Questions That Convey Information in Teacher-Student Conferences

This chapter, written by Irene Koshik, investigates questioning and answering in a pedagogical setting, one-on-one, second-language writing conferences at an American university. The teachers that Koshik studies wish to help students self-correct rather than provide them with corrections. The author analyzes four types of questioning practices, all categorized as known information questions: designedly incomplete utterances (DIUs), reversed polarity questions (RPQs), alternative questions, and questions that animate the voice of an abstract audience. Koshik's analysis demonstrates the complex relationship between the designs of the questioning prompts, their positions in a sequence of talk, their functions, and the types of answers they elicit. According to Koshik, each question type makes a different use of the grammar of both turn and sequence to accomplish a slightly different set of functions. The analysis reveals how teaching and learning are constituted in this speech event and how the participants collaboratively contribute to the pedagogical process.