Studies in dialogue and discourse. III. Utterance structure and utterance function in interrogative sequences

Strategy Instruction Shifts Teacher and Student Interactions During Text‐Based Discussions

“…For instance, authentic teacher questions give rise to deeper comprehension processes, and encouraging elaborated student talk yields an understanding of text at a higher level (Soter et al., ; Wells, ). In contrast, in a seminal study on classroom discourse, Mishler () found that when teachers posed questions, students gave short responses, but when students posed questions to one another, the students responded with more elaboration. Regardless of who is asking the questions, discussion styles that move away from recitation models toward models of shared reasoning garner greater levels of engagement in discussions from students, higher quality of discourse, and greater equity in participation across various levels of achievement (Chinn, Anderson, & Waggoner, ).…”

Rethinking Schooling

“…Other studies contradict this view. A socio-linguistic study done in primary classrooms found that responses to a second question is shorter, 42 per cent of answers consisting of a single word (Mishler 1978). In a psycho-linguistic study of hesitation phenomena, experimenters asked questions of those children who were 'especially hesitant, spoke slowly, or paused a great deal' while trying to explain a curious event the child had just described.…”

General problems of questioning research

“…I speculate that these procedures increase the chances that some subjects make up questions to please the experimenter. In contrast, other subjects may ask only a few questions because they still feel a little uneasy about taking the floor while someone they think superior -the experimenter -is present (see Dillon, 1990;Mishler, 1978) or because they do not believe that the conditions for question-asking are biased in their favor (there are ambiguous signs, since timing is not arranged for their convenience).…”