Classroom interaction is studied   mostly as a ritualistic,  hierarchical pattern with greater attention to its formal structure rather than to the content and the actual realization of meanings in the class. Such an approach concentrates on teacher’s role, speaking rules and activity moves.  With a more attention to the main medium of the educational activity – a linguistic code - C.Cazden (1988) defined the 3 languages of the classroom as the language of curriculum (the communication of propositional information), the language of control (the establishment and maintenance of social relationships) and the language of personal identity (the expression of the speaker’s identity and attitudes). With each of these languages come the problems.

The first language issue raises the questions of
- the subject matter
- what is worth knowing
- how to negotiate knowledge
- technical problems of the scientific register

The second language lets us ask questions about
- institutional discourse
- power asymmetry
- peer activity

The third language sets problems of
- personal discourse which is certainly connected with social contexts, sociological categories of status, class and gender.

The more content-oriented discourse structure of classroom interaction is constituted of different discourse patterns:
- scientific discourse of the academic discipline,
- university discourse (the «myths» of the university, the most academically strong schools within a university, positive and negative evaluation of the educational environment and so on),
- societal discourse (what are educational values in the society),
- personal voice.

The question of how these different levels are related and interacted in actual talk in the classroom prompted more attention to such form of classroom interaction as discussion. Although the whole classroom activity is a permeation of all the discursive forms, discussion seems to be a quintessential form. Discussion is difficult for a teacher to make it occur and for a student to participate. «Observers have hard time to find discussions and teachers have a hard time creating them». Kuhn (1985) found in undergraduate college class across several departments that only short segments of the 50 minute periods class could be characterized as true discussions, never the whole class. In discussions ideas are explored rather than answers to teacher’s questions are provided and evaluated. The ratio of a teacher and students talk is approximately equal on the contrary to 2/3ds of teacher’s talk in class. Students are supposed to decide when to speak rather than keep silent. There is self-selection by students rather than pre-allocations of turns by a teacher.

The kind of «perpetuum mobile» of class discussions is questioning. Questions are traditionally viewed as a pair unit that can be analyzed as having phonological, syntactic and semantic properties. Goody (1978) claimed that questions may best be understood in terms of the constraints of syntax and usage. At the syntactic level questions may be broken down into 2 types: yes-no questions that are complete propositions and differ from statements only in the inversion of word order;

e.g. -Are you writing a new book?
-Yes, I am.

and questions that are incomplete propositions for which the answer provides the missing clue

e.g. -What did you do over the weekend?
-I went to Moscow.

Questions also have pragmatic force of demanding request or obligation. Schegloff and Sacks (1973) viewed questions as an initial element of a two-part sequence related by timing and content. Timing rules control the relationship of utterances – the answer that follows the question, whereas content rules control the coherence or appropriateness of responses to the question that precedes them. Sacks (1966) proposed that questions and answers is one type of base sequential pair whose elements are both time- and type-related.

The structural views on questioning do not seem to answer the question how questions constrain or influence responses in contextually bound stretches of speech such as classroom discussions or university classroom discourse when the meaning is constructed not only in the coherent structural unit of question-answer pair. This limitation of a general theory of questions points out the need for a discourse-based view to address the problem of rules that relate the force of the question to the type of response produced, and not merely to internal structural properties of the question itself.

So, questions realized in classroom talk are difficult to explain on the sentential level because they are not merely complete inverted propositions (yes-no questions) or incomplete propositions for which the answer provides the missing clue - special questions. Although they have a pragmatic force obliging or demanding request and can be measured by timing (next to each other) and content (coherence and appropriateness of answers to the preceded questions), their function in classroom interaction is contextual and social.

Individual speech acts the notion of which can be derived from the assumption that «… speaking a language is performing speech acts such as making statements, giving commands, asking questions, making promises, and so on …» (Searle 1969) must be studied in the wider context of a whole conversation that could be called as discursive context affecting the functions of questions. The difference of these functions from the sentential functions lies in the fact that the meaning that can be applied to a question pair is derived on the basis of contextual clues, i.e. social goals and intentions of a student.

The university classroom discourse properties mostly types of direct/indirect questioning were analyzed on the basis of classroom discussions videotaped at Stanford University (winter quarter 1998), the University of Iowa (spring semester 1998) and Moscow University (fall semester 1998).

Questions in the context of university classroom discourse have the following discursive functions on the surface interactional level:

breaking silence:
1.1)»Well, did you hear anything new on Unabomber case?»
« If he is mentally ill, he shouldn’t be prosecuted, right?» (Iowa class)

1.2)»I’d like to ask you about the stylistic device of irony. Is it possible to define it linguistically?» (Moscow class)

1.3)»What would you say on writing the pastische on Proust and Camu?» (Stanford class)

clarification:
2.1)“I just want to clarify the following…Was the story written by a British or American writer?” (Moscow class)

2.2)»Were his data taken in the mental clinic?» (Iowa class)

2.3)»Was it written after the war?» (Stanford class)

initiation of talk or discussion:
3.1)“I have trouble understanding …When Proust talks about love – is    there more of moral judgement or poetic exaggeration? ” (Stanford class)

3.2)»The butterfly metaphor is quite obscure. Is it something like butterfly in Lolita that is mentioned in the scene of the last meeting of Lolita and Humbert?» (Moscow class)

3.3)»Did you hear anything new on Unabomber?» (Iowa class)

curiosity questions:
4.1)“I just wonder…Was Becket married?” (Stanford class)

4.2)»Have you ever seen an old 1930s movie?» (Moscow class)

4.3)»Why did you select this fiction for the course?» (Stanford class)

On the deep level:

establishing status/reinforcing status - questions that students know answers to:
1.1)»Was it Emerson who said that quotation is specifically American anxiety about our identity against the Old World?» (Stanford class)

 producing impression on a teacher - reference to other authors or works that are not scheduled to be read, etc.:
2.1)»Did you read the last book by J.Rios?» (Stanford class)

2.2)»Why, it is an allusion to Shakespeare’s Macbeth, isn’t it?» (Moscow class)

Questioning is not merely the matter of expressing propositional content or revealing pragmatic force. On the discourse level it has the complex structure and the meaning can not be derived without considering the contextual variables or other aspects of socially relevant structures such as status and power which is asymmetrical in the educational context. Traditionally, feminist educationalists consider that conventional classroom interaction process alienates women. Its mostly content-oriented discourse transmitting scientific subject matter from a teacher to students is separate and rational and, thus, objective and intellectual. They are arguing that classroom discourse can be connected and relational creating knowledge in the collaborative activity of a teacher and students. I assume that discourse level questions characterize the ways students negotiate their social and personal identities establishing a student status and collaborating in classroom activity.
It was hypothesized that the surface interactional level questions of breaking silence and initiation of talk or discussion as well as deep-level questions of establishing/reinforcing status and producing impression on a teacher would be more characteristic for men. The data showed the following qualitative and quantitative proportion of discursive types of questions: 40% of surface interactional level questions, 22% of reinforcing status type questions and 38% of educational content-oriented questions. Women’s use of reinforcing status questions is almost equal in number to men’s (15% vs 17%). Women tend to ask more clarification and curiosity questions (35% vs 20%). Iowa class students (7 male, 4 female) asked more educational content-oriented questions regardless of gender (71% of total number of questions). Moscow class female students ask more clarification and initiation of talk questions (57% of total number of questions). Stanford female students classroom talk is characterized by the more even propotion of «surface» and «deep» level questioning.
 

References

1. Cazden, C. 1988. Classroom Discourse: the Language of Teaching and Learning. Cambridge: University Press.
2. Green, J.L.and Harker, J.O. (Eds.). 1988. Multiple Perspective Analysis of Classroom Discourse. Vol.XXIII.
3. Goody, E. 1978. Towards a Theory of Questions. In E.Goody (Ed.), Questions and Politeness: Strategiws in Social Interaction, pp.231-60. Cambridge: University Press.
4. Sacks, H. 1975. Everyone Has to Lie. In B.Blount and M.M.Sanchez (Eds.), Sociocultural Dimensions of Language Use, pp.57-80. New York: Academic Press.
5. Schegloff, A.E. and H.Sacks. 1973. Opening up Closings.Semiotica, 8, 289-327.
6. Searle, J. 1969. Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge: University Press.

*This work was supported by the Research Support Scheme of OIS/HESP, grant No.:262/1996.