Discursive practices in family dinner talk and classroom discourse: A contextual comparison

Learning, Culture and Social Interaction 3 (2014) 134–145

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Discursive practices in family dinner talk and classroom discourse: A contextual comparison Vivien Heller 1 University of Dortmund, Joseph von Fraunhofer-Str. 20, 44227 Dortmund, Germany

a r t i c l e

i n f o

Article history: Received 29 May 2013 Received in revised form 23 January 2014 Accepted 3 February 2014 Available online 4 March 2014 Keywords: Discursive practices Argumentation Family interaction Teacher–student interaction Educational inequality

a b s t r a c t The present study investigates the interplay of communication, socialization practices and educational opportunities by reconstructing the discursive practices of the same children in different contexts: family dinner talk and classroom interaction. From a rich corpus of naturally occurring interactions of eleven children before and after school enrollment, two cases are selected for presentation. The microanalytic reconstruction demonstrates how discursive practices are socio-culturally situated and differ in terms of communicative genres, topics and communicative demands, both between families and contexts. When the teacher does not make communicative investments to bridge divergences in teacher-student interactions, children lack the external resources necessary for utilizing discourse as a means of learning, both from a microgenetic and ontogenetic perspective. © 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction: discursive practices in family and classroom discourse

1

E-mail address: [email protected]. Tel.: +49 231 9700512.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.lcsi.2014.02.001 2210-6561/© 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

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In these interview extracts two teachers comment on the performance of Lukas and Patrick, two boys just starting school. Both teachers perceive the two children's learning participation as a person-bound property, not as an outcome of their own interaction with the children. In both cases the perceptions are associated with ascriptions of willingness and competence. Whereas Lukas is seen as bright and clever, Patrick is considered erratic and unreliable. How do the teachers arrive at these assessments? The present article views such assessments as manifestations of an interactively established match or divergence between pupils' discursive practices and teachers' institutional expectations. Thus, the objective is to investigate how, in the course of the interactional histories of teacher–student dyads, interactional patterns and corresponding expectations with regard to communicative demands and competence solidify. Consequently, the intent is to explain (the lack of) school achievement in terms of being included or excluded as a legitimate member of the classroom discourse community. In order to investigate why some pupils do not succeed in fulfilling the communicative demands established by the teacher, the pupils' communicative experiences in their families are also reconstructed. This approach requires careful attention: variance in children's familial discursive practices is not used as an explanans for educational inequality in itself; instead, it is the interactive constitution of a match or divergence which is assumed to be crucial for classroom discourse participation and – in the long run – for school achievement. Why are discursive practices relevant to classroom discourse? How can they provide an explanatory account of educational inequality? Discursive practices are a key competence at school because they enable children to utilize classroom discourse as a means of learning (Cazden, 2001; Michaels, O'Connor, & Resnick, 2008). Participation in classroom discourse not only requires abilities and knowledge with regard to institutional orders of turn-taking and turn design (e.g. McHoul, 1978) but also entails mastering globally organized discourse activities in production and comprehension. Classroom discourse is largely composed of explanations, instructions, descriptions and arguments – discourse activities which serve the purpose of handling topics transcending the immediate here and now and which are an important means of knowledge transmission and construction. Linguistically, these verbal activities require structural abilities (Nguyen, 2012) to organize speech at an above-sentence level (Hausendorf & Quasthoff, 1996). In the present context, the term discourse in the expression ‘discursive practices’ refers to such global structures. Interlocutors do not exchange sentences; instead, their utterances create contexts above and beyond sentences (Quasthoff, 2011). With regard to their sequential structure, the aforementioned discourse activities can be conceptualized as discourse units (Houtkoop & Mazeland, 1985; Wald, 1978), i.e. as chunks of conversation which are clearly marked as different from the surrounding turn-by-turn talk. Their internal sequential realization follows a specific structural pattern for each type of discourse unit. Furthermore, discourse units establish special conditions for the turn-taking mechanism. Generally, the participant responsible for the performance of the discourse unit is assigned the role of “primary speaker” (ibid.) and holds the right to the floor until the closing of the discourse unit is interactively established. The term practice refers to a praxeological – as opposed to a structuralist – understanding of discursive activities. Rather than being seen as a system, language, or, more precisely, “talk in interaction” (Schegloff, 2007) is viewed as a socially and culturally situated practice. From this perspective, discursive practices can be conceptualized as communicative genres, i.e. as procedural solutions for recurring communicative problems (Bergmann & Luckmann, 1995). Genres are used as an orientation framework and serve to organize, routinize and render (more or less) obligatory solutions to recurrent communicative problems. They are also crucial for the constitution of contexts of interaction. By realizing a genre in a particular way, interlocutors can frame the situation at hand as ‘private’ (e.g. by telling a story of personal experience) or as ‘formal’ (by providing an instruction). Thus, the realization of genres is an important means for constituting different contexts, such as family dinner talk and classroom discourse (Heller, 2011). From the perspective of the sociology of knowledge, genres are part of the “communicative budget of a society” (ibid.). As access to the latter is socially stratified, individuals and even groups possess different knowledge of communicative genres. For many years, research in sociolinguistics and ethnography has considered communities in terms of their communicative practices and resources as reflected in the terms ‘speech communities’ (Hymes, 1974), ‘communities of practice’ (Nguyen, 2012; Wenger, 1998) and ‘discourse communities’ (Young, 2008). Discourse communities share and value different repertoires of communicative genres. Conversely, repertoires of genres are constitutive of social milieus. On this basis, discursive practices can be understood as cultural practices (Günthner, 2009). School enrollment is assumed to represent a point in time when the affinity or divergence between familial discursive practices and institutional demands is consequential for learning receptivity and general attitudes towards school. Pioneering studies on such (mis) matches have been conducted by Philips (1972), Gumperz (1981), Heath (1983) and Michaels and Cazden (1986). More recently, Lareau has compared communicative practices in family and school, taking taken up Bourdieu's line of thought. In her ethnography of twelve black and white working and middle class families, she describes internally coherent cultural repertoires of child rearing, which include a certain attitude towards language. According to her observations, argumentation and reasoning are primarily performed by middle-class families, whereas working-class families typically rely on directives and use language primarily as “a conduit for social life” (2003, 146). Teachers promote reasoning and thus favor discursive practices valued by middle-class families. In Bourdieu's terminology, these findings suggest that discursive practices are a constituent part of the linguistic habitus, as elaborated by Hanks (1996, 246): “Analyzed as modes of practice, they [genres, author's note] are among the best examples of habitus as a set of enduring dispositions to perceive the world and to act upon it in certain ways. Genres are neither rigid formal types that can be repeated indefinitely as tokens, nor are they formless, purely momentary conjectures. Rather, they embody just the kinds of schemes for practice that constitute the habitus. And like it, they are unequally distributed among agents in any social world. For access to certain genres involves power and legitimacy and serves as a form of sociocultural capital.” Such enduring dispositions to interpret and act upon the world are interactively acquired in socialization. In general, language socialization can be regarded as “the process whereby children and other novices are socialized through language, part of such socialization being a socialization to use language meaningfully. Language socializes not only through its symbolic content but also

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through its use, i.e. through speaking as a socially and culturally situated activity.” (Ochs, 2000, 408) As these situated activities are primarily realized by genres and as they continue to be central in the secondary socialization context of school, the term discourse socialization (Duff, 2010) is used in this paper. Families, peers, schools and work places are important sites of discourse socialization. For the purpose of this contribution, the focus is on family and school. Based on seminal findings (Aukrust, 2002; Aukrust & Snow, 1998; Pontecorvo & Fasulo, 1997; Snow & Blum-Kulka, 2002) that point to cultural and milieu-specific differences in genre realizations, discourse socialization practices will be examined in terms of the following questions: What repertoires of genres and topics are realized in families and classrooms? Do parents or teachers create contexts in which children are assigned the primary speaker role? Which interactive patterns (Quasthoff & Kern, 2007) emerge in the joint production of discourse units, i.e. what kind of discursive space do parents create for their children to perform in as a primary speaker and what kind of interactive support do they provide? Because interactive patterns go hand in hand with a recurrent distribution of participant roles and ascriptions of competence, they can be viewed as the building blocks of socialization and thus open up a promising approach for investigating discourse socialization practices. A number of studies provide evidence for differences in how children are involved and supported in discourse activities; different interactional patterns of narrating and explaining (Morek, 2012; Quasthoff & Kern, 2007) and reasoning and arguing (Quasthoff & Krah, 2012) have been reconstructed, albeit without a detailed investigation of how these patterns are linked with institutional discursive demands. Schools represent an equally important context of discourse socialization. Characteristic of this institutional context is the fact that the teachers themselves implicitly prioritize certain (institutional) norms of language usage (Alcalá & Martín Rojo, 2010; Lareau, 2003; Michaels & Cazden, 1986; Sarangi & Roberts, 2002). This is also supported by Cekaite's (2012) longitudinal study which aptly demonstrates how an immigrant student's affective stances and the teacher's socializing responsive moves are consequential for the emergence of a problematic student identity which is ‘revised’ from “immature” and “resigned” to “oppositional” and “unwilling to learn”. Hence, only some practices come to be treated as “legitimate language” and are thus converted into cultural (linguistic) capital (Bourdieu, 1991). How this conversion is accomplished in and through interaction has yet to be studied. As a consequence, “cultural match” has mainly been seen as a static phenomenon (Gumperz & Cook-Gumperz, 2006 for a more comprehensive overview). 2. Research questions and empirical basis The present study investigates the co-constructed process of constituting a cultural match or divergence by reconstructing the discursive practices of the same children in two different contexts: family and school. In contrast to sociolinguistic studies which have correlated social class variables and certain forms of language use, this study takes a microanalytic (Hutchby & Wooffitt, 2008) and microethnographic approach (Streeck & Mehus, 2004) in order to investigate the phenomenon of match or divergence as a dynamic and “practical accomplishment” (Garfinkel, 1967, 9). The focus is on how teachers and pupils constitute matches or divergences in situ. The present study is based on a corpus of 25 h of dinner talk (encompassing 72 argumentative sequences) and a corpus of 20 lessons of classroom discourse in German primary schools, each involving the same eleven six-year-old children with Vietnamese, Turkish and German as their first languages (L1). The present article focuses on two children with German L1. To obtain comprehensive insights into discourse socialization practices, microanalytic reconstruction is combined with approaches in the tradition of the ethnography of communication. Repertoires of communicative genres and topics are described in terms of the range of communicative activities during family dinner talk and classroom discourse. These repertoires are compared between families as well as between contexts. By focusing on one particular genre, namely argumentation, practices of argumentation are micro-analytically reconstructed and compared. How do the interlocutors (children and their parents/teachers) establish contexts for argumentation and which interactive patterns emerge? The focus is on the contexts themselves as well as on two children's participation in these contexts. The reconstruction is based on a descriptive tool developed by Hausendorf and Quasthoff (1996) (see Section 3.2) that encompasses three levels of description, namely the jointly accomplished conversational jobs and individually realized devices and forms. By comparing contexts, interactional patterns of teacher-student dyads are reconstructed and triangulated with the teachers' accounts. Are there differences in interactional support which are decisive for determining a match or divergence and how do teachers perceive these differences? Due to the lack of space I will present only four sequences. The selected sequences are, however, prototypical for the interactive patterns which have been reconstructed on the basis of the larger corpus (see above). 3. Results I: discursive practices in the context of family dinner talk 3.1. Repertoires of genres and topics in Lukas' and Patrick's families The following table lists all communicative activities realized during dinner talk in Patrick's and Lukas' families. The activities are ordered according to two analytic perspectives. Range refers to the sequential structure. Locally structured communicative activities are characterized by adjacency pairs, while discourse units or genres are referred to as globally structured activities, as was mentioned above (Table 1). The range of communicative activities is often associated with certain types of topics which can either be bound to or transgress the situation at hand (see also Morek, 2014–in this issue). Both families realize a similar number of communicative activities. If range is taken into account, however, considerable differences can be seen. In Patrick's family the repertoire of globally structured discourse activities is relatively small; it encompasses instructions which are mainly produced by the mother, a great number of competitive dissent formats without

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Table 1 Repertoires of genres and topics.

Types of topics

Range

Communicative activities

Families

Lukas

Patrick

Organizing mealtime activities

X

X

Commenting on the food

X

X

Commenting on table manners

X

X

Commenting on the running TV program Admonishments

X X

Reproaching and blaming

local

Teasing

X

X X

X

Bargaining and negotiating Joking

X X

Quarrels

global

transgressing

bound to the situation

Reprimands and threats

X X

Instructing

X

Making plans

X

Gossiping

X

Conversational narratives

X

X

Developing fictitious scenarios

X

X

Discussing radio broadcasts, movies, books

X

Reasoning and arguing

X

X

Explaining

X

(X)

Disambiguation

X

Language games Total number

X 16 (10)

14 (5)

reasoning2 and rather few instances of argumentation, narration and explanation. Patrick's family primarily realizes communicative activities related to the We-Here-Now, i.e. to the mealtime itself. Such “immediately local topical resources” (Erickson, 1982) are characterized by the possibility of implicitly referring to perceivable aspects of the situation. Typical examples are comments on the meal or television program and admonishments related to table manners: • mother to Patrick and his older sister Friederike: wir machen den fernseher auf jEden fall gleich AUS heute; (in any case we are going to turn the tv off in a minute today;) (03 m-d-f-1) • mother: patrick du hast doch jetz WIRKlich nicht viel gegEssen; (Patrick you really haven't eaten much;) (03 m-d-f-2) In other words, Patrick has very little opportunity to perform as a primary speaker, to structure global discourse units and to establish discourse worlds that are not bound to the immediate here and now. By comparison the repertoire of Lukas' family is characterized by a larger number of genres such as language games, planning activities, narration, developing fictitious scenarios, telling jokes, discussion of radio broadcasts, explanations and reasoning. These genres are often used for dealing with subjects which are not bound to the immediate situation. In this respect, Erickson (1982) distinguishes two other types of topics: “Local resources once removed” refer to joint experiences which are typically shared within reconstructive genres (Bergmann & Luckmann, 1995) such as narration: • mother to Lukas: warst doch mit papa auf_m DACHboden oder nicht? […] und was habt ihr da geMACHT? ich war da ja auch nicht daBEI; (you were in the attic with dad weren't you? […] what did you do there? i wasn't there;) (01 m-d-f-2) • mother: lukas soll ich dir was erZÄHlen? bist du NEUgierig? (−−) ich weiß wer zu deiner EINschulung kommt. (Lukas should I tell you something? are you curious? (…) I know who is coming to your first day of school;) (01 m-d-f-4) The transgression of the situation becomes even more evident with “nonlocal topic resources” (Erickson, 1982). Most often they are realized by communicative genres such as explanations, reasoning, disambiguation and fictionalization. Such discourse activities are typical of classroom discourse and require explicit communication about abstract ideas or subject-specific topics, e.g. 2

In the same way, fictitious scenarios are used as a means of provoking the mother and prompting her to participate in the interaction.

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• Lukas: KIbap?3 ich kenn den NAmen nicht; (kibap? I don't know this word;) (01 m-d-f-2) • Lukas: wieso is (1.3) dE:r himmel länger als die her (−−) die ERde? (why is (1.3) the: sky longer than the her (−−) the earth?) (01 m-d-f-5) Lukas is also engaged in games and disambiguation, i.e. activities in which language is turned into an object of talk, is manipulated and reflected upon (Ely, Gleason, MacGibbon, & Zaretsky, 2001; Goodwin, 2007; Stude, 2014–in this issue). Such activities provide an opportunity to build up metalinguistic skills, which are especially relevant for classroom discourse where language is not only used as a means of learning but also becomes a subject of learning. Finally, the large repertoire of genres can be assumed to help Lukas develop his contextualization competence (Quasthoff, 2011), i.e. the ability to recognize and fulfill different kinds of global sequential obligations and to constitute different kinds of contexts interactively. Contextualization competence is crucial for utilizing classroom discourse as a means of learning, as teachers seldom explicitly contextualize the discourse activity underway and usually rely on the children's contextualization competence. 3.2. Argumentation as a special case of discourse practices Reasoning and argumentation are understood as a communicative genre, i.e. as a procedure designed to solve problems such as disagreements and controversial questions (Brumark, 2008; Miller, 1986). According to Hausendorf and Quasthoff (1996), genres or discourse units are realized by the interactive accomplishment of genre-specific conversational “jobs”. Participants observably orient themselves to these jobs and thus make them accessible for a strictly descriptive reconstruction. Because the jobs are context-insensitive, they can be used as a tertium comparationis for the comparative reconstruction of argumentation practices. Based on the aforementioned corpus, five constitutive jobs for argumentation could be identified (see Heller, 2012). The first, constituting a dissent/problematizing, is the very basis for argumentation. The question is whether and how the participants use the potential of dissent to handle the critical question

3

With kebab understood.

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argumentatively. Therefore, a second job, establishing an obligation to provide reasons, needs to be accomplished. By carrying out the core job of ‘reasoning’, the interlocutors successively fulfill the obligation: they give reasons, justifications, question each other, etc. The fourth job, closing, requires the interlocutors to signal to each other when and how to end their argumentative project. Finally, they have to manage the transition to the subsequent discourse activity. In the following, the argumentation practices in Lukas' and Patrick's families are examined. Special emphasis is given to the second job, the obligation to give reasons, because this job can be dealt with in different ways which are consequential for the distribution of each participant's communicative rights and responsibilities. In excerpt (1)4 an obligation is established by the child. Subsequent to a discussion about the neighbors who just returned from their holidays in Croatia, Lukas produces an implicit complaint that this year the family will not go on vacation (due to moving). (1) Holidays in Croatia; M: mother, A: Alex (brother, 11 y.), L: Lukas (6 y.) F: father Formulating a counterfactual conditional, Lukas delineates an alternative to the status quo (l. 8–9) which he in fact would prefer (expressed through the focus adverb “too”). This implicit accusation requires the parents to make an apology or give a justification. However, this unilateral obligation as projected by Lukas is not precisely dealt with. The mother offers a strong dissent with her answer “certainly not”. The older brother Alex laughs at this statement, thus establishing an ironic and non-serious mode of interaction (Günthner, 2000). At this possible point of closure the mother maintains the dissent5 by asking: “what would I do in Croatia”, ratifying Lukas' quaestio and at the same time returning the obligation to him. Lukas himself immediately fulfills the sequential obligation by justifying his counterfactual proposal (l. 16). By metacommunicatively rejecting Alex' contradiction (l. 18–20), the mother again ratifies the legitimacy of Lukas' accusation and defines him as a participant to be taken seriously, i.e. as a full member of the interaction. At the same time, she prevents the formation of imbalanced coalitions among the dinner-table participants. In other words, the mother modifies the unilateral into a reciprocal obligation. In the following discussion, the parents also participate in the argument, but not as apologists. Instead, they hold Lukas responsible for and engage him in the process of jointly explicating reasons for not going on vacation. This enlarges Lukas' response duties as well as his response options: he is expected to argue on an equal footing with his parents. Such interactive procedures occur systematically and trans-situationally in the argumentation of Lukas' family. They thus form an interactional pattern which, according to Hausendorf & Quasthoff, 1996; see also (Domenech & Krah, 2014–in this issue; Quasthoff & Kern, 2007), can be termed as demanding and supporting. Besides placing demands on Lukas – by turning the unilateral obligation into a reciprocal one – the parents also provide interactional support when Lukas loses sight of his own line of thought (l. 27) by returning to the question at hand (l. 32) and thereby providing structural support for the closing. The argumentation in Patrick's family typically follows a very different interactional pattern. The following extract stems from the end of a meal which was eaten while watching TV. (2) Fried eggs; P: Patrick (6 y.), M: mother, F: Frederike (sister, 8 y.)

4 5

The following excerpts are transcribed according to GAT 2 (Selting et al., 2009). For the transcription conventions, see the journal's appendix. The modal particle denn and the modal verb soll indicate her critical stance towards Lukas' proposal.

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By denying Patrick's polar question (l. 1), the mother constitutes a dissent. Although she justifies her refusal (l. 3), she does not put the decision about tomorrow's meal up for negotiation. Patrick reinforces the denial and starts out to repair a potential misunderstanding (his wish for fried eggs instead of eggs in general), but then stops (l. 5/6). At this point, a request for clarification or interactional support to continue or repair the utterance would be expected. The mother, however, makes use of the option to accord more relevance to the TV program (break in l. 7). Thus, the topic brought up by Lukas is neither explicitly ratified nor suspended. Finally, the older sister Friederike supports the mother's position (l. 8). Again, the mother allows for a long break (l. 9), thus indicating that the topic does not attract her attention. With her subsequent utterance “we shouldn't eat so many eggs you know”, she does not refer back to Friederike's contribution but formulates a rule without any explication or justification. Such general regulations invoke an anonymous authority that cannot be questioned further. Therefore, Patrick re-establishes the obligation by asking for a reason (l. 12). Instead of explicating the regulation or returning the obligation to Patrick (e.g. ‘but what do you think, what would happen if you ate eggs every day?’), the mother again makes an assertion by formulating a commonplace statement (l. 14). She thus ignores the obligation and suspends the topic as a subject for discussion. This pragmatic device is also realized in her final statement (l. 17): by using the generic pronoun “one” and the modal verb “needs” she presents her position as a generally accepted regulation which is not open to discussion. Patrick then gives up further questioning. A long break marks the transition to the next activity, in this case, the complete shift of attention to the TV program. This type of interactional pattern, ignoring and decreeing, is characterized by an enactment of communicative rights and obligations which in the framework of family psychology would be described as authoritarian (cf. Yotyodying & Wild, 2014–in this issue): the mother claims the right to decide by decree and complementarily defines the children as recipients of orders (for a variant of this pattern see Domenech & Krah, 2014–in this issue). In some cases she falls back on anonymous and abstract authorities; in other cases she invokes her own authority (e.g. “because I said so”). This attempt to authorize and empower herself by referring to her own words constitutes a status-based authority (as opposed to a source-based, see Enfield, 2011) which is not backed up by knowledge demonstrations or justifications and hence merely asserted instead of being ratified and recognized. Thus, the mother deprives Patrick of the right and opportunity to reason about controversial questions. Not ratifying the child in the role of the discussant allows her to move to another (discourse) activity without further ado. Thus, discourse activities are rarely explicitly closed. Taken as whole, Patrick is not only discouraged from reasoning but also lacks opportunities to receptively and productively handle openings and closings of globally structured discourse activities. 3.3. Case-related comparison A comparison of Lukas' and Patrick's discursive practices demonstrates differences with regard to the repertoires of communicative genres, opportunities for establishing discourse worlds transgressing the here and now, and argumentation practices which are deeply embedded in everyday routines. The functionality of those practices can be described with regard to two different analytic perspectives, the microgenetic and the ontogenetic (Quasthoff, 2012). Typically, the interlocutors' activities are oriented towards accomplishing actual interactions in situated contexts (from an analytical point of view: the microgenetic perspective). They are not aware of the long-term effects their interactions could have on the acquisition of discourse competence (ontogenetic perspective). In this sense, the acquisition of competence – in terms of contextualization, textualization and marking (cf. Domenech & Krah, 2014–in this issue; Morek, 2014–in this issue; Quasthoff, 2011) – emerges as a side effect which is ignored by the interlocutors (cf. Quasthoff, 2012). From the microgenetic perspective both ensembles of discursive practices can be seen as functional. The efforts of Lukas' mother are targeted at the delicate balance of communicative rights and responsibilities; thus, ‘family’ is constituted as a group of interlocutors who share experiences and knowledge by being assigned the same communicative rights and responsibilities. Even the younger, less experienced participants are included as legitimate members. The less extensive repertoire in Patrick's family and the disregarding and decreeing pattern are functional as they take pressure off the single mother, help her arrive at clear decisions and reaffirm her status which is constantly questioned by the children (and the child welfare service), but which is essential for maintaining the family. However, from an ontogenetic perspective, the ensembles of discursive practices are not equally functional. The interactive pattern observed in Lukas' family is highly effective for the acquisition of discourse competence. First, the global structure of the argumentation practices – especially the introductory and closing jobs – are mutually negotiated and explicitly marked, and thus made publicly observable for Lukas. Second, by modifying the unilateral obligation into a reciprocal one, the parents make discourse norms intelligible. Moreover, they establish Lukas as a legitimate participant, who is assigned the same rights but at the same time held responsible for justifying his positions. Thus, he is encouraged to develop the ability to explicate assertions and to create coherency with explicit verbal means. The use of past subjunctives for expressing a counterfactual dependency “if we had … then we would be now” demonstrates that Lukas has already acquired this ability to a considerable degree. 4. Results II: discursive practices in the context of classroom discourse 4.1. Repertoires of genres and topics in classroom discourse Most of the genres realized in classroom discourse are designed to explicitly transmit and construct knowledge. In the two classrooms of the present study this applies to lectures, explanations, justifications, argumentations, instructions and

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definitions of concepts. These are precisely the genres Lukas is already familiar with. In contrast, Patrick's repertoire of genres mainly encompasses locally structured discourse practices. Although he is used to being lectured by his mother, he is seldom asked to explain or justify himself. His mother's explanations and lectures are further characterized by assertions rather than by explications of reasons and causes, and they are usually designed to close the sequence. Such discursive practices stand in notable contrast to the demands typical of classroom discourse. In the school context, pupils are expected to demonstrate their knowledge by explicating reasons and arguments (Cazden, 2001; Heller, 2012; Morek, 2012). This requires the mastery of explicit verbal means, means that Lukas and Patrick have at their disposal to different degrees. 4.2. Reasoning and arguing in classroom discourse The following section examines Lukas' and Patrick's participation in classroom discourse, especially in argumentative sequences. Preceding the next sequence is a discussion about an Advent wreath6 and about how many candles should be lit on this particular day. The teacher starts to light an additional candle which belongs to Umi, a hand puppet used in the elementary reading program. (3) How many candles, T: Teacher, Lu: Lukas, K4–K5: other pupils

Lukas formulates a contradiction, marked by the adversative connective “but”, thereby displaying an epistemically autonomous position and establishing an obligation to give reasons why another candle should be lit (l. 98). The teacher indeed fulfills the obligation with a rebuttal (l. 99–104, 108), at the same time ratifying Lukas' entitlement to question her action. Furthermore, Lukas demonstrates his ability to fulfill sequential obligations established by others. When another pupil signals the need for further explanation (l. 106/109), Lukas – in place of the teacher – explicates the Advent ritual (l. 112). In overlap with Lukas, the teacher confirms his explanation (l. 113), whereupon Lukas produces an elaboration which is again affirmatively reformulated by the teacher. It is noticeable that the contributions are produced with slight overlap or latchings so that the explanation is accomplished collaboratively with Lukas performing as a co-teacher. In summary, although Lukas initially questioned the teacher's action, he fulfills her expectations. This match triggers a reinforcing mechanism: the attribution of relevance to Lukas' turns encourages him to further elaborate his ideas. This is again followed by positive evaluations. Thus, Lukas is established and ratified as a competent participant in the classroom discourse community. Patrick and his teacher typically do not accomplish such a match. The following sequence stems from a morning circle. When one child reports having seen a horror movie at the weekend the teacher questions this statement. Thus, she initiates an argumentation which is embedded in the activity of narrating.

6

The Advent wreath is a Christian tradition and has four candles. An additional candle is lit on each of the four Sundays of Advent.

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(4) Horror movie (T: Teacher, P: Patrick, K1-4: other pupils)

Like his classmates, Patrick interprets the teacher's objection as an invitation to an argumentation (l. 11). The teacher, however, initiates a repair sequence focusing on the form of Patrick's utterance — a quasi-hidden language exercise which Patrick does not recognize. With an open class repair initiator “hm?” (Drew, 1997), the teacher conveys that she has not heard the utterance (l. 13), thus making manifest an acoustic problem of understanding (Macbeth, 2004; Selting, 1987). By asking clarification questions which suggest possible completions of the problematic utterance (candidate understandings) (l. 25/29), she then pretends a lack of understanding and thereby redefines the misunderstanding as a problem of semantic reference. Her questions are aimed at prompting Patrick to produce an explicit and syntactically complete sentence. However, this alienated repair (Heller, 2012) does not locate a trouble source (Schegloff, Jefferson, & Sacks, 1977) but instead creates trouble. The increasing number of hedges and continuers (l. 15: “uh”, “or so”, l. 23: “somehow”, “or so”) document Patrick's growing uncertainty and the fact that he does not recognize the teacher's implicit and hidden expectation with regard to the form of his previous utterance. Although the teacher provides cues (“twelve o'clock”, “twelve persons?”), Patrick is not able to locate the problem domain. Only after

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several attempts to repair the pretended misunderstanding does one of Patrick's classmates formulate the complete utterance “from twelve years on”. According to Jefferson (1987), this kind of repair can be termed “exposed”: the ongoing argumentative activity is disrupted and the repair is foregrounded. Jefferson points out that exposed repairs, as opposed to embedded ones, often fulfill additional tasks “which specifically address lapses in competence and/or conduct” (ibid., 88; emphasis added). In this case, Patrick lacks the competence – and from the teacher's perspective also the willingness (see Section 1) – to fulfill expectations with regard to the form of utterances (explicitness, complete syntactical structure), a domain which the teacher prioritizes over content and function in this case. It is notable that Patrick takes up the argumentation at a sequentially adequate position, namely after the closing of the repair sequence (l. 54). In formulating the conditions for watching a horror movie, he again displays his orientation towards the content of the discussion. In the following exchange, his contribution is neither taken up thematically nor given any relevance. In other words, the teacher and Patrick define the context differently. Whereas Patrick assumes he is engaged in an argumentation about horror movies, the teacher conducts a ‘language exercise’. Patrick however is not able to fulfill his part in this exercise because he does not contextualize, i.e. recognize the implicitly projected discursive demand. Note that in Patrick's family neither language games nor other metalinguistic activities were observed. 5. Lukas and Patrick in family and classroom discourse: divergence or match between contexts? After having compared the discursive practices in terms of their contextual embeddedness, the present section focuses on a case-related comparison. The analysis of Patrick's and Lukas' interactions with their teachers provides insights into the microgenetic constitution of a match or divergence. Of course, the instances of match or divergence presented here do not provide a sufficient empirical basis for explaining the relation between the utilization of classroom discourse as a means of learning on the one hand and school achievement on the other. Therefore, additional observations (for more extensive analyses see Heller, 2012) are included so that dyad-specific interactional patterns can be reconstructed over the course of the interactional histories. In the context of classroom discourse, Lukas not only fulfills the global sequential obligations established by the teacher but also demonstrates his knowledge without being prompted and, most notable, initiates argumentations and explanations himself. Furthermore, he masters devices to obtain individualized support. The teacher systematically takes up his contributions positively, attributes competence to him, encourages elaborations and appreciates his performance publicly. Thus, the interactional demanding and supporting pattern Lukas experienced in his family is continued in classroom discourse. In other words, his discursive practices are confirmed so that he most likely experiences the transition from home to school pretty much as a continuum. His familial discourse socialization with a large number of explicitly verbalized communication and manifold contextualization experiences equips him with resources that ‘fit’ his teacher's expectations. Lukas and his teacher seem to accomplish a match easily; in fact, the match seems to arise ‘without effort’. In other words, the teacher does not have to invest additional communicative work since Lukas' contributions ‘fit’ into the ongoing discourse or even add to the thematic progression. For Patrick, the relation between home and school can be characterized by discontinuity. Compared to Lukas, Patrick has very little contextualization experience and explicit verbal means at his disposal. He is even less used to talking or thinking about language as such. This makes it difficult for him to understand what the teacher hints at and to contextualize the embedded language exercise. As a result, he does not manage to fulfill the teacher's communicative demands. The divergence is consequential for the teacher's recipient design and evaluation. In general, Patrick's turns are neither functionally integrated into the ongoing discourse nor positively received. In this teacher–student dyad, a communicative match is not accomplished: The teacher refrains from providing communicative support that would enable Patrick to fulfill her communicative demands and to be involved in the classroom discourse sustainably. The teacher perceives the divergence as a lack of willingness or reluctance. As a consequence of the presumed lack of cooperation, she does not make communicative investments into shared understanding. Thus, Patrick is not established as a competent and legitimate member of the classroom discourse community. Correspondingly, it could be observed that he is increasingly oriented towards other activities and reframed educational activities (e.g. playing ‘air guitar’ instead of accompanying a Christmas song with body movements). The divergence also becomes manifest in the high number of admonitions: more than half of the teacher-initiated interactions with Patrick are of a disciplinary nature. The communicational divergence is further enhanced by the fact that in her account of Patrick's discourse participation, the teacher does not reflect on the interactive mechanisms and her own part in constituting a divergence. Instead, she refers to Patrick's individual characteristics: he takes “things at face value”, “he loses interest in things much too fast”, “he can't concentrate”. His lack of experience in discursive practices addressing the formal aspects of language remains unrecognized: “but I don't have the feeling that he doesn't understand”. Her statement that “Patrick for example is difficult” can be interpreted as an indication of her solidifying negative expectations. By referring to other pupils' practices (“actually follow along quite well”, “scrutinize things”) as a normative baseline, the teacher presents Patrick's performance as discrepant. 6. Conclusions This paper has investigated the interplay of discourse socialization practices and educational opportunities by comparing two children's discursive practices at home and school. Methodologically, the approach was not aimed at identifying a static relationship between the two contexts, but at reconstructing how teachers and students handle divergent discursive practices in

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situ, in other words, how a match or divergence is constituted in interaction. The comparison of the two cases could be misread as suggesting a linear-causal relationship between familial discourse socialization practices on the one hand and the mastering of institutional communicative demands on the other. In fact, an analysis of the whole corpus of eleven children (Heller, 2012) demonstrates that in some cases teachers establish a match by making communicative investments and enabling the children to fulfill their communicative demands. In other cases, teachers refrain from such investments as they do not recognize that pupils contextualize discourse activities divergent from their own understanding. Moreover, they interpret this as a lack of co-operation or even reluctance. Taken together, these results suggest that the communicative support which secures the constitution of a shared understanding and the pupils' involvement in classroom discourse is crucial for establishing a match. Communicative investments fundamentally ensure that the child perceives him-/herself as a legitimate and competent member of the classroom discourse community. This sense of participation in an institutional practice forms the foundation for utilizing the interactions with the teacher as an “external resource” for acquiring both knowledge and discourse competences (see Quasthoff, 2011). If this sense of participation and membership is not established, pupils withdraw from participation in classroom discourse — which is interpreted as a refusal to perform, a lack of interest or reluctance: “he is disruptive”, “he doesn't work properly”. It would appear legitimate, therefore, to assume that the teachers' expectations have ‘real consequences’ as they provide differential support and thus play their part in educational achievement from an ontogenetic perspective. In conclusion, an ethnographic and microanalytic approach makes it possible to define interaction as the locus of match or divergence. Consequently, the notion of match or divergence of mutual expectations needs to be re-conceptualized as the dynamic process in which a match or divergence is achieved in interaction, depending largely on the teachers' communicative investments. Thus, a match cannot be defined as a given identity of practices, but as a processual understanding of what is ‘common’ or ‘shared’ (Schegloff, 1992, 1298), i.e. as the sequential and microgenetic process of incorporating or rejecting pupils' discursive practices. 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