resolved the students’ struggles were categorized as: productive, productive at a lower level, or unproductive. These categories were based on how the interactions maintained the cognitive level of the implemented task, addressed the externalized student struggle, and built on student thinking. Findings provide evidence that there are aspects of student‐teacher interactions that appear to be productive for student learning of mathematics. The struggle‐response framework developed in the study can be used to further examine the phenomenon of student struggle from initiation, interaction, to its resolution, and measure learning outcomes of students who experience struggle to make sense of mathematics. / text

Ce travail comporte un aperçu de la théorie des positionnements, la construction d’une méthodologie adaptée à l’analyse des interactions, et l’application de cette méthodologie aux interactions de classe.Celle-ci est réalisée à partir de transcriptions d’enregistrements audio-vidéo de 15 heures de leçons en mathématiques et en physique/sciences en Angleterre et en France. Les élèves avaient entre 11 et 12 ans. Ces transcriptions sont divisées en épisodes, c’est-à-dire en unités cohérentes quant à leur thème et à leur enjeu. Puis, chaque épisode est codé selon les comportements observés pour le professeur. Les catégories de comportement trouvées pour l’interaction plénière de classe sont comparables à celles trouvées par d’autres travaux de recherche sur le travail en groupe. Une analyse réalisée afin de déterminer les types de comportement (considérés en tant que droits et devoirs) qui apparaissent simultanément indique que deux droits apparaissent souvent simultanément : poser une question scientifique et valider une proposition. Ceci est cohérent avec les résultats d’autres travaux de recherche, qui indiquent la prédominance des séquences IRE/IRF.Une étude de la fréquence de ces comportements met en évidence la rareté d’affirmations indépendantes par le professeur. Une analyse des épisodes qui contiennent de telles affirmations indique que le professeur n’introduit de nouveaux éléments en se reposant sur sa propre autorité que dans des cas particuliers : (a) suite à l’erreur d’un élève, auquel cas l’affirmation se limite à expliquer l’erreur, (b) suite à la question d’un élève, ou (c) suite à l’affirmation non invitée d’un élève. Les contenus introduits de cette manière semblent être considérés légitimes plus longtemps que ceux qui sont introduits en faisant référence à une source officielle.Les conséquences de ces résultats sont abordées : il semble désormais nécessaire de considérer l’agence des élèves lors de futurs travaux de recherche ; et il est possible qu’un style d’enseignement magistral puisse bénéficier à l’apprentissage. / This work consists in a theoretical overview of positioning theory, the construction of a methodology for interaction analysis, and its application to classroom interaction.The latter part is based on transcripts from audio-video recordings of 15 hours of lessons in mathematics and physics or science in England and in France, with children aged between 11 and 12. These transcripts were divided up into episodes, units displaying coherence in theme and purpose; and each episode was coded according to the types of behaviour the teacher displayed in them. The same types of behaviour were found in plenary interaction as those found by previous research into group work. Analysis carried out to highlight co-occurring types of behaviour (seen as rights and duties) only yielded two co-occurring rights – asking a scientific question and validating a statement, consistently with the previously noted prevalence of IRE/IRF sequences.A frequency analysis of the levels of occurrence of individual types of behaviour highlighted the scarcity of unsupported teacher statements. Further analysis of the episodes featuring teacher statements showed that the teacher may only introduce new elements on the basis of their own authority in highly specific circumstances: (a) after a student’s mistake, in which case the teacher’s statement is limited to explaining why the aforementioned mistake is one; (b) after a student’s question or (c) after a student’s unsolicited statement. In the last two cases, the teacher’s statement may go beyond the remit of the question or statement. Content introduced in such a way appears to have a longer-lasting legitimacy than that introduced with the help of official content.Some implications of these results are discussed: the need to take into account student agency in further research; and it is suggested that a lecturing style of teaching might be beneficial for learning.

This paper discusses correction sequences in classroom interaction when teachers correct students’ erroneous answers. The focus of this paper is the relevance between types and techniques of correction used by teachers to correct students’ answers and face-work. The study explains face-work necessity in classroom interaction since it increases students’ motivation to participate in classroom activities.

Examined in this hermeneutic phenomenological study is a transformation in the researcher's choral music teaching in which students' abilities to construct self emerged organically from interactions, or dialogues, that took place among and between the students, the teacher, and the music being studied. To allow for such interaction to emerge organically and meaningfully, students and teacher both shared in the power needed to construct a classroom environment in which the localized issues of the classroom and the specific contexts of students' lived histories were maintained and encouraged. This process of interaction, based upon dialogue among and between equal agents in the classroom, is described in the study as dialogic interactionism. In order to examine the concept of dialogic interactionism, three constructs upon which dialogic interactionism is based were developed and philosophically analyzed. They include the construction of self through the construction of self-knowledge; the localized reference system of the classroom, and the issue of power. Each construct is considered within the context of extant writings both in general education and music education philosophy. Following the analysis, a theoretical description of the dialogic interactive choral classroom is given as well a description of how such ideas might be realized in practice. The study concludes with issues for further study.

Developing students’ ability to think critically is an important goal of Swedish upper secondary school education. The aim of this thesis is to describe and analyse critical thinking at the classroom level from a didactic perspective. Using participant observation and interviews, two groups of students and their two course teachers are being studied during two months. The groups study philosophy and social studies respectively. The thesis explores in what way critical thinking is manifested in the classroom and how the teachers view critical thinking in relation to their teaching. Didactic decisions and challenges are identified and discussed. The findings show that critical thinking is manifested in the classroom dialogue. Focus, relevance and precision are distinctive qualities of critical discussions. The teachers use different strategies to scaffold critical thinking, such as developing what the students say, questioning assumptions and supporting with distinctions. Some of the challenges facing the teachers are finding ways of assisting students to be independent in their thinking, disputing what they say without being perceived as biased and creating the right atmosphere in the group allowing for critical thinking to take place. It’s concluded that critical thinking at the classroom level is a highly complex phenomenon that involves more than just thinking skills which is the dominant view among researchers in the field.