“You’re supposed to agree with me too!” Pupils’ managing of peer group talk during an intervention with talk lessons in the Norwegian subject

Abstract

In this article, I examine how pupils (12–13 years old) managed group talk during a 10-week classroom intervention with explicit teaching of talk skills. The design of the lessons was inspired by Talk Lessons from the Thinking Together approach (Dawes et al., 2004), which involves establishing ground rules to promote exploratory talk. I analyze “managing turns” in four peer groups using the constant comparative method (Corbin & Strauss, 2015). Six categories of “managing turns” are exemplified and analyzed in the article, focusing on the functions of these utterances. The findings indicate that the lessons stimulated the pupils’ awareness of productive participation in group talk, although in some cases their managing turns seemed mechanical. This indicates that the pupils were in the process of mastering new communicative tools, but that these were not yet fully appropriated. Another finding is that the pupils’ managing of group talk was characterized by a “consensus pressure”, in which the pupils rushed to reach a joint conclusion. This seemed counterproductive in terms of promoting exploratory talk. The article contributes to oracy education within the Norwegian subject, by highlighting the importance of explicit teaching of group talk. The findings also lead to critical reflection on elements of the teaching approach used in the study.

Keywords: oral skills, Norwegian subject, upper primary level, exploratory talk, ground rules