Deploying an everyday life approach, this article focuses on the kindergarten meal, defined as a space in which humans, materials and discursive elements interact. The article identifies and discusses two co-existing perspectives on the everyday meals that emphasise children as future beings and here-and-now beings. Through the concepts of smoothing and striation the paper discusses how these perspectives produce different mechanisms of regulation and agency, and position the eaters differently. The paper emphasises kindergarten mealtime as an ambiguous space that does not offer simple discussions about good and bad meal situations. The paper thereby adds to the existing literature within children’s geographies which emphasise interactional, relational and material aspects of children’s lives. It does so by revisiting some concepts, striation and smoothing, that has been used to explore children’s spaces and child–adult relations, but argue that these concepts describe ambivalent and complex processes in children’s and adult’s everyday lives.

Young children’s eating practices and mealtimes within early childhood education and care have attracted considerable attention over the past 30 years, with an increasing focus on nutrition and family-style meals. Research in this field is typically conducted in parallel strands that would benefit from an overview perspective and critical discussion. This article addresses that need, reviewing international research from 166 empirical papers published between January 1990 to December 2020. A scoping literature review was used to inductively identify three core areas of research: i) factors influencing children’s eating practices, ii) teacher’s and children’s perspectives on mealtimes, and iii) situated meal practices. Key trends included a focus on repeated exposure, modeling behavior, teachers’ feeding practices, rules and norms vs. playfulness, and participation in the meal as event. Future research could work across disciplinary boundaries and combine a focus on nutritional concerns with an examination of the multimodal interaction within the mealtimes.

In this conversation analytic study, we investigate requests for assistance in the third-age (65+) language classroom. Seven Dutch seniors participated in a one-month course of English as a foreign language. We found that these seniors asked many language-related questions which fell into one of three categories: (1) production-oriented questions, (2) comprehension-oriented questions and (3) wonderment questions. These questions differ in the ways the sequences are shaped: (a) what precedes the request for assistance, (b) the person who is recruited to provide the assistance, (c) the person who offers the assistance, and (d) the response to the provided assistance and the subsequent interaction. We found wonderment questions to be the most prevalent category. Our findings suggest that the senior learners in our data show clear ownership and agency over their own learning process, demonstrated by their active participation and frequent (wonderment) questions in the classroom.

Data from whole-class discussions in Dutch upper primary school show that teachers occasionally explicitly take downgraded epistemic stances through epistemic disclaimers such as ‘ik weet het niet’ (English: I don’t know (it)), which contrasts with their institutionally assigned epistemic authority. In the current study, we have collected turns in which such epistemic disclaimers occur, and analysed them using conversation analysis. In our analyses, we focused on the positions of the turns in which epistemic disclaimers occur, and on the varying ways in which these turns influence the subsequent course of interaction. We have found that teachers’ epistemic disclaimers occur in initiating turns, facilitating student participation, but also in responsive turns. The latter vary in the extent to which they facilitate participation, ranging from facilitating student participation in a similar way to the initiating turns, to blocking further student contributions altogether. This study furthermore demonstrates that teachers employ epistemic disclaimers to navigate two teacher roles, namely those of a teacher with epistemic authority, and of a facilitator of whole class-discussions.

This paper addresses the ways in which teachers in whole-class discussions invite students to elaborate their previous turn. Our conversation analytic study uncovers that the teachers’ invitations are prompted by elicited as well as spontaneous student turns of both subjective and factual nature. While giving the students the space to expand on their previous turn, most invitations nevertheless steer towards a specific type of response, namely an account or explanation. Only incidentally, the invitations simply solicit a continuation. The fact that the invitations follow not only teacher-initiated, but also student-initiated contributions reflects the teachers’ attempts to foster an actual discussion framework in which they partly hand over control and in which the student contributions are taken up for further consideration.

This article analyses teacher conduct around episodes of subsequent student contributions during whole-class discussions. We scrutinised the teachers’ facilitating role in these episodes by systematically analysing their verbal as well as bodily conduct before, during and after the episodes, unearthing the teacher behaviour leading to and maintaining the discussion and the conduct bringing the discussion to an end. Our analysis reveals a large repertoire of conduct and proves that the teachers, while often refraining from verbal contributions, nonetheless actively foster the discussion by bodily means such as gestures, gaze and even laughter. 

This paper reports on a conversation analytic study into the pass-on turns that teachers produce to return the floor to the class following one student’s contribution, in the context of whole-class discussions around texts in 4th grade history and geography lessons. These pass-on turns are remarkable, as the teachers take the turn in order to convey that they will not be responding, but are instead giving their students the opportunity to do so. Our bottom-up analyses allowed us to identify different practices and their projections, and revealed their effects on the ensuing responses. Whereas minimal pass-on practices do not alter the sequential implications of the preceding student turn and typically lead to responses to the student turn, more elaborate practices do slightly alter the sequential implications and mostly lead to responses to the pass-on turn itself, or to an earlier turn produced by the teacher. The analyses show that, although the pass-on turns seem to sustain the Teacher-Student-Teacher-Student participation pattern, this does not hinder the activity of having a whole-class discussion in which students discuss the topic at hand and critically consider and challenge the contributions of their classmates.

This dissertation reports on detailed interaction research into the ways in which primary school teachers provide space for discussion during history lessons. Teachers participating in this project were asked to hold whole-class discussions on the basis of the textbook texts, instead of having their students complete written exercises individually. Productive discussions offer students the opportunity to collaboratively build understanding and enhance their individual cognitive processes. In order to realize productive discussions, teachers should facilitate interaction in which students produce longer stretches of talk and are provided the opportunity to talk and think together. Until now, recommendations to teachers holding whole-class discussions have been rather general. This thesis fulfils the need for detailed insight into teachers’ conduct during these discussions.The research shows that teachers, without having received intensive instruction, possess a large repertoire of conduct to facilitate and support discussions. For instance, the study of teachers’ ‘open and authentic questions’ revealed that one open question gives students much freedom and leads to actual discussion, while the other steers the students into a certain direction and generates only short answers. The other studies in this thesis unravel details of teacher conduct encouraging students to elaborate and to respond to each other. Apart from these nuances within specific types of conduct, this research has pointed out that teachers can facilitate and support whole-class discussions by means of less obvious conduct such as gaze, gestures and even the drinking of coffee at a moment at which the teacher would normally take a speaking turn. With the insights from this research teachers could be made more consciously competent.

This article takes a conversation analytic approach to the often employed notions of ‘open-ended or authentic questions’ in classroom interaction. We analyzed the, as we called them, open invitations teachers utter after reading a piece of text during whole-class discussions in 4 Dutch upper primary school classes, of which 2 were followed for a longer period of time. Our data show that these invitations vary in openness. We found 4 different types: (1) invitations projecting (a series of) objectively true or false answers, (2) invitations projecting specific response types, (3) invitations that have a restricted referent but do not project specific response types, and (4) topic soliciting invitations giving room to various contributions. Virtually all invitations resulted in fitted responses. The subsequent interactions following the less open invitations typically resulted in series of parallel responses, whereas the more open invitations typically yielded discussions or the collaborative answering of clarification questions.

Levende Talen Tijdschrift 2014-2 bevat een artikel van Theo Pullens, Hanny den Ouden, Wolfgang Herrlitz en Huub van den Bergh waarin zij de vraag stellen of een meerkeuzetoets kan bijdragen aan het meten van schriftelijke taalvaardigheid. Op basis van hun onderzoek concluderen zij dat er vraagtekens moeten worden gezet bij het gebruik van meerkeuzetoetsen als meetinstrument van schriftelijke taalvaardigheid. Zij formuleren als advies om deze toetsvorm niet langer op te nemen in de eindtoets basisonderwijs en geen plaats te geven in de te ontwikkelen diagnostische tussentijdse toets voor het voortgezet onderwijs. Het advies om meerkeuzetoetsen voor schrijfvaardigheid in de ban te doen is in onze ogen overhaast, zeker omdat het advies enkel op de eigen bevindingen van Pullens en collega’s lijkt te berusten.