‘Yes? I have no idea’: teacher turns containing epistemic disclaimers in upper primary school whole-class discussions

ABSTRACT

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.

KEYWORDS:

• Epistemic stance markers
• whole-class discussions
• conversation analysis
• teacher roles
• epistemic disclaimer

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the teachers and students for allowing us into their classrooms to observe and record the lessons. We would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

There is no potential conflict of interest to report.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sofie van der Meij

Sofie van der Meij is a research master student in Linguistics at the University of Groningen. Her research interests include using conversation analysis to study institutional interaction and epistemics.

Myrte Gosen

Myrte Gosen is an assistant professor at Communication and Information Studies of the University of Groningen, the Netherlands. She has a particular interest in classroom interactions in relation to knowledge and she uses conversation analysis to identify the fundamental structures and practices in interaction that are related to knowledge construction.

Annerose Willemsen

Annerose Willemsen is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Behavioural Sciences and Learning at Linköping University, Sweden. Using multimodal conversation analysis and discursive psychology, she focuses on interaction in educational settings, such as whole-class discussions in primary school and traffic and mealtime socialization in Swedish preschools.