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Patterns of Participation in Classroom Interaction: Girls’ and Boys’ Non-compliance in a Greek High School
Patterns of Participation in Classroom Interaction: Girls’ and Boys’ Non-compliance in a Greek High School Theodossia-Soula Pavlidou Department of Linguistics, School of Philology, Faculty of Philosophy, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, GR-54124 Thessaloniki, Greece
INTRODUCTION The present paper is part of a larger project on native classroom interaction in which I have been involved, trying to illuminate two questions (cf. Pavlidou, 1999a, 1999b): (a) Are students “active” or “passive” when interacting with the teacher? (b) Are there differences in the ways girls and boys interact with the teacher and participate in class? With respect to the first question, the focus has been on verbal initiative on the students’ part: do students just conform with what the teacher wants, or do they take verbal initiative, i.e., do they do (verbally) things on their own, e.g., ask for the floor, ask a question, make an unsolicited comment, disagree with the teacher, reply to a question that is addressed to the class as a whole, etc. The second question concerns quantitative and qualitative differences in the behavior of girls and boys in classroom, as have been reported by, e.g., Altani (1992), Holmes (1995), Swann (1992) and others: do girls talk less in class than boys, do they take less initiative, are they more polite, etc. and what do such differences imply? A major perspective in my analysis of classroom interaction has been that of politeness as presented in the Brown and Levinson (1987) theoretical framework. Accordingly, special attention was paid to verbal initiative on the students’ part that would potentially threaten the teacher’s face (cf. Pavlidou, 2000, 2001). In
Direct all correspondence to: Theoossia-Soula Pavlidou, Department of Linguistics, School of Philology, Faculty of Philosophy, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, GR-54124 Thessaloniki, Greece. E-mail: [email protected] Linguistics and Education 14(1): 123–141. Copyright © 2003 Elsevier Science Inc.
All rights of reproduction in any form reserved. ISSN: 0898-5898
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this light, two, relatively homogeneous, groups of turns could be distinguished in the students’ behavior: (1) turns that potentially threaten the teacher’s negative face, like bids for the floor, requests for information or clarification (mainly yes/no or wh-questions on the content of the lesson, or the current topic of discussion, and on the management of turn-taking, of classroom affairs), etc. I called this group of turns verbal initiative of the directive type, (2) turns that potentially threaten the teacher’s positive face, like protesting, complaining, disagreeing with the teacher, correcting the teacher and so on; I named this group of turns verbal initiative of the non-compliant type. The purpose of this paper is to look more closely at the second type of verbal initiative, i.e., non-compliance, and discuss some differences between girls and boys, which—though not impressive on a quantitative level—may be cumulatively indicative of different discursive paradigms. My analysis is based on eight fully transcribed hours from the last two grades of obligatory education,1 drawn from audio-recordings of about 50 hours in two high schools in provinces of Northern Greece, which two teachers made in their own classes and in the classes of their colleagues.2 “NON-COMPLIANCE” As already mentioned above, the focus of the present paper is on verbal initiative of the non-compliant type that comprises protests, complains, disagreements, disapprovals, corrections, etc.—all directed toward what the teacher is saying or doing. Contrary to the verbal initiative of the directive type, the acts subsumed under this label do not fall into a single class in speech act theoretical terms. But they do have two features in common: first, they are all reactions to a preceding utterance by the teacher; second, they are all negative reactions to what the teacher just did or said, and in this sense they entail some kind of opposition on the students’ side towards the teacher. The terms “non-compliant” (applying to turns, acts, behavior, etc.) and “non-compliance” (as a type of behavior) are meant to capture exactly these two features. This is a purely definitional matter, carrying no implications of classroom norms, rules, etc. with which students are expected to conform in classroom.3 Other terms, commonly employed in the literature, are “disagreement” or “argument,” or even “conflict” and “dispute”: they, too, can be said to express a negative reaction or opposition. But they are not comprehensive enough, since they could not adequately describe other forms of negative reactions in the classroom, like for example a general protest by a group of students in the form of an interjection, a complaint regarding something that the teacher
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has suggested, or finally the expression of disapproval or disappointment, as in the following example: Example 1 (Expressing disapproval of the teacher’s management of classroom matters).
In Example 1, three different students express, in three different ways, their disapproval of the teacher’s handling of calling on somebody to do an assignment: boy5 uses just an interjection, girl5 simply states a fact, boy4 asks a rhetorical question. Although all of these instances entail an opposition to the teacher’s not calling on anybody else, I believe that terms like “argument,” “conflict,” “dispute” would be too strong, if only because such terms normally imply longer exchanges between teacher and students. On the other hand, neither would “disagreement” provide a real alternative. While this term is easier to stretch or bend in order to render it co-extensive with “non-compliance,” it is still all too often associated with exclusively the truth of propositions. For example, for Rees-Miller (2000, p. 1088) a speaker “disagrees when s/he considers untrue some proposition P uttered or presumed to be espoused by an Addressee A and reacts with an utterance the propositional content or implicature of which is Not P.” Needless to say that this would not cover the cases in Example 1, opposition to value-judgements of the teacher, certain corrections to the teacher, etc. Other definitions of “disagreement,” though not as restrictive with respect to the scope of disagreement, are less encompassing in different respects. For example, Kakava (1993, p. 408) defines “disagreement” to mean “an
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oppositional stance taken (verbal or non-verbal) to an antecedent position verbal (or non-verbal) position.” This definition, however, though broader in its scope, misses the possibility of disagreement not with an explicit position, but with what this position may presuppose, as in the following example: Example 2 (Disagreeing with a teacher’s presupposition regarding the content of the lesson).
In turn 2 of Example 2, boy3 does not disagree with what the teacher said in turn 1, but with what she takes for granted in this turn, namely that the way the last rapsody in Iliad ends is a proper one. In sum, then, I opt for “non-compliance” in lack of a sufficiently comprehensive term among the ones usually found in the literature. I use the term “non-compliant” to cover all those turns by the students in which any sort of opposition, as a reaction to what the teacher is saying or doing, is expressed, e.g., protesting, complaining, disagreeing with the teacher, correcting the teacher, etc. I also talk of “non-compliant sequences,” when non-compliance extends over more than one students’ turns in their interaction with the teacher. It should be reminded at this point that non-compliance is understood as a type of verbal initiative, and as such it precludes any kind of non-verbal behavior that could be understood as “opposition to the teacher,” like slamming the door, making faces, talking to a fellow student, etc.4 NON-COMPLIANCE IN THE CONTEXT OF THE STUDENTS’ OTHER (VERBAL) BEHAVIOR Before going into the differences between girls’ and boys’ non-compliance, I will sketch briefly how non-compliance features quantitatively against the background of the students’ other behavior in class. The basic unit of analysis is the students’ turns.5 (1) Students, when interacting with the teacher in class, are rather “passive” in general. As Table 1 shows, students’ turns to teacher in class are more frequently without initiative rather than with initiative, in the sense described above:
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Table 1.
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Students’ Turns in Class
To teacher without initiative To teacher with initiative To other students Other
41.5% (725) 34.4% (602) 2.5% (43) 21.6% (379)
Total
100% (1749)
“Other” is a waste-basket category here, covering those students’ turns whose content or addressee could not be sufficiently specified, turns to the teacher which could not be clearly categorized as either initiative or not, etc. (see Pavlidou, 1999a). (2) As can be seen from Table 2, initiative turns of the students to the teacher are more frequently of the directive type, i.e., bids for the floor, requests for information or clarification—mainly yes/no or wh-questions on the content of the lesson, or the current topic of discussion, and on the management of turn-taking, of classroom affairs, etc. The second largest part of initiative turns is “other,” a very heterogeneous category which comprises different kinds of initiative with very low frequency, e.g., joking, comments not elicited by what the teacher said, expression of personal opinion, etc. Non-compliant turns, e.g., protesting or complaining, disagreeing with the teacher, correcting the teacher and so on, make up the third sizable group of initiative turns. Table 2. Students’ Initiative Turns to Teacher Directive Non-compliant Other Unclear
46.2% (278) 21.6% (130) 29.0% (174) 3.3% (20)
Total
100% (602)
(3) Turning now to what girls and boys do in class, we see (Table 3) that girls participate in classroom interaction less frequently than boys, although on the whole there are more girls than boys in class. In other words, the majority of the students’ turns in class comes from boys. Table 3. Girls’ turns Boys’ turns Unspecified Total
Girls’ and Boys’ Turns in Class 38.3% (669) 50.2% (878) 11.5% (202) 100% (1749)
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The value “unspecified” for the variable sex indicates either that the turn came from a group of students or that the speaker’s sex was unclear. (4) Moreover, the majority of initiative turns to teacher in class comes from boys. In other words, girls seem to be more “passive” than boys in their interaction with the teacher, as shown in Table 4. Table 4. Girls’ and Boys’ Types of Turns Without initiative Girls’ turns Boys’ turns Column total
47.2% (333) 52.8% (372)
With initiative 39.1% (216) 60.9% (337)
100% (705)
100% (553)
Rest
Row total
41.5% (120) 58.5% (169)
43.2% (669) 56.8% (878)
99.9% (289)
100% (1547)
N = 1,547 is the total number of turns in class coming from either girls or boys. X = 8.84, df = 2, p < .025. 2
(5) Girls’ and boys’ turns to teacher do not differ significantly as to the kind of initiative they represent (cf. Table 5). Table 5. Girls’ and Boys’ Type of Initiative Turns to Teacher Directive
Non-compliant
Other
Unclear
Row total
Girls’ turns Boys’ turns
46.8% (101) 50.1% (169)
24.5% (53) 19.9% (67)
25.5% (55) 26.1% (88)
3.2% (7) 3.9% (13)
100% (216) 100% (337)
Column total
(270)
(120)
(143)
(20)
(553)
N = 553 is the total number of girls’/boys’ initiative turns to teacher. X2 = 2.04, df = 3, p < .75.
In other words, neither boys nor girls can be clearly associated with one type of initiative turns (directive, non-compliant, etc.). There is, however, a noteworthy convergence in the numbers of non-compliant turns coming from boys and girls, since the girls’ turns on the whole are fewer, and so are girls’ initiative turns. That is, of each sex, girls take more non-compliant turns than boys relatively to their own initiative behavior. SOME DIFFERENCES OBSERVED IN THE NON-COMPLIANCE OF GIRLS AND BOYS Girls and boys may not differ significantly as to the type of initiative turns they take in class, but they do differ as to the kind of directivity and non-compliance their initiative turns express. In this section, I will point at some differences in the non-compliance that girls and boys exhibit towards their teachers (on the differences in the directive turns of girls and boys, see Pavlidou, 2000, 2001). Some of these differences are representable in numbers, others are either too small on
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a quantitative level or have to do with phenomena which are too complex to be coded in a straightforward manner. Orientation of Non-compliance I will first distinguish between two kinds of non-compliance with respect to the orientation of the students’ opposition: non-compliance concerning the content of the lesson (or the topic of current discussion) and non-compliance having to do with the management of classroom matters, regulation of turn-taking, etc. (cf. also Pavlidou, 2000, 2001). In Example 1, all three instances of non-compliant turns apply to the regulation of being called upon by the teacher to do an assignment on the board: they all express a disapproval of the teacher’s management of such matters. In contrast, in Example 2, the boy’s non-compliance in turn 2 has to do with the content of the lesson: he disagrees on something that the teacher seems to take for granted, and claims that the last rapsody of the Iliad does not end properly. As can be seen from Table 6, boys are more frequently non-compliant with respect to the content of the lesson (or topic of current discussion), while the girls’ non-compliance is more focused on the management of classroom matters, regulation of turn-taking, etc. Table 6. Orientation in the Girls’ and Boys’ Non-compliant Turns Content
Management, etc.
Unclear
Row total
Girls’ turns Boys’ turns
30.2% (16) 58.2% (39)
67.9% (36) 37.3% (25)
1.9% (1) 4.5% (3)
100% (53) 100% (67)
Column total
(55)
(61)
(4)
100% (120)
N = 120 is the total number of girls’ or boys’ non-compliant turns to teacher. X = 10.5, df = 2, p < .01. 2
In other words, with respect to the focus of non-compliance, there seem to be different preferences among the students: the girls’ non-compliance is oriented more strongly towards the management of classroom matters, regulation of turn-taking, etc. while boys are more frequently non-compliant with regard to the content of the lesson (or topic of current discussion). Sustenance of Non-compliance Non-compliance in classroom can be of very short length, e.g., an exclamation of disapproval, or expand over several turns by the same student in his/her interaction with the teacher. In what follows, I distinguish between one-shot non-compliance, i.e., non-compliance restricted to one turn, and sustained non-compliance, that
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is non-compliance extending over three or more turns by the same student. In my data, I encountered 42 cases of one-shot non-compliance, 15 instances of two-turn non-compliance by the same student, and another 15 instances of sustained non-compliance. In other words, for the greatest part the students’ noncompliant turns in class are one-shot, as in the following example: Example 3 (One-shot non-compliance).
In this example, in line 3, we have a case of one-shot non-compliance coming from a group of students (which, as seen in line 4, the teacher fully ignores). On the motivational level, one-shot non-compliance presumably occurs because the students may not want very strongly something different from the teacher or because they know that it would be futile to insist. On the interactional level, however, non-compliance of this kind may be the outcome of the teacher’s discouraging reaction: s/he may react very rigorously to the first non-compliant turn on the students’ part, so that any further discussion is cut down; or s/he may simply just ignore the students and go on with what s/he had in mind, as in the example above. But there are also instances (30), where non-compliance runs over two and more turns, either because of collective participation or because of individual persistence, or both, as in the following example:6
PATTERNS OF PARTICIPATION IN CLASSROOM INTERACTION
Example 4 (Sustained non-compliance).
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In the example above, boy3 brings up the opinion that Achilles’ cruelty was justified since it all happened in a war context (line 2) and leads a sustained argument against the teacher’s position that Achilles had been enormously cruel. Besides the teacher and boy3, other students participate in the argument: girl3 in line 5, boy1 in line 7, on the teacher’s side (probably also boy? in line 17); girl1 in line 15 on boy3’s side. But the main reason for the sustained non-compliance in the example above is that boy3 himself keeps bringing up arguments against the teacher’s position (lines 9, 11, 13, 20), which the teacher tries to refute. It is only after a last effort to restate her position (lines 25–27 with omitted material) that she finally breaks up the discussion by giving the floor to another student who had been reading before the argument with boy3 started. In other words, the boys’ persistence in attacking the teacher’s position goes hand in hand with the teacher’s consent to allow him for more space in the discussion. In principle, the teacher could have made use of her institutional power in an earlier stage of the argument and end up the discussion, as she does in line 27. In my data, sustained non-compliance seems to be more at home with boys than with girls; in other words, boys appear to be more persistent in their non-compliant behavior. For one, all really long non-compliant sequences, i.e., involving four and more non-compliant turns by the same individual, come from boys. Moreover, in two teaching hours, it is boys alone that bring up all sustained non-compliance. Finally, boys take up more non-compliant turns in collective non-compliant sequences running over several turns, i.e., in sequences in which more than one students express non-compliance to the teacher. It is also interesting to note that boys seem to be more persistent also when taking directive turns (Pavlidou, 2000, 2001).7 Overt Negotiation of Relationships Students can negotiate their relationship to the teacher in a variety of manners, for example, via topic discussion in which the student covertly challenges the teacher as a knowledge authority, by suggestions as to what should be done in class as in Example 5, line 4, etc. But there are a few notable instances in my data, where students overtly negotiate their position in the given constellation of roles, by reciprocating the interactional move that the teacher just took; it is like throwing back the ball to the teacher on an interactional level. Example 5 illustrates such a case.
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Example 5 (Throwing back the ball to the teacher).
After her claim in line 1, girl3 gets no response from the teacher; her utterance is followed by a 10 seconds’ pause. It is after this pause that the teacher utters a threatening “Good,” which is not addressed to a particular student, but presumably to the whole class. Girl3, without being discouraged by all this, initiates a new sequence in line 4 and makes a suggestion as to what they should do in class; this initiative turn, although it entails girl3’s appreciation of the assignment (and, thus, a positive attitude to the teacher), is actually rather threatening to the teacher’s face, since the suggestion concerns things that the teacher is entitled to decide alone. Indeed, the teacher’s reaction in lines 5–6 indicates that the teacher herself is not very appreciative of the girl’s suggestion: the teacher’s ironic (even
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sarcastic) remarks imply a criticism of girl3’s suggestion, since what girl3 proposes is not feasible due to lack of time. But girl3, instead of being intimidated by the teacher’s irony (and implicit criticism), throws back the ball to the teacher in line 7, i.e., the criticism, claiming that it is in the teacher’s power to decide such things—which of course is absolutely correct. She, thus, not only treads grounds that are reserved for the teacher, as she already did in line 4, but also reprimands the teacher for not taking into account the kind of institutional power that the teacher is endowed with. Notice that she does this in a quite direct way (as opposed to the off-record strategy that the teacher uses in the preceding turn). Notice also that she juxtaposes in this turn (line 7) the “we” with the “you,” thus taking the teacher away from where she (girl3) had originally placed her (“we” in line 4) and where the teacher herself remained (“we” in lines 5–6), and verbalizing the distance and the difference in roles between the teacher and the students. I believe that the fact that the teacher resigns from a further discussion (the repetition of the interjection “ ” indicates in Greek that there is nothing else that the teacher can say) and calls on another student shows that the round goes one up for girl3. In my data, I have spotted six such instances of “throwing back the ball to the teacher” (not necessarily restricted to the management level), five of which came from girls. In other words, it is the girls who attempt such a reciprocation of interactional moves, and thus negotiate in an overt manner their relationship to the teacher. Moreover, it is only girls that speak up for the whole group or take another student’s part as in Example 6.
Example 6 (Expressing solidarity to fellow student).
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In the example above, the teacher uses an impersonalized rhetorical question in line 2, addressed to the whole class, but her purpose is clearly to reprimand the boy because of his choice of words (presumably, she would rather have the verb “ ” than “ ” in this context; but notice that she does not even correct the student). Anna’s negative reaction in line 4 is quite strong: she first uses a syntactic structure (adversative interjection + VERB + and + OBJECT/PREDICATE) which is typical for rebuttals in Greek, followed by a (incomplete) rhetorical question, implying that it is natural for students to make errors when expressing themselves. In other words, she takes implicitly the boy’s part and shows solidarity with her fellow students (cf. the use of the first person plural in the verb: “we make expression mistakes”). At the same time, however, she refuses to accept the teacher’s implicit claim that the students do not have adequate knowledge of the language, conveying that expression errors are not such a serious problem. This, in turn, is rejected by the teacher, as lines 4–6 show (note the adversative structure and the rhetorical question in line 4). Common in the cases discussed above is the fact that the girls challenge the teacher’s role and thus overtly negotiate their relationship to the teacher.8 A similar case is demonstrated in Example 7, which is discussed as an instance of provoked non-compliance. Reasons for Non-compliance While there may be all sorts of reasons for the students’ non-compliant behavior, from an interactional point of view it is of interest to examine to what extent the students’ non-compliance is triggered or provoked by the teacher. This is the case in my data, when the teacher accuses a student or the whole class of something, e.g., that they have not been paying any attention or that they have not been doing their homework properly, or ascribes to them qualities that they are not willing to accept, as in the following example:
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Example 7 (Provoked non-compliance).
In Example 7, in lines 3–4, the teacher tries to be humorous but her comment, being a collective negative characterization of more than half of the class, brings forth— justifiedly—girl4’s indignant reaction (cf. the use of the adversative interjection— plus another typical syntactic structure of rebuttals) in line 5. In this case, I consider the girl’s non-compliance to be interactionally motivated, since it is the teacher who provoked it.9 Note that the teacher here not only goes far beyond the scope of her role as knowledge transmitter, but she also splits the class into two parts, one of which functions as her actual audience, i.e., the boys. In my data, I have found 15 clear instances of teacher provoked non-compliance, most of which (11 out of 15) come from girls. In other words, girls’ non-compliance is almost 4 times more frequently triggered by the teacher than the boys’ noncompliance. The teacher may be provocative of course without getting a non-compliant reaction from the students; there are indeed a few instances like this in my data, but girls and boys do not appear to differ as to the times they let the provocation pass without being non-compliant. CONCLUSION As we saw above, girls participate less in class than boys and take less (verbal) initiative in their interaction with the teacher. This is an indisputable quantitative
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finding, and in this sense girls would be characterized as more “passive” than boys in class. Although there is no statistically significant difference in the type of initiative turns that girls and boys take in their interaction with the teacher, if we look at the kind of non-compliance that students bring up in their interaction with the teacher, we do find a difference in the orientation of non-compliant turns: girls are mainly concerned with things other than the content of the lesson (or topic of current discussion). This orientation of girls and boys towards different aspects of classroom discourse emerged also in my examination of their directive turns to teacher in class (cf. Pavlidou, 2000, 2001). Can we regard these findings as evidence in support of gender stereotypes (e.g., men: active agents, interested in truth, women: passive recipients, devoted to trivialities)? As several authors have variously indicated (e.g., Bergvall & Remlinger, 1996; Cameron, McAlinden, & O’Leary, 1989; Freed & Greenwood, 1996), numbers do not tell us the whole story, and qualitative differences—be it functional, discursive, contextual or other—may prove to be crucial in our assessment and interpretation of quantitative results. I, too, have argued in Pavlidou (2000, 2001) that, contrary to other claims (e.g., Holmes, 1995), we cannot conclude from the quantitative findings presented above that girls are necessarily more polite than boys. The present study brings forth a certain differentiation concerning sustained non-compliance and non-compliance connected to the overt negotiation of relationships. Both these aspects of student–teacher interaction do not come up often in my data; but when they do, there is a preferential distribution to be observed: in my data, girls seem to be less persistent than boys in their non-compliance to the teacher and it is mainly girls who overtly negotiate their relationship to the teacher. What is of interest, however, is that both aspects can be directly related to conditions in the interaction. For one thing, no sustained non-compliance can take place, if a teacher does not tolerate it, that is, if s/he makes use of her/his institutional power to cut off the student’s persisting behavior. For another, overt negotiation of relationships may be the outcome of a direct provocation from the teacher (recall that most cases of teacher provoked non-compliance were observed on the girls’ side). So, before we talk of gender stereotypes, we have to look at the interactional conditions under which preferential patterns in the students’ quantity of talk, choice of strategies, etc., arise. For example, who (girls, boys, which girls, which boys, and so on) has more interactional reasons for non-compliance, “passivity,” etc. Moreover, the fact that girls in my data do resist when provoked by the teacher— an aspect not quite compatible with the traditional understanding of gender roles— cannot allow a conclusion similar to that drawn by Bergvall and Remlinger (1996, p. 472), namely: “If we look closely at how and not simply how much talk occurs, traditional gender roles become more evident [. . . ].” On the contrary, it may indicate that “subordinate groups do after all negotiate and struggle against the
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conditions of their oppression” (Cameron et al., 1989, p. 91). Based, then, on the analysis presented here, we may hypothesize that although at the surface of interaction, traditional gender roles are reproduced, at a more minute level of examination different discursive paradigms are emergent in the classroom. The extent to which this hypothesis can be corroborated will have to be validated with further data from my corpus. CONVENTIONS FOR TRANSCRIPTION, TRANSLATION, ETC. Transcription symbols are based on the conventions presented in Ochs, Schegloff, and Thompson (1996), with the following deviations: / // [. . . ] (2)
Single slash indicates self-repair. Double slash indicates point at which the current utterance is interrupted by the next one, also marked with //. Brackets enclosing three periods mean that part of a turn, or turn sequence, has been left out. Numbers in parentheses indicate silence, in seconds, while a dot in parentheses indicates silence less than a second.
In the Greek excerpts, “;” is the question mark (indicating rising intonation, not necessarily a question). Numbers at the left column in the examples refer to lines in the excerpt. Abbreviations MASC FEM NEUT SING PLUR
Masculine Feminine Neutral Singular Plural
INTERJ EXCL ADVERS PART
Interjection Exclamative Adversative Particle
Translation: The English translation of Greek examples and excerpts is only approximate; moreover, translation of certain multifunctional Greek words may vary according to context. Greek particles or interjections with no English equivalent are not translated; they appear in uppercase in the translation, followed by PART or INTERJ, respectively. Acknowledgments I would like to thank the editors of this volume, Jo van den Hauwe and Tom Koole, as well as the two anonymous reviewers for their very helpful comments. I would also like to express my warmest thanks to Bill Freedman for sharing with me his
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space and thoughts on classroom interaction during my stay at the University of Haifa. NOTES 1. More specifically: two classes from each grade, 2 hours from each class, with “philological” lessons, i.e., Modern Greek, Ancient Greek, History. The students are 14 and 15 year olds (second and third grades). On the whole, there are 37 second grade students (21 girls and 16 boys) and 38 third grade students (23 girls and 15 boys), thus yielding a total number of 75 students (44 girls and 31 boys). Most of the third grade students are identical with the second grade students, about 9 months later. Three teachers are involved, two female (FT1, FT2) and one male (MT). 2. For a more detailed discussion of the data, as well as of their limitations, see Pavlidou (1999a, 1999b, 2001). 3. One of the reviewers argued that “non-compliance” is typically associated with rules, norms, laws, etc. and therefore I am presupposing such rules, norms, and so on, against which compliance or non-compliance is assessed—which was not at all intended on my part. In search for a better alternative, I discussed this point with several colleagues (all native speakers of American English, whom I want to thank all at this point for their valuable contributions on the subject), but there was no unanimous resolution of the problem. 4. For more information, see Pavlidou (1999a, 1999b). 5. The coding of the turns proved to be less straightforward than one might assume (see Pavlidou, 1999a, 1999b). It is therefore quite an enigma to me, how Rees-Miller (2000) could conduct her quantitative analysis of disagreement on the basis of notes that she took during classes and colloquia. 6. This is similar to what Kakava (1993, p. 408) calls “adversative rounds,” which she defines as “sustained disagreement for a minimum of two consecutive argumentative turns marked by structural repetition, substitution, and competitive overlaps”; but again, sustained non-compliance is not as restricted, as are adversative rounds, neither with respect to “disagreement” nor to other structural specifications, like, e.g., competitive overlaps, except for the number of turns. 7. Both in the case of non-compliance and directivity, persistence renders boys’ behavior less polite, as I have argued in Pavlidou (2000, 2001). 8. With respect to other activities that may entail a challenge of the teachers’ role, like, e.g., posing rhetorical questions or asking the teacher for reasons, there are no differences between boys and girls. 9. In contrast, in Example 6, one can claim that it was within the teacher’s obligations to correct the students and hence the girls’ reaction is not interactionally provoked.
REFERENCES Altani, C. (1992). Gender construction in classroom interaction: Primary schools in Greece. Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Lancaster. Bergvall, V., & Remlinger, K. (1996). Reproduction, resistance and gender in educational discourse: The role of critical discourse analysis. Discourse and Society, 7, 453–479. Brown, P., & Levinson, S. (1987). Politeness: Some universals in language usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cameron, D., McAlinden, F., & O’Leary, K. (1989). Lakoff in context: The social and linguistic functions of tag questions. In J. Coates & D. Cameron (Eds.), Women in their speech communities (pp. 74–93). London: Longman. Freed, A., & Greenwood, A. (1996). Women men and type of talk: What makes the difference? Language in Society, 25, 1–26.
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Kakava, C. (1993). Conflicting argumentative strategies in the classroom. In J. Alatis (Ed.), Georgetown university round table 1993 (pp. 402–420). Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. Holmes, J. (1995). Women, men and politeness. London: Longman. Ochs, E., Schegloff, E. A., & Thompson, S. A. (Eds.) (1996). Interaction and grammar. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pavlidou, T.-S. (1999a). Verbal initiative in classroom interaction. In Proceedings of the 3rd international conference on Greek language. Greek linguistics’97 (pp. 648–656). Athens: Ellinika Grammata (in Greek). Pavlidou, T.-S. (1999b). Issues of politeness in native classroom discourse (pp. 13–16). Paper at PRAGMA99, Tel-Aviv. Pavlidou, T.-S. (2000). Between politeness and impoliteness: Boys and girls in the classroom. Studies in Greek linguistics (pp. 437–448). Proceedings of the 20th annual meeting of the Department of Linguistics, Faculty of Philosophy, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, 23–25 April 1999, Thessaloniki (in Greek). Pavlidou, T.-S. (2001). Politeness in the classroom? Evidence from a Greek high school. In A. Bayraktaroglu & M. Sifianou (Eds.), Linguistic politeness: The case of Greece and Turkey (pp. 105–136). Amsterdam: Benjamins. Rees-Miller, J. (2000). Power severity and context in disagreement. Journal of Pragmatics, 32, 1087– 1111. Swann, J. (1992). Girls, boys and language. Oxford: Blackwell.
INTRODUCTION The present paper is part of a larger project on native classroom interaction in which I have been involved, trying to illuminate two questions (cf. Pavlidou, 1999a, 1999b): (a) Are students “active” or “passive” when interacting with the teacher? (b) Are there differences in the ways girls and boys interact with the teacher and participate in class? With respect to the first question, the focus has been on verbal initiative on the students’ part: do students just conform with what the teacher wants, or do they take verbal initiative, i.e., do they do (verbally) things on their own, e.g., ask for the floor, ask a question, make an unsolicited comment, disagree with the teacher, reply to a question that is addressed to the class as a whole, etc. The second question concerns quantitative and qualitative differences in the behavior of girls and boys in classroom, as have been reported by, e.g., Altani (1992), Holmes (1995), Swann (1992) and others: do girls talk less in class than boys, do they take less initiative, are they more polite, etc. and what do such differences imply? A major perspective in my analysis of classroom interaction has been that of politeness as presented in the Brown and Levinson (1987) theoretical framework. Accordingly, special attention was paid to verbal initiative on the students’ part that would potentially threaten the teacher’s face (cf. Pavlidou, 2000, 2001). In
Direct all correspondence to: Theoossia-Soula Pavlidou, Department of Linguistics, School of Philology, Faculty of Philosophy, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, GR-54124 Thessaloniki, Greece. E-mail: [email protected] Linguistics and Education 14(1): 123–141. Copyright © 2003 Elsevier Science Inc.
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this light, two, relatively homogeneous, groups of turns could be distinguished in the students’ behavior: (1) turns that potentially threaten the teacher’s negative face, like bids for the floor, requests for information or clarification (mainly yes/no or wh-questions on the content of the lesson, or the current topic of discussion, and on the management of turn-taking, of classroom affairs), etc. I called this group of turns verbal initiative of the directive type, (2) turns that potentially threaten the teacher’s positive face, like protesting, complaining, disagreeing with the teacher, correcting the teacher and so on; I named this group of turns verbal initiative of the non-compliant type. The purpose of this paper is to look more closely at the second type of verbal initiative, i.e., non-compliance, and discuss some differences between girls and boys, which—though not impressive on a quantitative level—may be cumulatively indicative of different discursive paradigms. My analysis is based on eight fully transcribed hours from the last two grades of obligatory education,1 drawn from audio-recordings of about 50 hours in two high schools in provinces of Northern Greece, which two teachers made in their own classes and in the classes of their colleagues.2 “NON-COMPLIANCE” As already mentioned above, the focus of the present paper is on verbal initiative of the non-compliant type that comprises protests, complains, disagreements, disapprovals, corrections, etc.—all directed toward what the teacher is saying or doing. Contrary to the verbal initiative of the directive type, the acts subsumed under this label do not fall into a single class in speech act theoretical terms. But they do have two features in common: first, they are all reactions to a preceding utterance by the teacher; second, they are all negative reactions to what the teacher just did or said, and in this sense they entail some kind of opposition on the students’ side towards the teacher. The terms “non-compliant” (applying to turns, acts, behavior, etc.) and “non-compliance” (as a type of behavior) are meant to capture exactly these two features. This is a purely definitional matter, carrying no implications of classroom norms, rules, etc. with which students are expected to conform in classroom.3 Other terms, commonly employed in the literature, are “disagreement” or “argument,” or even “conflict” and “dispute”: they, too, can be said to express a negative reaction or opposition. But they are not comprehensive enough, since they could not adequately describe other forms of negative reactions in the classroom, like for example a general protest by a group of students in the form of an interjection, a complaint regarding something that the teacher
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has suggested, or finally the expression of disapproval or disappointment, as in the following example: Example 1 (Expressing disapproval of the teacher’s management of classroom matters).
In Example 1, three different students express, in three different ways, their disapproval of the teacher’s handling of calling on somebody to do an assignment: boy5 uses just an interjection, girl5 simply states a fact, boy4 asks a rhetorical question. Although all of these instances entail an opposition to the teacher’s not calling on anybody else, I believe that terms like “argument,” “conflict,” “dispute” would be too strong, if only because such terms normally imply longer exchanges between teacher and students. On the other hand, neither would “disagreement” provide a real alternative. While this term is easier to stretch or bend in order to render it co-extensive with “non-compliance,” it is still all too often associated with exclusively the truth of propositions. For example, for Rees-Miller (2000, p. 1088) a speaker “disagrees when s/he considers untrue some proposition P uttered or presumed to be espoused by an Addressee A and reacts with an utterance the propositional content or implicature of which is Not P.” Needless to say that this would not cover the cases in Example 1, opposition to value-judgements of the teacher, certain corrections to the teacher, etc. Other definitions of “disagreement,” though not as restrictive with respect to the scope of disagreement, are less encompassing in different respects. For example, Kakava (1993, p. 408) defines “disagreement” to mean “an
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oppositional stance taken (verbal or non-verbal) to an antecedent position verbal (or non-verbal) position.” This definition, however, though broader in its scope, misses the possibility of disagreement not with an explicit position, but with what this position may presuppose, as in the following example: Example 2 (Disagreeing with a teacher’s presupposition regarding the content of the lesson).
In turn 2 of Example 2, boy3 does not disagree with what the teacher said in turn 1, but with what she takes for granted in this turn, namely that the way the last rapsody in Iliad ends is a proper one. In sum, then, I opt for “non-compliance” in lack of a sufficiently comprehensive term among the ones usually found in the literature. I use the term “non-compliant” to cover all those turns by the students in which any sort of opposition, as a reaction to what the teacher is saying or doing, is expressed, e.g., protesting, complaining, disagreeing with the teacher, correcting the teacher, etc. I also talk of “non-compliant sequences,” when non-compliance extends over more than one students’ turns in their interaction with the teacher. It should be reminded at this point that non-compliance is understood as a type of verbal initiative, and as such it precludes any kind of non-verbal behavior that could be understood as “opposition to the teacher,” like slamming the door, making faces, talking to a fellow student, etc.4 NON-COMPLIANCE IN THE CONTEXT OF THE STUDENTS’ OTHER (VERBAL) BEHAVIOR Before going into the differences between girls’ and boys’ non-compliance, I will sketch briefly how non-compliance features quantitatively against the background of the students’ other behavior in class. The basic unit of analysis is the students’ turns.5 (1) Students, when interacting with the teacher in class, are rather “passive” in general. As Table 1 shows, students’ turns to teacher in class are more frequently without initiative rather than with initiative, in the sense described above:
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Table 1.
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Students’ Turns in Class
To teacher without initiative To teacher with initiative To other students Other
41.5% (725) 34.4% (602) 2.5% (43) 21.6% (379)
Total
100% (1749)
“Other” is a waste-basket category here, covering those students’ turns whose content or addressee could not be sufficiently specified, turns to the teacher which could not be clearly categorized as either initiative or not, etc. (see Pavlidou, 1999a). (2) As can be seen from Table 2, initiative turns of the students to the teacher are more frequently of the directive type, i.e., bids for the floor, requests for information or clarification—mainly yes/no or wh-questions on the content of the lesson, or the current topic of discussion, and on the management of turn-taking, of classroom affairs, etc. The second largest part of initiative turns is “other,” a very heterogeneous category which comprises different kinds of initiative with very low frequency, e.g., joking, comments not elicited by what the teacher said, expression of personal opinion, etc. Non-compliant turns, e.g., protesting or complaining, disagreeing with the teacher, correcting the teacher and so on, make up the third sizable group of initiative turns. Table 2. Students’ Initiative Turns to Teacher Directive Non-compliant Other Unclear
46.2% (278) 21.6% (130) 29.0% (174) 3.3% (20)
Total
100% (602)
(3) Turning now to what girls and boys do in class, we see (Table 3) that girls participate in classroom interaction less frequently than boys, although on the whole there are more girls than boys in class. In other words, the majority of the students’ turns in class comes from boys. Table 3. Girls’ turns Boys’ turns Unspecified Total
Girls’ and Boys’ Turns in Class 38.3% (669) 50.2% (878) 11.5% (202) 100% (1749)
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The value “unspecified” for the variable sex indicates either that the turn came from a group of students or that the speaker’s sex was unclear. (4) Moreover, the majority of initiative turns to teacher in class comes from boys. In other words, girls seem to be more “passive” than boys in their interaction with the teacher, as shown in Table 4. Table 4. Girls’ and Boys’ Types of Turns Without initiative Girls’ turns Boys’ turns Column total
47.2% (333) 52.8% (372)
With initiative 39.1% (216) 60.9% (337)
100% (705)
100% (553)
Rest
Row total
41.5% (120) 58.5% (169)
43.2% (669) 56.8% (878)
99.9% (289)
100% (1547)
N = 1,547 is the total number of turns in class coming from either girls or boys. X = 8.84, df = 2, p < .025. 2
(5) Girls’ and boys’ turns to teacher do not differ significantly as to the kind of initiative they represent (cf. Table 5). Table 5. Girls’ and Boys’ Type of Initiative Turns to Teacher Directive
Non-compliant
Other
Unclear
Row total
Girls’ turns Boys’ turns
46.8% (101) 50.1% (169)
24.5% (53) 19.9% (67)
25.5% (55) 26.1% (88)
3.2% (7) 3.9% (13)
100% (216) 100% (337)
Column total
(270)
(120)
(143)
(20)
(553)
N = 553 is the total number of girls’/boys’ initiative turns to teacher. X2 = 2.04, df = 3, p < .75.
In other words, neither boys nor girls can be clearly associated with one type of initiative turns (directive, non-compliant, etc.). There is, however, a noteworthy convergence in the numbers of non-compliant turns coming from boys and girls, since the girls’ turns on the whole are fewer, and so are girls’ initiative turns. That is, of each sex, girls take more non-compliant turns than boys relatively to their own initiative behavior. SOME DIFFERENCES OBSERVED IN THE NON-COMPLIANCE OF GIRLS AND BOYS Girls and boys may not differ significantly as to the type of initiative turns they take in class, but they do differ as to the kind of directivity and non-compliance their initiative turns express. In this section, I will point at some differences in the non-compliance that girls and boys exhibit towards their teachers (on the differences in the directive turns of girls and boys, see Pavlidou, 2000, 2001). Some of these differences are representable in numbers, others are either too small on
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a quantitative level or have to do with phenomena which are too complex to be coded in a straightforward manner. Orientation of Non-compliance I will first distinguish between two kinds of non-compliance with respect to the orientation of the students’ opposition: non-compliance concerning the content of the lesson (or the topic of current discussion) and non-compliance having to do with the management of classroom matters, regulation of turn-taking, etc. (cf. also Pavlidou, 2000, 2001). In Example 1, all three instances of non-compliant turns apply to the regulation of being called upon by the teacher to do an assignment on the board: they all express a disapproval of the teacher’s management of such matters. In contrast, in Example 2, the boy’s non-compliance in turn 2 has to do with the content of the lesson: he disagrees on something that the teacher seems to take for granted, and claims that the last rapsody of the Iliad does not end properly. As can be seen from Table 6, boys are more frequently non-compliant with respect to the content of the lesson (or topic of current discussion), while the girls’ non-compliance is more focused on the management of classroom matters, regulation of turn-taking, etc. Table 6. Orientation in the Girls’ and Boys’ Non-compliant Turns Content
Management, etc.
Unclear
Row total
Girls’ turns Boys’ turns
30.2% (16) 58.2% (39)
67.9% (36) 37.3% (25)
1.9% (1) 4.5% (3)
100% (53) 100% (67)
Column total
(55)
(61)
(4)
100% (120)
N = 120 is the total number of girls’ or boys’ non-compliant turns to teacher. X = 10.5, df = 2, p < .01. 2
In other words, with respect to the focus of non-compliance, there seem to be different preferences among the students: the girls’ non-compliance is oriented more strongly towards the management of classroom matters, regulation of turn-taking, etc. while boys are more frequently non-compliant with regard to the content of the lesson (or topic of current discussion). Sustenance of Non-compliance Non-compliance in classroom can be of very short length, e.g., an exclamation of disapproval, or expand over several turns by the same student in his/her interaction with the teacher. In what follows, I distinguish between one-shot non-compliance, i.e., non-compliance restricted to one turn, and sustained non-compliance, that
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is non-compliance extending over three or more turns by the same student. In my data, I encountered 42 cases of one-shot non-compliance, 15 instances of two-turn non-compliance by the same student, and another 15 instances of sustained non-compliance. In other words, for the greatest part the students’ noncompliant turns in class are one-shot, as in the following example: Example 3 (One-shot non-compliance).
In this example, in line 3, we have a case of one-shot non-compliance coming from a group of students (which, as seen in line 4, the teacher fully ignores). On the motivational level, one-shot non-compliance presumably occurs because the students may not want very strongly something different from the teacher or because they know that it would be futile to insist. On the interactional level, however, non-compliance of this kind may be the outcome of the teacher’s discouraging reaction: s/he may react very rigorously to the first non-compliant turn on the students’ part, so that any further discussion is cut down; or s/he may simply just ignore the students and go on with what s/he had in mind, as in the example above. But there are also instances (30), where non-compliance runs over two and more turns, either because of collective participation or because of individual persistence, or both, as in the following example:6
PATTERNS OF PARTICIPATION IN CLASSROOM INTERACTION
Example 4 (Sustained non-compliance).
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In the example above, boy3 brings up the opinion that Achilles’ cruelty was justified since it all happened in a war context (line 2) and leads a sustained argument against the teacher’s position that Achilles had been enormously cruel. Besides the teacher and boy3, other students participate in the argument: girl3 in line 5, boy1 in line 7, on the teacher’s side (probably also boy? in line 17); girl1 in line 15 on boy3’s side. But the main reason for the sustained non-compliance in the example above is that boy3 himself keeps bringing up arguments against the teacher’s position (lines 9, 11, 13, 20), which the teacher tries to refute. It is only after a last effort to restate her position (lines 25–27 with omitted material) that she finally breaks up the discussion by giving the floor to another student who had been reading before the argument with boy3 started. In other words, the boys’ persistence in attacking the teacher’s position goes hand in hand with the teacher’s consent to allow him for more space in the discussion. In principle, the teacher could have made use of her institutional power in an earlier stage of the argument and end up the discussion, as she does in line 27. In my data, sustained non-compliance seems to be more at home with boys than with girls; in other words, boys appear to be more persistent in their non-compliant behavior. For one, all really long non-compliant sequences, i.e., involving four and more non-compliant turns by the same individual, come from boys. Moreover, in two teaching hours, it is boys alone that bring up all sustained non-compliance. Finally, boys take up more non-compliant turns in collective non-compliant sequences running over several turns, i.e., in sequences in which more than one students express non-compliance to the teacher. It is also interesting to note that boys seem to be more persistent also when taking directive turns (Pavlidou, 2000, 2001).7 Overt Negotiation of Relationships Students can negotiate their relationship to the teacher in a variety of manners, for example, via topic discussion in which the student covertly challenges the teacher as a knowledge authority, by suggestions as to what should be done in class as in Example 5, line 4, etc. But there are a few notable instances in my data, where students overtly negotiate their position in the given constellation of roles, by reciprocating the interactional move that the teacher just took; it is like throwing back the ball to the teacher on an interactional level. Example 5 illustrates such a case.
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Example 5 (Throwing back the ball to the teacher).
After her claim in line 1, girl3 gets no response from the teacher; her utterance is followed by a 10 seconds’ pause. It is after this pause that the teacher utters a threatening “Good,” which is not addressed to a particular student, but presumably to the whole class. Girl3, without being discouraged by all this, initiates a new sequence in line 4 and makes a suggestion as to what they should do in class; this initiative turn, although it entails girl3’s appreciation of the assignment (and, thus, a positive attitude to the teacher), is actually rather threatening to the teacher’s face, since the suggestion concerns things that the teacher is entitled to decide alone. Indeed, the teacher’s reaction in lines 5–6 indicates that the teacher herself is not very appreciative of the girl’s suggestion: the teacher’s ironic (even
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sarcastic) remarks imply a criticism of girl3’s suggestion, since what girl3 proposes is not feasible due to lack of time. But girl3, instead of being intimidated by the teacher’s irony (and implicit criticism), throws back the ball to the teacher in line 7, i.e., the criticism, claiming that it is in the teacher’s power to decide such things—which of course is absolutely correct. She, thus, not only treads grounds that are reserved for the teacher, as she already did in line 4, but also reprimands the teacher for not taking into account the kind of institutional power that the teacher is endowed with. Notice that she does this in a quite direct way (as opposed to the off-record strategy that the teacher uses in the preceding turn). Notice also that she juxtaposes in this turn (line 7) the “we” with the “you,” thus taking the teacher away from where she (girl3) had originally placed her (“we” in line 4) and where the teacher herself remained (“we” in lines 5–6), and verbalizing the distance and the difference in roles between the teacher and the students. I believe that the fact that the teacher resigns from a further discussion (the repetition of the interjection “ ” indicates in Greek that there is nothing else that the teacher can say) and calls on another student shows that the round goes one up for girl3. In my data, I have spotted six such instances of “throwing back the ball to the teacher” (not necessarily restricted to the management level), five of which came from girls. In other words, it is the girls who attempt such a reciprocation of interactional moves, and thus negotiate in an overt manner their relationship to the teacher. Moreover, it is only girls that speak up for the whole group or take another student’s part as in Example 6.
Example 6 (Expressing solidarity to fellow student).
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In the example above, the teacher uses an impersonalized rhetorical question in line 2, addressed to the whole class, but her purpose is clearly to reprimand the boy because of his choice of words (presumably, she would rather have the verb “ ” than “ ” in this context; but notice that she does not even correct the student). Anna’s negative reaction in line 4 is quite strong: she first uses a syntactic structure (adversative interjection + VERB + and + OBJECT/PREDICATE) which is typical for rebuttals in Greek, followed by a (incomplete) rhetorical question, implying that it is natural for students to make errors when expressing themselves. In other words, she takes implicitly the boy’s part and shows solidarity with her fellow students (cf. the use of the first person plural in the verb: “we make expression mistakes”). At the same time, however, she refuses to accept the teacher’s implicit claim that the students do not have adequate knowledge of the language, conveying that expression errors are not such a serious problem. This, in turn, is rejected by the teacher, as lines 4–6 show (note the adversative structure and the rhetorical question in line 4). Common in the cases discussed above is the fact that the girls challenge the teacher’s role and thus overtly negotiate their relationship to the teacher.8 A similar case is demonstrated in Example 7, which is discussed as an instance of provoked non-compliance. Reasons for Non-compliance While there may be all sorts of reasons for the students’ non-compliant behavior, from an interactional point of view it is of interest to examine to what extent the students’ non-compliance is triggered or provoked by the teacher. This is the case in my data, when the teacher accuses a student or the whole class of something, e.g., that they have not been paying any attention or that they have not been doing their homework properly, or ascribes to them qualities that they are not willing to accept, as in the following example:
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Example 7 (Provoked non-compliance).
In Example 7, in lines 3–4, the teacher tries to be humorous but her comment, being a collective negative characterization of more than half of the class, brings forth— justifiedly—girl4’s indignant reaction (cf. the use of the adversative interjection— plus another typical syntactic structure of rebuttals) in line 5. In this case, I consider the girl’s non-compliance to be interactionally motivated, since it is the teacher who provoked it.9 Note that the teacher here not only goes far beyond the scope of her role as knowledge transmitter, but she also splits the class into two parts, one of which functions as her actual audience, i.e., the boys. In my data, I have found 15 clear instances of teacher provoked non-compliance, most of which (11 out of 15) come from girls. In other words, girls’ non-compliance is almost 4 times more frequently triggered by the teacher than the boys’ noncompliance. The teacher may be provocative of course without getting a non-compliant reaction from the students; there are indeed a few instances like this in my data, but girls and boys do not appear to differ as to the times they let the provocation pass without being non-compliant. CONCLUSION As we saw above, girls participate less in class than boys and take less (verbal) initiative in their interaction with the teacher. This is an indisputable quantitative
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finding, and in this sense girls would be characterized as more “passive” than boys in class. Although there is no statistically significant difference in the type of initiative turns that girls and boys take in their interaction with the teacher, if we look at the kind of non-compliance that students bring up in their interaction with the teacher, we do find a difference in the orientation of non-compliant turns: girls are mainly concerned with things other than the content of the lesson (or topic of current discussion). This orientation of girls and boys towards different aspects of classroom discourse emerged also in my examination of their directive turns to teacher in class (cf. Pavlidou, 2000, 2001). Can we regard these findings as evidence in support of gender stereotypes (e.g., men: active agents, interested in truth, women: passive recipients, devoted to trivialities)? As several authors have variously indicated (e.g., Bergvall & Remlinger, 1996; Cameron, McAlinden, & O’Leary, 1989; Freed & Greenwood, 1996), numbers do not tell us the whole story, and qualitative differences—be it functional, discursive, contextual or other—may prove to be crucial in our assessment and interpretation of quantitative results. I, too, have argued in Pavlidou (2000, 2001) that, contrary to other claims (e.g., Holmes, 1995), we cannot conclude from the quantitative findings presented above that girls are necessarily more polite than boys. The present study brings forth a certain differentiation concerning sustained non-compliance and non-compliance connected to the overt negotiation of relationships. Both these aspects of student–teacher interaction do not come up often in my data; but when they do, there is a preferential distribution to be observed: in my data, girls seem to be less persistent than boys in their non-compliance to the teacher and it is mainly girls who overtly negotiate their relationship to the teacher. What is of interest, however, is that both aspects can be directly related to conditions in the interaction. For one thing, no sustained non-compliance can take place, if a teacher does not tolerate it, that is, if s/he makes use of her/his institutional power to cut off the student’s persisting behavior. For another, overt negotiation of relationships may be the outcome of a direct provocation from the teacher (recall that most cases of teacher provoked non-compliance were observed on the girls’ side). So, before we talk of gender stereotypes, we have to look at the interactional conditions under which preferential patterns in the students’ quantity of talk, choice of strategies, etc., arise. For example, who (girls, boys, which girls, which boys, and so on) has more interactional reasons for non-compliance, “passivity,” etc. Moreover, the fact that girls in my data do resist when provoked by the teacher— an aspect not quite compatible with the traditional understanding of gender roles— cannot allow a conclusion similar to that drawn by Bergvall and Remlinger (1996, p. 472), namely: “If we look closely at how and not simply how much talk occurs, traditional gender roles become more evident [. . . ].” On the contrary, it may indicate that “subordinate groups do after all negotiate and struggle against the
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conditions of their oppression” (Cameron et al., 1989, p. 91). Based, then, on the analysis presented here, we may hypothesize that although at the surface of interaction, traditional gender roles are reproduced, at a more minute level of examination different discursive paradigms are emergent in the classroom. The extent to which this hypothesis can be corroborated will have to be validated with further data from my corpus. CONVENTIONS FOR TRANSCRIPTION, TRANSLATION, ETC. Transcription symbols are based on the conventions presented in Ochs, Schegloff, and Thompson (1996), with the following deviations: / // [. . . ] (2)
Single slash indicates self-repair. Double slash indicates point at which the current utterance is interrupted by the next one, also marked with //. Brackets enclosing three periods mean that part of a turn, or turn sequence, has been left out. Numbers in parentheses indicate silence, in seconds, while a dot in parentheses indicates silence less than a second.
In the Greek excerpts, “;” is the question mark (indicating rising intonation, not necessarily a question). Numbers at the left column in the examples refer to lines in the excerpt. Abbreviations MASC FEM NEUT SING PLUR
Masculine Feminine Neutral Singular Plural
INTERJ EXCL ADVERS PART
Interjection Exclamative Adversative Particle
Translation: The English translation of Greek examples and excerpts is only approximate; moreover, translation of certain multifunctional Greek words may vary according to context. Greek particles or interjections with no English equivalent are not translated; they appear in uppercase in the translation, followed by PART or INTERJ, respectively. Acknowledgments I would like to thank the editors of this volume, Jo van den Hauwe and Tom Koole, as well as the two anonymous reviewers for their very helpful comments. I would also like to express my warmest thanks to Bill Freedman for sharing with me his
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space and thoughts on classroom interaction during my stay at the University of Haifa. NOTES 1. More specifically: two classes from each grade, 2 hours from each class, with “philological” lessons, i.e., Modern Greek, Ancient Greek, History. The students are 14 and 15 year olds (second and third grades). On the whole, there are 37 second grade students (21 girls and 16 boys) and 38 third grade students (23 girls and 15 boys), thus yielding a total number of 75 students (44 girls and 31 boys). Most of the third grade students are identical with the second grade students, about 9 months later. Three teachers are involved, two female (FT1, FT2) and one male (MT). 2. For a more detailed discussion of the data, as well as of their limitations, see Pavlidou (1999a, 1999b, 2001). 3. One of the reviewers argued that “non-compliance” is typically associated with rules, norms, laws, etc. and therefore I am presupposing such rules, norms, and so on, against which compliance or non-compliance is assessed—which was not at all intended on my part. In search for a better alternative, I discussed this point with several colleagues (all native speakers of American English, whom I want to thank all at this point for their valuable contributions on the subject), but there was no unanimous resolution of the problem. 4. For more information, see Pavlidou (1999a, 1999b). 5. The coding of the turns proved to be less straightforward than one might assume (see Pavlidou, 1999a, 1999b). It is therefore quite an enigma to me, how Rees-Miller (2000) could conduct her quantitative analysis of disagreement on the basis of notes that she took during classes and colloquia. 6. This is similar to what Kakava (1993, p. 408) calls “adversative rounds,” which she defines as “sustained disagreement for a minimum of two consecutive argumentative turns marked by structural repetition, substitution, and competitive overlaps”; but again, sustained non-compliance is not as restricted, as are adversative rounds, neither with respect to “disagreement” nor to other structural specifications, like, e.g., competitive overlaps, except for the number of turns. 7. Both in the case of non-compliance and directivity, persistence renders boys’ behavior less polite, as I have argued in Pavlidou (2000, 2001). 8. With respect to other activities that may entail a challenge of the teachers’ role, like, e.g., posing rhetorical questions or asking the teacher for reasons, there are no differences between boys and girls. 9. In contrast, in Example 6, one can claim that it was within the teacher’s obligations to correct the students and hence the girls’ reaction is not interactionally provoked.
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Kakava, C. (1993). Conflicting argumentative strategies in the classroom. In J. Alatis (Ed.), Georgetown university round table 1993 (pp. 402–420). Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. Holmes, J. (1995). Women, men and politeness. London: Longman. Ochs, E., Schegloff, E. A., & Thompson, S. A. (Eds.) (1996). Interaction and grammar. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pavlidou, T.-S. (1999a). Verbal initiative in classroom interaction. In Proceedings of the 3rd international conference on Greek language. Greek linguistics’97 (pp. 648–656). Athens: Ellinika Grammata (in Greek). Pavlidou, T.-S. (1999b). Issues of politeness in native classroom discourse (pp. 13–16). Paper at PRAGMA99, Tel-Aviv. Pavlidou, T.-S. (2000). Between politeness and impoliteness: Boys and girls in the classroom. Studies in Greek linguistics (pp. 437–448). Proceedings of the 20th annual meeting of the Department of Linguistics, Faculty of Philosophy, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, 23–25 April 1999, Thessaloniki (in Greek). Pavlidou, T.-S. (2001). Politeness in the classroom? Evidence from a Greek high school. In A. Bayraktaroglu & M. Sifianou (Eds.), Linguistic politeness: The case of Greece and Turkey (pp. 105–136). Amsterdam: Benjamins. Rees-Miller, J. (2000). Power severity and context in disagreement. Journal of Pragmatics, 32, 1087– 1111. Swann, J. (1992). Girls, boys and language. Oxford: Blackwell.