It ain't what you say, it's the way that you say it: The role of pragmatics in A Level English Language students' learning conversations during collaborative writing using a computer

Abstract

By focusing on some of the pragmatic features of two A Level students' learning conversations, I explore the ways in which they make meaning while working together to produce shared writing on a computer. I argue that the widely used theory of 'exploratory talk' might not always explain how learners make sense of each other in order to develop their ideas. While recognising that this research needs further development, I show how subtle, nuanced ways of making meaning can bring about 'constructive talk' which develops the students' collaborative learning activities.

Exploratory talk in times of globalisation and digitalisation: a narrative review

“…This has resulted in interventions with e.g. writing and story-making software (Dourneen, 2013;Kucirkova et al, 2014), the interactive whiteboard (Murcia & Sheffield, 2010;Mercer et al, 2010), the combination of interactive whiteboard and iPads (Kerawalla et al, 2023); WebQuests (Liang & Fung, 2020;Murphy, 2015), online discussion platforms (Sas et al, 2017;Lee et al, 2021), student response in wikis (Morin et al, 2017), microblogging (Amundrud et al, 2022) and podcasts (Dversnes & Blikstad-Balas, 2023). More recently, some researchers have reversed this design to a non-interventional approach, i.e.…”