This research uses conversation analysis to describe three prosodic techniques a teacher uses to facilitate learner participation. While he validates and connects all student responses, he employs larger prosodic features to encourage further participation whereas these prosodic features remain largely absent when a student is discouraged from further participation.
Research on classroom discourse has described how teachers engage students in exploratory talk while simultaneously maintaining classroom control. Less attention has been paid to how prosody features as a classroom interactional resource for eliciting and responding to student contributions. Based on videotaped data from an eighth grade Humanities classroom in the U.S., I use conversation analysis to describe three prosodic techniques the teacher uses with binding (Reddington, 2018) to facilitate learner participation. While the teacher uses binding to validate and connect all student responses, he employs larger prosodic features to encourage a student to revise an insufficient response whereas these prosodic features remain largely absent when a student provides an insufficient response and is also discouraged from further participation. In light of the analysis, I discuss the implications for teacher education and conclude with directions for future research.
