An Interactional Resource for Creating Opportunities for Student Participation: Designedly Incomplete Utterances

This study examines social studies course classroom interaction in a primary school and describes an interactional resource deployed by the teacher for creating opportunities for student participation. Social studies classrooms are multidisciplinary settings that require teaching of rich content, which is only possible through ensuring student participation. However, there is no study to our knowledge that documents such resources in social studies classrooms by focusing on the micro moments of classroom interaction. This study investigates 17 hours of social studies classroom interactions using Conversation Analysis as the research methodology and present findings on a specific interactional resource deployed repeatedly by the teacher for encouraging learner initiatives and creating opportunities for student participation. This resource has been referred to in previous literature as Designedly Incomplete Utterance (DIU) that is mainly used for creating opportunities for student participation by leaving an utterance designedly incomplete so that it can be completed by the students. Our study has shown how designedly incomplete utterance (DIU) is used as an interactional resource (i.e. as hints, for eliciting an extension or repetition of prior talk, and for prompting the continuation of an action) by the teacher, which provides evidence for that the teacher creates opportunities both for student initiations and student participation in an observable way. Our study contributes to the field of social studies education with the first research to examine social studies classroom interaction and also by presenting an innovative research methodology and providing the teachers and teacher candidates with a rich interactional resource to encourage, create opportunities for, and maintain student participation.