Managing progressivity in small group discussions on zoom
Open Access
- Author:
- He, Yingliang Elvin
- Graduate Program:
- Applied Linguistics
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- June 21, 2023
- Committee Members:
- Mari Haneda, Outside Unit Member
Ning Yu, Outside Field Member
Joan Kelly Hall, Chair & Dissertation Advisor
Stephen Looney, Major Field Member
Tommaso Milani, Program Head/Chair - Keywords:
- Progressivity
Conversation Analysis
ITA
Group discussion - Abstract:
- Group discussions are frequently used in classrooms. Prior research has mainly focused on the efficacy of using group work and on designing tasks to better promote students’ learning. Rarely investigated is the process accomplished by the students themselves. With the increasing popularity of teaching and learning online, it is important to investigate how students interactionally organize small group activities in a synchronous online environment; and how they forward the progression and work towards the completion of the activity. This study uses conversation analysis and the concept of progressivity to investigate the above questions. The data include 20 hours of zoom recordings of small group discussions (3-5 students) in breakout rooms in two sections of an International Teaching Assistant training course. The analysis first reveals the working mechanism of student discussion and their strategies to progress interaction. A group discussion can be divided into several sections that are bookmarked by participants’ reading the discussion questions out loud and are closed by a collective verbal/non-verbal agreement. This agreement either leads to a discussion on the next question or a breakdown in progression. Secondly, analysis show students’ practices to maintain or regain progressivity: assigning agency to the discussion questions, verbally selecting a next speaker, and “what else / any other …” interrogatives are found to be frequently used by the participants to hold other speakers in the group accountable to speak and in turn progress the discussion. Thirdly, it is found that epistemic imbalance among group members creates a temporary halt in progression in interaction, which is resolved by a negotiation of epistemic relations among the students. The results of this study advance insights in the field of CA on how the overarching goal of an institutional interactional project affects progressivity. In addition, this study reveals how interactants with similar rights progress conversations in institutional settings. Pedagogically, by showing the working mechanism of group discussion in classrooms, the results can provide guidance for teachers when designing group work and for teacher educators when illustrating group work as a classroom activity to pre-service teachers. They can also give insights to in-service teachers on how to mediate students verbally and textually on teaching materials to better facilitate the progression of group work.