Purpose: Founded in sociocultural theories of learning, the authors argue that engaging learners in collaborative knowledge building is critical. When responding to others' ideas, research shows that learners in online settings more frequently focus on surface-level aspects of colleagues' contributions -- sharing, comparing and praising -- rather…

Reports work on text from extended event of talking among professionals. Discusses problematic communication and implications of nonsuccess in social interaction. Believes failure in explanation or in resolving competing claims implies need for more adequate cognitive and cultural models of participants' knowledge and practices; theoretical…

Considers the phenomenon of a single utterance having different illocutions at the same time, depending on the relationship between the speaker and different hearers and the differing amounts of shared knowledge among the conversation's participants. (MSE)

Discusses the dominant paradigm for analyzing interactions, Conversation Analysis (CA), pointing out that the paradigm does not include participant intention in its analysis. Notes that CA practitioners focus on empirical investigations of what the participants are doing and how they are doing it and that the understanding of an utterance is…

In this article, the author examines the character of the conversations generated in an elementary teacher group as they worked on mathematical problems together and analyzed their students' work. Two distinct forms of talk--"exploratory" and "expository"--were found. The first type of talk occurred most prominently when discussions centered on…

Extends the work with distributional structures to the analysis of leaders' oral behaviors. (MH)

Dynamics of discussion in the classroom are analyzed based on data from 64 classrooms in Georgia, Alabama, and Florida. Among the discourse problems considered are the separation of answers from questions, the relationship between the presupposition of an utterance and the speaker/hearer assumptions, and the relationship between utterance form and…

Anthropologists have indicated that the need to act politically and to avoid the appearance of such action is marked in egalitarian societies. The perils of confrontation in such societies often foster indirect and highly allusive speech. This paper invesitgates the relationship between direct and indirect speech in an Indo-Fijian community which…

Develops a multidimensional framework for analyzing an extended physics classroom interaction to understand the resources participants use, alignments they form, and meanings and context they construct. Considers how participants negotiate their positions, focusing on one resistant student and why she remains unconvinced by others' arguments and…

Used a lexical statistics program to analyze conflict and nonconflict discussions of two different groups of college students. Found preliminary evidence for a pattern of greater redundancy and less vocabulary diversity for the discussion groups in conflict. (PD)

This document reports on a conference focused on speech problems. The main objective of these discussions was to facilitate a deeper understanding of human communication through interaction of conference participants with colleagues in other disciplines. Topics discussed included speech production, feedback, speech perception, and development of…

Examines the various frames within which debates, discussions, and dialogs occurred at a major midwestern university, concerning the disbandment of one of its departments. Stresses the importance of building a unified vision in the context of the common good. Contains 34 references. (JDI)