Now you see it, now you don’t (Some notes on participant and observer perceptions of language for learning.)

Terry Phillips School of Education, University of East Anglia Chairman, NATE Middle Years Committee

Downstairs in the London Science Museum there’s a belljar containing a bell! There is often a small queue of children waiting eagerly to press the button which operates that bell, but despite their obvious enthusiasm to see what happens not many of them stay long after they have discovered that the bell makes no sound, Most of the children, unable to resolve the conflict between the evidence of their eyes and the evidence of their ears, ignore the metal clapper beating away vigorously on its adjacent steel dome, assume that the exhibit is not functioning properly, and move on quickly to another one. A few will become curious about the misfit between what they know in their heads should happen, and what they perceive is happening, and occasionally from amongst these few a child will remain to push the button again and again to check out the evidence. This child may eventually focus on a previously unnoticed part of the display to discover the switch which releases the vacuum around the bell and makes it possible to hear it perfectly clearly.

An analogy may be made between the behaviour of the children in the museum and the responses of teachers/observers/researchers to what they see happening in classrooms. A proportion of each will dismiss as irrelevant any observation which fails to make sense in terms of what they have always held as ‘normal’, whilst others will recognise the need to study the evidence closely but will still fail to understand its full significance because even their thinking is too constrained by preconceptions. There will be some, however, who will regard apparently problematic evidence as an indication that they need to reassess a number of their existing ideas. If the latter group prevail it will finally become obvious that the ‘meaning-vacuum’ in which many children are placed at school exists partly because adults hold firmly entrenched but entirely false notions about what children can and cannot do with their language. The implication is that a close study of what children can and do do with their language in a range of selected classroom contexts is long overdue. It is the purpose of this paper to draw attention to the linguistic competence shown by eleven-year olds in one particular context from a range I have examined, and to suggest that the normative view of classroom discussion adopted by many teacher-researchers and university- researchers alike is one which transmutes that competence into a learning- disability.

The majority of us hold tightly to what we believe to be the ‘basic truths’ about talk, and view any talk which fails to fit our ‘truth framework as

Now you see it, now you don’t 33

somehow deviant behaviour. Whilst studying group talk I have come to believe that many of these ‘truths’ need to be adjusted. I set out three candidates below, starting with what is perhaps the most fundamental amongst our beliefs, i.e. that a question demands an answer, which should follow in the turn immediately after itself. This belief is demonstrated by teachers when they preface a particular question with the words, ‘I don’t want you to answer yet’, and by the child who volunteers an answer in order to break an embarrassing silence after a question. It is also assumed by researchers such as Sinclair and Coulthard who, in their influential work on the analysis of classroom discourse’ regard teacher, opening-move elicita- tions i.e. questions, as unmarked if followed by a pupil answering-move reply; and by French and Maclure who, when writing more recently about questions and answers in the infant classroom, define a question as ‘finished’ once the answer begins in the next speaker’s turn.‘ Even the seminal work by Barnes on open and closed questions, invites us to evaluate question types by referring to the way in which teachers treat a pupil’s answer to the original question,’ thereby implying that it is normal for questions to be followed by answers in the discourse turn which follows that question. But each of these studies (and many more, including C o r ~ a r o ; ~ Garvey;’ and Wells, Montgomery, and Maclure6. ’) has examined situations in which one of the speakers carries either an institutionally-assigned power or a positionally- assigned power- as ‘omniscient’ adult with very small child, or teacher with pupils, that person has the right to require answers straight away. The pattern of question and answer pairs in these asymmetrical groups has been erroneously generalised, and children working in different contexts where questions and answers are not contiguous are said to be ‘wasting time’ or ‘using language inefficiently’. In truth, we know very little about the ‘questions’ children ask each other in (for example) a small group context, and until we do know we are bound to consider unanswered ‘wh-’utterances as deviations to be put right. Looking at the text of such a small group discussion is the only way we can begin to understand how language works in that particular context.

The texts from which I have drawn the findings which follow were all taken from a conversation lasting over three-quarters of an hour, and although for the purpose of study they have been objectified as ‘texts’, it was considered most important that the conversation itself should be recorded under near-normal classroom conditions. The group had been acclimatised to the technological apparatus over a period of a month, and had worked on their project alongside myself and the camera-men when we had not been operating the apparatus but were just simply around as interested adults. When finally the recording took place, the group of eleven-year old middle- school children were discussing an aspect of their ongoing project on ‘How to save energy’- a topic which had arisen several weeks earlier because of the interest many of the children had shown in the severe winter cold they were experiencing in their seaside town. The only novel things about the occasion were the topic of discussion itself- ‘polluted water’- and the fact that the

34 Terry Phillips

group had not been together previously in this particular combination, cir- cumstantials which were deliberately looked for but not artificially engineered. It was a happy and relaxed classroom where the teacher had time set aside for teaching specific skills but children and teacher worked together on matters of joint interest at other times. And as the transcript below shows, they were perfectly willing to engage in talk.

1. Excuse me but I would like to talk . . . what about if you had your own little sewage works underneath your garden

2. yeah but when that fills up what’s going to happen then 3 . where would you put i t 4. yeah 5 . we . . . we have got some sorts of sewage works underneath-

1. not underneath your garden 2 . what about if [interruptedl 3. we’ve got some pipes going . . . we’ve got . . . in our house we’ve got

pipes going to a . . . septic tank . . . yeah septic tank . . . um yeah tank made out of bricks

6. really 5 . bricks [sharp rise in intonation1 3. yeah . . . and when it fills up like it is now the man comes . . . gets

all the dirty stuff out of the . . . [hesitation1 . . . well 1. dirty stuff [sarcastic tone] 6. really . . . that’ll let all the stuff . . . 3 . dirty water 1. why doesn’t everyone have a well each and all the water goes into

your house and then you don’t need it 5 . maybe i f , . . no forget it 3 . yes but when it . . . when . . . when . . . what do you do when rain

falls on water . . . you’ve gotta . . . got to make i t so’s you can drink it otherwise you’ll get a disease

6. mm 1. rain . . . rain’s all dirty 2 . yeah but - [breaks OH, looks up at ceiling, waves hand around, looks

round whole group] oh yeah . . . you’ve gotta catch i t in’t ya 6. yeah

[all laugh1 1. what about great big buckets thats on top of your roof . . . 5 . there’s an illness you know . . . if you don’t have muck . . . if you

don’t have enough dirt you get an illness 1. what did you say 5 . if you don’t have a bit of dirt in your dinner you get an illness

[general laughter1 3. h o w . . . how 4. you don’t want the dirt

[ interrupted]

Now you see it, now you don’t 35

5 . I don’t know . . . all I’ve heard is-“interrupted1 6. some people say that if you suck your fingers and your thumb or

something you get 1. you go all green 5. you get ill

The group had already discussed in detail the possibility of sending pollutants into outer space and then allowing them to re-enter the earth’s atmosphere at a great speed when they would burn up- the possible hazard from ‘identified flying tin cans’ was viewed with mock alarm; and had attempted to understand the motives that prompted ‘townee’ holiday- makers to leave rubbish on their beaches. They were to go on to speculate about the viability of individual cisterns capable of separating pure water from impure water. And as we can see here, they took in on the way a struggle with the notion of bucket-shaped roofs for collecting personal water supplies, and hypothesised the need for germs in small quantities to help build up resistance to disease. There is no doubt that what the children discuss is both wide-ranging and well-sustained, and on that basis alone it could be argued that it has not been a waste of time, but if we next go on to look at how the children accomplish the discussion we might also be able to see that they have done something more positive still. To see this we shall be obliged to look at the language in a different way.

In the extract, the utterances which appear to be questions are invariably left unanswered; the only exceptions being ‘How . . . how’ which receives the reply, ‘I don’t know . . . all I’ve heard is -’, and ‘What did you say’ which is answered with ‘If you don’t have a bit of dirt in your dinner you get an illness’. The latter is a perfect example of what Corsaro calls a ‘clarifica- tion request’, identified by Corsaro in adult/young child interchanges, but occurring here in child/child discourse. If more examples of this feature emerge then it would be possible to say that this kind of question-answer pair can be found in specified sorts of discourse context, but it would not constitute the basis of a case for other, non-procedural questions. The other question is not answered in full because another speaker interrupts, possibly a sign that the question is not seen as very important in the general context of the conversation. So what about all those other ‘questions’ after which there is either no reply:

3. . . . what do you do when rain falls on water . . . you’ve gotta . . . got to make it so’s you can drink it otherwise you’ll get a disease

or which seem only to be followed by more questions:

1

2. yeah but when that fills up what’s going to happen then 3. where would you put it

what about if you had your own little sewage works underneath your garden

or which have to wait some time for anything approximating to an answer:

36 Terry Phillips

2. yeah but when that fills up what’s going to happen then

3. yeah . . . and when it fills up like it is now the man comes . . . gets

When we look at them we see that they invite further exchanges of conversation of a general kind rather than indicating ‘supply the second- pair part of the qu/ans adjacency pair (cf. Schegloff, Sacks and Jefferson’.) ‘What about g- ’, ‘What S going to happen then- ’, ‘Where would you put it’, ‘Why doesn’t eueryone--’, and ‘What do you do g-’ are all special question forms which invite the others in the conversation to consider problems rather than to try to answer them. They signal the speaker’s intention that answers should evolve after an exchange of conversation to develop the theme of the question and to explore a number of alternative possibilities. The speakers in this group are oriented by the form of their utterances towards interpreting one another’s meanings, and they expect negotiatiuely to arrive at solutions. Far from demonstrating an inability to answer questions, they show unambiguously that they are aware of certain kinds of questions as instruments for promoting hypothesis and speculation, and that they know when and how to employ these ‘What if’ questions. In this group and under these circumstances there is no expectation that all questions require an answer in the next turn.

It may not be just over the matter of questions that we shall have to change some of our basic assumptions, however, we may have to look again at what many teachers are wont to call ‘waffly language’, that is, language which is imprecise. A second extract from the same discussion provides some interesting examples.

[answered nine utterances later by:-]

all the dirty stuff out of the . . . well

1. the water pressure mi . . . might be too much for them 2. it’ll bulge 3. yeah well if we get fairly . . . fairly tough . . . fairly tough pipes 4. copper pipes 1. no but that might bring fish through with it . . . the water . . . no

but that could though 3. if they . . . if they had something like a filter and all the water go

through , . . and the fish they could go into sort of another bag 2. but small germs can . . . they can get through almost anything

germs 4. yeah 3. yeah well if we could have a sort of vacuum thing then you could

2. yeah but even in our water you still get some 1. that’ll cost millions . . . well you wouldn’t spend about twenty

4. you’d have to wouldn’t you 1. no [emphatically] 3. well if we got- [interrupted]

have [interrupted]

million on a bloomin’ drain

Now you see it, now you don’t 37

2. how about things like stop watering . . . stop watering your gardens

4. what about clay pipes . . . what about clay pipes . , . you know if

2. you’ll get no water then stupid 3. if we got some soft surroundings for a clay pipe that wouldn’t crack

or anything and that’s fairly tough and you drill holes in that for the sewage . . . you know

and things like that , . . save water

you done them fairly . . .

Collectively, modifiers such as ‘fairly’, ‘sort of, ‘about’, and ‘thing’ might suggest a vagueness and what many commentators have called ‘a lack of vocabulary’ although attention given to the other language in the text will reveal that the same children are perfectly capable of using appropriately precise vocabulary when the need arises (‘water pressure’, ‘filter’, ‘vacuum’, ‘soft surroundings’). But an alternative explanation for the use of so many markers of imprecision is that the speakers actually intend to be less than perfectly precise. As has already been shown, the children in the group are exploring sets of possibilities and speculating over alternatives, and to introduce a total certainty would create an alien mode. The modifiers they use help to signal that it is a general idea which is being offered to the debate and not the precise details of that idea. (See also comments on the r81e of the modal auxiliary verb in ‘Mode-marking’, Phillips, paper in preparation.) In this group and under these circumstances there is a positive function for vocabulary normally perceived by observers as evidence of ‘woolly thinking.’ Could it be that once again the norm has been taken from the language used in groups where the topic and style of the agenda are dictated by one person with assigned power, circumstances in which it is rare for ideas to be discussed at length in a spirit of co-operativeness and openness to persuasion by all parties?

A final myth which is exposed when we study how children use their language in a peer group is the one that says that teacherless groups produce talk that is unstructured. The structure is certainly very different from the one in a teacher-led, whole class discussion where, as is now well-known, teachers talk three times as much as all their pupils put together (Flandersg), and pupil replies are normally followed up by teacher evaluations (Sinclair and Coulthard). Barnes and Todd” have shown that in small, teacherless groups there is much more fluid patterning of speaker moves, but they have primarily been concerned with the cognitive and social learning and have not wished to give priority to how a cohesive conversation is achieved, so what still remains to be demonstrated is (a) whether peer-groups discourse is in any real sense ‘structured’, and (b) if it is, then how.

In school conversations involving participants of asymmetrical status (i.e. where one of the conversationalists is a teacher), one member of the group bears responsibility for arbitrating topical relevance, for deciding which of the other group members should speak, and for arranging the moment when this should happen. For this reason all the other members of the group

38 Terry Phillips

have to give the main focus of their attention to successfully accomplishing the moves in the interaction ‘game’. In a small group of peers, entering a conversation just to have one’s turn is no longer compulsory, instead speakers are free to take their turn when they have something to contribute. What they do have to do, however, is negotiate the right to speak when such a moment arrives. It is, for instance, normally unacceptable to other members of the group if one person joins in with a remark which is left topically unrelated to anything that has preceded it, and it is consequently necessary that, although the substance of what a speaker wishes to say may have very little to do with what has gone before, it should be framed in a manner which makes it appear to be so connected. It is also normally unacceptable for a group member to nominate another person for a turn, so each speaker is left to negotiate their own way in to the conversation without assuming ‘rights’ over the others. In short, no speaker is expected to behave in a way which would indicate that they believe they have power over their peers, so they must devise appropriate linguistic strategies to regulate the discussion without giving offence. Which means of course that even children in peer group discussions have to devote part of their attention to ‘getting it right’: in this context, however, they are not trying to ‘get right’ someone else’s preordained set of rules for a game essentially designed to promote good order, but ‘getting right’ the language necessary for the creation of coherent and cohesive jointly-constructed discourse.

The text of a peer group discussion provides convincing evidence that, in the absence of the well-established ritual adopted by teacher-pupil ‘conver- sationalists’, group members employ language skilfully to give a cohesive structure to their talk, and to organise their turn-taking. For example, in this final extract from the ‘polluted water’ discussion:

5. 2. 6 . 5. 1. 5.

1. 5.

6 . 2. 1.

no . . . if you have a clean feeler if you have a clean what I know . . . something for the tanks a clean feeler a bucket . . . what about a bucket shaped . . . [tails offl you have a little cup right and when the rain comes [looks round group1 what about a bucket-shaped roof the rain falls down , . . the rain , . . the rain that’s fresh innit . . . well then [signals rain skidding down a chute, and then mimes picking up a cup and drinking] I know . . . sort of sensibilised yeah an’ then [interrupted] what about a bucket-shaped roof. . . a bucket-shaped roof. . , the rain falls on it and then it just goes into your systems an’ that

speaker 1 first uses the technique of perseveration to get himself heard (‘a bucket . . . what about a bucket shaped. , . ’, ‘what about a bucket-shaped roof) and fails to gain a hearing, so he next incorporates a previous

Now you see it, now you don’t 39

speaker’s words about falling rain to make his own utterance appear to be topically related to it. (It Zs in the much broader sense, cf. Van Dijk,” but ‘macrostructural relatedness’ is not my concern in this paper.) In the first extract he has to be a little more direct and say ‘Excuse me but I would like to talk’, claiming a turn and immediately launching into his proposition ‘what about if you had your own little sewage works underneath your garden’. In both instances he has had to make an instant decision about how best to become part of the conversation, and he has had to make choices from amongst a number of strategies available to him. The ‘excuse me’ bid works well but cannot be used more than once without setting up a social distance; the device of repeating an utterance fails to work, but the speaker realises that the reason for this is that the topic is too loosely related to the other utterances; the third time he uses a further ‘device’ of incorporating another speaker’s topic until his point is made. In the second extract one of the speakers ignores the conventions and sets herself up as a judge of someone else’s contribution, but the speaker who follows her prevents loss of group cohesion by gently incorporating and expanding the challenged speaker’s words (and idea) into her own utterance.

4. what about clay pipes . . . what about clay pipes . . . you know if

2. You’ll get no water then stupid 3 . if we got some soft surrroundings for a clay pipe that wouldn’t crack

or anything and that’s fairly tough and you drill holes in that for sewage . . . you know

you done them fairly . . .

This is not just a case of speaker three using the same words as speaker two (-‘a clay pipe’-) something which is often inevitable if they are referring to the same topic, but also an instance of the second speaker using the same style of discourse in refutation of speaker 2’s abrupt and potentially disruptive intervention. I have already suggested that certain kinds of ‘question’ promote hypothesis and speculation, and ‘what about’ is a ‘question’ of that type. ‘If we got . . . ’ (etc) is also in a speculative vein. (Fuller details and further examples will be given in the paper on ‘Mode- marking’ referred to earlier.) Here, and at many other points in the three- quarter of an hour discussion, it becomes apparent that not only do the children carefully structure their contributions, paying close attention to other speakers in order to be able to do this, but also that they do so by making linguistic choices amongst a set of linguistic options not open to them in the asymmetrical class group.

In this paper I have attempted to refocus perceptions about what is happening when certain kinds of talk take place in classrooms, using as my springboard the linguistic evidence from a particular text created during a peer-group discussion. I have suggested that a better understanding of how the language is actually used in such a context may lead us to different conclusions from the ones we might make if we adhere to norm-related assumptions based on previous experience of class ‘discussion’. I have shown,

40 Terry Phillips

I hope, that to dismiss peer-group talk as timewasting, unstructured, or ‘waffly’ is to ignore the evidence which reveals the consistent and careful use by speakers of a range of sophisticated linguistic strategies to achieve genuine discussion. And finally, I have indicated that the ’fine-tuning’ essential for the successful accomplishment of a joint ‘text’ requires co- operation and negotiation at a concentrated level. ‘Competition for the floor’, the term used by Barnes and Todd to describe the process of gaining a turn in small group discussion, conveys an element of ‘battle’ which is contrary to the negotiation which is actually taking place. It is for this reason that I prefer to use rather vague, but essentially sympathetic images such as ‘fine-tuning’. If we wish to offer children the opportunity to include in their communicative competence the ability to hold a sustained and well- structured conversation, then we will wish to create the sort of learning environment which facilitates the setting up of a range of contexts for discussion, chief amongst which will be small working groups. By making possible the kinds of language for learning typical of small group interaction we as teachers can promote the bringing nearer of several consciousnesses, each with its own understanding, but each willing to take account of other understandings.

To return finally to the analogy with which we started, I wish now to change it. A bell is always a bell, and whatever the hearer does in response to it, even when there is no vacuum present to prevent his or her ear picking up the signal, the bell itself remains impassive and unaffected. Children in school are more than just ‘bells’ or ‘ears’. Given the right circumstances they are both affected by and in turn affect other speaker/hearers. Perhaps we should have moved deeper into the Children’s Gallery of the Museum. Here we could have found a door which opens as you approach it. This is much closer to an image of how learners make meanings,

Notes and References

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

Sinclair J . and Coulthard R. M. (1975) Towards an analysis of discourse: the language of teachers and pupils. Oxford. French, P. and Maclure, M. (1981) ‘Teachers’ questions, pupils’ answers: an investigation of questions and answers in the infant classroom’, in First Language, vol. 2 , pt. 2 , no. 4. Barnes, D. (1969) ‘Languages in the secondary classroom’, in D. Barnes, J. Britton, and H. Rosen, Language, the learner, and the school. Penguin. Corsaro, W. (1977) ‘The clarification request as a feature of adult interaction styles with young children’, in Language in Society, pp.

Garvey, C. (1977) ‘The contingent query: a dependent act in conversa- tion’, in M. Lewis and L. Rosenblum (eds), Interaction, conversation, and the development of language: Wiley.

183- 287.

Now you see it, now you don’t 41

6 . Wells, G., Montgomery, M. and Maclure, M. (1979) ‘Adult-child discourse: outline of a model of analysis’, in The Journal of Pragmatics, vol. 3, no. 3.4. Wells, G., Montgomery, M. and Maclure, M. (1979) ‘Some strategies for sustaining conversation’ - a typescript paper from the Centre for the Study of Language and Communication, Univ. of Bristol School of Education. Schegloff, E. Sacks, H. and Jefferson, G. (1974) ‘A simplest systematics for the organisation of turn-taking for conversation’, in Language, vol. 50, no. 4.

9. Flanders, N . (1967) ‘Interaction models of critical teaching behaviour’, in E. Amidon and J. Hough (eds), Interaction analysis: theory and research. Addison-Wesley.

10. Barnes, D. and Todd, F. (1977) Communication and learning in small groups. Routledge.

1 1 . Van Dijk, T. A. (1977) Text and context: explorations in the semantics and pragmatics of discourse. Longman.

7 .

8.

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