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Expressing Personal Opinions in Classroom Interactions: The Role of Humor and Displays of Uncertainty

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Interactional Competences in Institutional Settings

Abstract

We set out to uncover how young people deal with the challenges of expressing personal opinions in the classroom. Based on a corpus of video-recorded French L1 lessons in a secondary school in Switzerland, we scrutinize the interactional resources students put to use to do so, among which humor and claims of uncertainty feature as a means of dealing with the potentially delicate nature of opinion expression. We show how the expression of personal opinions and related resources are responded to in the classroom, both by teachers and by peers. The study sheds light onto students’ interactional competence by documenting the accountable ways in which, when expressing personal opinions, they subtly balance between assertiveness and uncertainty in response to the local circumstantial details of the ongoing interaction.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Center for Applied Linguistics, University of Neuchâtel, Neuchâtel, Switzerland

    Virginie Degoumois, Cécile Petitjean & Simona Pekarek Doehler

Authors
  1. Virginie Degoumois
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  2. Cécile Petitjean
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  3. Simona Pekarek Doehler
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Centre for Applied Linguistics, University of Neuchâtel, Neuchâtel, Switzerland

    Simona Pekarek Doehler

  2. Institute of Work and Organizational Psychology, University of Neuchâtel, Neuchâtel, Switzerland

    Adrian Bangerter

  3. Center of Logopedics, University of Neuchâtel, Neuchâtel, Switzerland

    Geneviève de Weck

  4. Faculty of Psychology & Educational Sciences, University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland

    Laurent Filliettaz

  5. Department of Social Sciences, University of Fribourg, Fribourg, Switzerland

    Esther González-Martínez

  6. Centre for Applied Linguistics, University of Neuchâtel, Neuchâtel, Switzerland

    Cécile Petitjean

Appendix: Transcription Conventions

Appendix: Transcription Conventions

The transcription of laugh particles is based on Jeffersonian conventions (Jefferson 1985; see also Hepburn and Varney 2013). When laughter is jointly produced by several participants, which is difficult to transcribe, we have used the comment ((laughs)), indicating its duration when it does not overlap with talk. When a participant smiles without speaking, we have transcribed smile by using the symbol £ in the line below the speaker’s turn (in italics), indicating the person performing the smile and its duration.

(0.2)

Silence in tenths of a second

hello:

Sound stretch

?

Rising intonation

,

Continuative intonation

.

Falling intonation

partici-

Cut-off

=

Fast follow-up

↑↓

Rise or fall in pitch

bon jour

Accentuation

bonJOUR

Louder talk

bon°jour°

Softer talk

>bonjour<

Faster speech rate

<bonjour>

Slower speech rate

[ ]

Overlapping talk

(bonjour)

Uncertain transcription

(xxx)

Non-understandable segment

.h

Inhalation

h

Exhalation

£bonjour£

Smiley voice

bonj(h)ou(h)r

Infiltrated laugh particles

((writing: 1.0))

Transcriber’s comment

PRT

Particle

All:

All students

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Degoumois, V., Petitjean, C., Pekarek Doehler, S. (2017). Expressing Personal Opinions in Classroom Interactions: The Role of Humor and Displays of Uncertainty. In: Pekarek Doehler, S., Bangerter, A., de Weck, G., Filliettaz, L., González-Martínez, E., Petitjean, C. (eds) Interactional Competences in Institutional Settings. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-46867-9_2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-46867-9_2

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  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-46866-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-46867-9

  • eBook Packages: Social SciencesSocial Sciences (R0)

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