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Journal of Literacy Research

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How Contingent Questioning Promotes Extended Student Talk: A Function

of Display Questions
Maureen Boyd; Don Rubin
Online publication date: 13 November 2009
To cite this Article Boyd, Maureen and Rubin, Don(2006) 'How Contingent Questioning Promotes Extended Student Talk:
A Function of Display Questions', Journal of Literacy Research, 38: 2, 141 — 169
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JOURNAL OF LITERACY RESEARCH, 38(2), 141–169
Copyright © 2006, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.
How Contingent Questioning

Promotes Extended Student Talk:
A Function of Display Questions
Downloaded By: [Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile] At: 15:00 10 August 2010
Maureen Boyd
School of Education
Binghamton University
Don Rubin
Department of Language and Literacy Education
University of Georgia
Research on traditional classrooms paints a picture of teachers controlling talk pat-

terns and of students producing minimal amounts of mainly procedural talk, recita-
tion-type talk, or both. Often this bleak state of affairs is attributed to teachers’
overreliance on inauthentic display questions—questions that impose tight thematic
control and therefore purportedly promote recitation rather than classroom dialogue.
Contrary to this blanket indictment of display questions, however, a small number of
previous studies have concluded that teacher display questions are not inherently
inimical to engaged student talk. This study examined a small 4th- and 5th-grade
English language learner classroom in which students were previously found to have
produced a substantial number of socially engaged and structurally elaborated utter-
ances. A new analysis of thematic episodes containing instances of extended student
talk revealed that authenticity of teacher questions was not a necessary condition for
triggering such student utterances. Indeed, text-based display questions that inquired
about details of readings obviously known to the teacher elicited elaborated re-
sponses. The distinguishing characteristic of teacher questions that elicited extended
student talk was found to be their contingency on previous student utterances rather
than whether they were open-ended or inquired about known information.
This article is about some ways in which teachers use questions in strategic, tar-
geted ways to engender structurally elaborated and dialogically accretive student
Correspondence should be addressed to Maureen Boyd, School of Education, Binghamton Univer-

sity, P.O. Box 6000, Binghamton, NY 13902. E-mail: mboyd@binghamton.edu
142 BOYD AND RUBIN
talk. The data on which it is based derive from a heterogeneous (albeit small) ele-
mentary English language learners (ELL) classroom—the kind of instructional
context in which it is arguably most important to foster heuristic and authoritative
student talk. Much received wisdom about promoting student talk—in both first
and additional languages—concludes that teachers should speak less overall, ask
authentic rather than display or recitation questions, and generally cede more con-
trol over the flow of classroom discourse to students (Cazden, 2001; Johnson,
1995; Mehan, 1979; Peregroy & Boyle, 2005). Without discounting the wisdom of
that prescription in many instances, we had observed evidence to the contrary in
some of our professional observations, as well as in some previous research (Boyd

& Rubin, 2002). This evidence indicates that directive and voluble teachers not in-
frequently preside over classrooms in which students engage in numerous remark-
able and productive content-based discussions. Turn taking in such classrooms is
patently not equitably distributed between teacher and students, and yet students
produce articulate, responsive, and expansive contributions. The purpose of this
inquiry, then, was to discern patterns of classroom questioning by which at least
one exemplary ELL teacher drew forth noteworthy student talk. Defining charac-
teristics of this teacher’s talk are her effective use of questioning (including display
questions) and her lack of evaluation.
Talk mediates all learning; we learn in and through language (Vygotsky, 1986/
1994). The patterns of talk we produce and respond to in the classroom shape the
type of learning likely to occur. Theory, research, and practice all converge on the
conclusion that engaged, elaborated student talk in the classroom enhances student
learning. Such articulate student talk supports inquiry, collaborative learning,
high-level thinking, and making knowledge personally meaningful (see, e.g.,
Hynds & Rubin, 1990; Johnson, 1995; Nystrand, 1997; Wilkinson, Murphy, &
Soter, 2005).
For second language learners, talk serves the same purposes as it does for native
speakers of English, but it is also a vehicle both for acquiring nonnative communi-
cative competence and for expanding linguistic repertoires in the student’s new
language (Pica, 1994; Swain, 1994). Student talk, or oral output, is thus simulta-
neously a necessary practice in learning an additional language and a vehicle for
negotiating meaning in academic subjects, as well as in the all-important social mi-
lieu. A student’s verbal production is likewise an indicator of language learning on
which teachers can learn to depend for immediate feedback on what and how that
student is learning, and what the student is understanding and not understanding
(Mosenthal, 1984; Swain, 1994).
Despite the recognition that student talk should be encouraged in classrooms,
the mode of student talk found in U.S. classrooms is generally formulaic and
choppy (Cazden, 2001). Indeed, research in typical first language (Nystrand, 2006;
Wells, 1993) and ELL (Ernst, 1994) classrooms has long documented two distinc-
tive characteristics of teacher and student classroom talk. First, teacher talk domi-
CONTINGENT QUESTIONING 143
nates classroom discourse; teachers typically produce two thirds of classroom

utterances. Second, teacher-controlled teacher initiation, student response, teacher
evaluation (IRE) patterns of discourse and the resultant fragmented “fill-in-the-
blank” pattern of student talk prevail (see, e.g., Almasi, 1996; Applebee, Langer,
Nystrand, & Gamoran, 2003; Chinn, Anderson, & Waggoner, 2001; Gutierrez,
1994). Even when teachers substitute nonjudgmental follow-up for evaluation as
the final move of this sequence (IRF instead of IRE), the consequence is to return
control of the topic to the teacher after each student utterance; little chaining
among student responses occurs (Nassaji & Wells, 2000). The all-too-common
classroom fare of IRE or IRF discourse is often attributed to teachers’ reliance on

display questions (or quasi-questions) rather than authentic ones (Christoph &
Nystrand, 2001). Display questions ask students to recite information already
known by the teacher. It is often assumed that this question form is mainly a ruse to
assess whether students have absorbed content matter. Authentic questions, on the
other hand, ask students to provide their own evaluations and interpretations of
class content. Presumably teachers (or other students) pose authentic questions be-
cause they are genuinely interested in hearing what the student has to say.
The promotion of authentic teacher questioning is well enshrined in contempo-
rary practitioner lore. An examination of virtually any teaching methods textbook
for preservice teachers—first language (e.g., Alvermann & Phelps, 2005; Vacca &
Vacca, 2005) and second language (e.g., Peregroy & Boyle, 2005) alike—indicates
that teachers are enjoined to avoid closed-ended questioning and encouraged to
pose questions that allow students to infer, predict, hypothesize, and evaluate.
In guiding their students toward discussion of children’s literature, for example,
teachers are reminded to “ask real questions, ones you do not know the answer to”
(Galda & Cullinan, 2002, p. 51). Such “real questions” go beyond the printed text
to invite student application of the text to their experience. Questions that simply
ask about events in the text, rather than about students’ personal responses to the
text, are presumed to squelch student dialogue.
We challenge the presumption that authentic questions hold the monopoly on
promoting student discussion. Indeed, without disavowing the primary value of
authentic questions, some recent research suggests that a degree of teacher
control—specifically questions encouraging students to adapt a “slightly efferent
stance” (along the aesthetic–efferent continuum; Rosenblatt, 1978/1994)—helps
foster student talk and high-level comprehension of literature (Soter & Rudge,
2005). One way that teachers promote high-level student responses is to struc-
ture questions, probes, or discourse frames as scaffolding for such responses
(Hynds, 1992; Smagorinsky & Fly, 1993; Soter & Rudge, 2005). Wells and
Chang Wells (1992) described such scaffolding practices as “contingently re-
sponsive to the students’ own efforts to make sense of the topic under investiga-
tion” (p. 33). That is, contingently responsive teacher behaviors promote growth
in discourse competence by deliberately creating opportunities for students to
144 BOYD AND RUBIN
enact key conversational roles: to initiate topics of discussion, to elaborate on

their own responses, or to direct substantive questions to fellow students. In
classrooms where contingently responsive teaching is practiced, and “a new
view of discussion” is enacted (Almasi, 1996), student talk performs a wider
range of functions than mere recitation or performance. It may be that the con-
tingency of a teacher’s question is more important than its authenticity vis-à-vis
its potency in promoting articulate student talk.
In an earlier classroom discourse analysis (Boyd, 2000; Boyd & Rubin, 2002),
our focal event was engaged student talk uttered by learners of English in a fourth-
and fifth-grade pull-out ELL class. We called instances of this important type of
engaged student talk student critical turns (SCTs).The definition of SCTs built es-
pecially on previous work characterizing student engagement and dialogic discus-
sion (Ernst, 1994; Nystrand, 1997; Nystrand & Gamoran, 1991). To qualify as an
SCT, an utterance needed to be (a) linguistically extended (single utterances of 10
seconds or more of uninterrupted talk), (b) structurally coherent, and (c) socially
engaged. We sought to characterize these SCTs and to understand the local condi-
tions preceding them. Teacher interactional roles and student interactional roles
immediately preceding occurrences of SCTs were remarkably similar; both teach-
ers and students adopted participant roles that sought to facilitate interpretation in
the classroom. However, teacher talk and student talk preceding SCTs were vastly
different in terms of how these participant roles were enacted. The dominant com-
municative function of student talk was extending and elaborating comments
(one’s own as well as those of others), but the dominant communicative function of
teacher talk was questioning. Questioning constituted 50.2% of teacher utterances,
a large proportion of which were traditional-seeming display questions to which
she obviously knew the answers. For example, a great many of these display ques-
tions queried students about details of actions from the trade books the students
and teacher were reading as the foundation of the instructional unit. Because the
teacher herself had selected these books, had used many in previous years, and had
read a good many of them aloud to the students, there could be no doubt to either
the students or to the researchers that she knew the answers to the recall questions
she was posing on those occasions.
The research reported here seeks to understand this unusual finding. How can a
teacher’s relatively closed questioning function to promote engaged and elabo-
rated student talk? We document the productive role of teacher questioning in en-
gendering SCTs and explicate a kind of teacher questioning that is contingently re-
sponsive to student utterances without falling into the IRE trap. In doing so, our
approach focuses not only on the linguistic structure of the teacher question (e.g.,
wh- question or yes–no question), nor just on the type of topic the teacher question
addresses (e.g., procedural, regulatory), but also on the function the question plays
growing from and engendering student talk. Like Nystrand (1997), we code ques-
tion events (i.e., the question is coded in terms of what it elicits), but we argue that
the degree to which the question builds on previous classroom contributions also
determines the function of the question.
THEORETIC BACKGROUND
Britton (1969/1990) reminded us that if students cannot talk in school, they lose
the action component of interaction. The importance of, and need for, student talk
in the classroom is not in dispute. The role that articulate student talk can play as a
path to literacy (Rubin, 1990) and as a vehicle for developing communicative prac-
tices (Canale & Swain, 1980; Hymes, 1972) is well documented. However, for talk
to promote literacy, communicative competencies, high-level thinking skills, and
academic achievement, students must participate in a wide array of classroom
events that encompass more than presentational or recitation-type student talk.
They must participate in meaningful and authentic conversational and instruc-
tional exchanges between and among students and teachers (Gutierrez, 1994;
Kamberelis, 2001; Nassaji & Wells, 2000). Although opportunities to participate
in consequential interactions in the classroom are important for all students, such
opportunities are especially critical for ELL students. Recognition of this need for
more dialogic classroom interaction has stimulated applied classroom research on
ways to promote such talk. Some first language research has focused on effects of
class and work group size on amount of student interaction. Clearly, smaller
groups have the potential to foster more student discussion; however, it is not the
group size but the discourse patterns that create classroom conditions that foster
student discussion (Marshall, Smagorinsky, & Smith, 1995).
Other studies have examined the impact of various instructional approaches to
literature study (e.g., literature circles, book clubs, collaborative reasoning) on pat-
terns of student discourse. The presumption is that literature can be a stimulus and
shared reference for discussion, that a shared textual experience will foster inter-
textual connections across and within texts, and that these connections will result
in text-based and personal response. Teacher educators typically urge more reader
response to literature and so advocate the kinds of authentic questioning that
encourage students to respond personally, assuming that authentic questions will
naturally foster in students the kinds of information synthesis and evaluation that
underlie critical thinking (see, e.g., Galda & Cullinan, 2002). Conversely, text-
based talk is presumed to encourage lower levels of comprehension and entail dis-
play questions, which elicit single-word answers rather than extended discussion.
That line of reasoning is why we are interested in comparing text-based and
non-text-based utterances.
One current review of nine literature-based approaches to promoting student
discussion supports the primary role of student knowledge of text over formal dis-
cussion techniques in determining the quality of student talk (Soter & Rudge,
146 BOYD AND RUBIN
2005). Indeed, this review across nine literature discussion approaches found
“very little incidence” (p. 12) of either teacher or student talk that made inter-
textual connections across books. Based on similar expectations about the potency
of literature for directing talk, literature-based instruction, or theme-based instruc-
tion incorporating picture books and trade books, is likewise a common approach
in ELL classrooms (e.g., Peregroy & Boyle, 2005). Thus, in our study we sought to
uncover the extent to which student utterances were based on the text (i.e., you
needed to have read the text to have made them) or personal response to the text
(i.e., utterances that may have been stimulated by or related to the text but that
could have been made without having read the text).

Dialogically organized instruction is the antidote to tired, formulaic, and frag-
mented talk in classrooms. According to proponents like Gambrell and Almasi
(1996), Christoph and Nystrand (2001), and Wells and Chang Wells (1992),
dialogic instruction (a) promotes student engagement and learning, (b) involves
fewer teacher questions and more conversational turns, and (c) is relatively un-
predictable because it is negotiated as teachers and students “pick up on, elabo-
rate and question what students say” (Nystrand, 1997, p. 7). What most teachers
call discussion is in fact elaborated recitation—a “question and answer discus-
sion” (Christoph & Nystrand, 2001, p. 250; see also Smagorinsky & Fly, 1993).
In his studies of 35 urban English high school classrooms, Nystrand (see also
Applebee et al., 2003; Nystrand & Gamoran, 1991; Nystrand, Wu, Gamoran,
Zeisener, & Long, 2003) reported that, in general, teachers asked more than 90%
of classroom questions, of which about a third were authentic. About a third of
those authentic questions were marked by uptake of student-generated topics. A
supplemental qualitative look at individual classrooms in Nystrand’s study indi-
cated that three teacher strategies were generally associated with promoting stu-
dent talk: (a) developing an ethos of involvement and respect by building on
student backgrounds and interests, (b) using scaffolding and specific ways of
phrasing questions to encourage discussion, and (c) acknowledging and making
space for the presence of students’ interpersonal relationships (Christoph &
Nystrand, 2001).
TEACHER QUESTIONING
The general body of instructional research on teacher questioning valorizes au-

thentic questioning and indicts display questions. After all, an estimated 80% of all
teacher questions in secondary schools merely elicit student recall in a recitation
format (Christoph & Nystrand, 2001). The dominant IRE and IRF instructional
practice is criticized for not providing opportunities for students to ask questions,
nominate topics of interest, and negotiate meaning (Cullen, 2002). A study of pat-
terns of discourse in literature discussions across four fourth-grade classrooms
(Chinn et al., 2001) reported that an average of 91.6% of the teacher turns involved
a teacher question in recitation-style classrooms, and 70.8% in collaborative rea-
soning discussions “intended to stimulate critical reading and thinking and to be
personally engaging” (p. 383). These questions were divided into assessment
questions, genuine information questions, open-ended questions, and challenge
questions. The collaborative reasoning approach was heralded for its higher per-
centage of open ended questions (56.3% as compared to only 30.2% in recitations)
and its lower percentage of assessment questions (8.5% as compared to 52.9% in a
recitation-driven class).
Although authentic questions may help produce classroom climates favorable

to student talk, at least some evidence suggests that display questions may not be
unequivocally deleterious to classroom dialogue. Two studies reexamined spe-
cific classrooms in Nystrand and Gamoran’s (1991) large-scale survey of high
school English classes and challenge the assumption that authentic questions
lead to dialogic instruction and display questions squelch student talk (Christoph
& Nystrand, 2001; Kachur & Prendergast, 1997). Kachur and Prendergast’s
comparison of two classrooms revealed that the classroom in which the teacher,
Ms. Jansen, asked authentic questions 70% of the time was characterized by a
lack of student engagement. In another classroom, where she asked authentic
questions only 32% of the time, the students were more engaged. Clearly, a look
at the structure of questions was insufficient to capture what was happening in
those classrooms. The role of the reading text, the participant roles assumed by
teachers and students, teacher–student interactions, and classroom culture were
all investigated as possible factors explaining how inauthentic teacher question-
ing could be associated with high student engagement in Ms. Jansen’s class.
Kachur and Prendergast concluded that it was the classroom culture of taking
students seriously that led to student engagement and overrode the type of
teacher questioning that in some other classroom culture might have extin-
guished dialogue. The creation of this “ethos of mutual respect” (p. 88) was fur-
ther developed by Christoph and Nystrand; these researchers explained how it is
possible to find teacher inauthentic (display) questions prevailing in dialogic
classrooms. Because these studies both pertain to high school first language
English instruction, it remains to determine if their findings also hold for ELL
instruction and for elementary-level classrooms.
The ethos of mutual respect (Christoph & Nystrand, 2001) implies contingency
among classroom utterances. That is, in a classroom characterized by mutual
respect, neither teachers nor students are primarily motivated to initiate new topics
of their own choosing. Rather, they are invested in listening and responding to the
utterances of others, thus extending topical episodes. We argue that contingency is
thus a manifestation of the classroom culture, a culture of taking the students seri-
ously and building on and extending what is presented in their contributions. Our
own previous work (Boyd & Rubin, 2002), along with findings such as those
148 BOYD AND RUBIN
reported by Kachur and Prendergast (1997), offers the possibility that teacher
display questions in the context of a culture of contingent discourse possess the
capacity to promote student dialogue. Central to an understanding of contingency
is explicating how such practices that give students their own language back and
build on student contributions are filtered by the classroom context. This article ad-
dresses the conditions under which display questions are likely to be facilitative
and assesses the notion that it is a question’s contingency and not necessarily its
authenticity that accounts for its power to engender student talk.
METHOD
This article is based on observations originally conducted in conjunction with

Boyd and Rubin’s (2002) research in a selected fourth- and fifth-grade ELL class-
room over the course of a 6-week science unit on the subject of whales. Our initial
study revealed the classroom teacher’s preference for questioning (over half of her
utterances were questions) and her unusual and extensive use of closed display
questions in those topical episodes containing elaborated student talk. This study
extends that work by recoding and reanalyzing teacher questions along the dimen-
sions of question authenticity and contingency, dimensions not examined in that
previous research. Moreover, this study situates this teacher’s use of questioning in
the broader context of a classroom culture of contingency.
Purpose of This Study

The purpose of this study was to examine teacher questioning in terms of contin-
gency, authenticity, and text-based or non-text-based content to better understand
how a teacher may use questioning to promote student engaged and elaborated talk
as indicated by the presence of SCTs. SCTs are tangible markers of communica-
tive and academic competence in the linguistic and collaborative elements that em-
body joint meaning making. For all learners, but for ELL students in particular,
SCTs stand as indicators of linguistic and academic competence and are opportu-
nities for students to make personally meaningful contributions to the learning pro-
cess. The specific research questions driving this study were the following:
RQ1: How do patterns of teacher display questions versus authentic questions

affect student production of extended, dialogic talk?
RQ2: How do patterns of teacher questions that are contingent on previous stu-
dent utterances affect student production of extended, dialogic talk?
RQ3: How do patterns of teacher questions that are based on texts versus based
on student experience affect student production of extended, dialogic
talk?
Context as a Funneling Frame

The importance of context as a means to “properly understand, interpret appropri-
ately, or describe in relevant fashion” (Goodwin & Duranti, 1992, p. 3) is recog-
nized here. What we determine as context shapes what can be seen or not seen and
delineates the resources for potential interpretation. Context in this article is a fun-
neling frame that directs attention to the focal event: teacher questioning preceding
the linguistically extended, structurally coherent, socially engaged student utter-
ances we have termed SCTs. Member checks by the classroom teacher, Ms. Char-
lotte, were conducted on three narrative profiles. Profile I consists of a brief history
of the school and the ELL program. Profile II focuses on the classroom—the ELL
teacher, students, and the classroom discourse norms. Profile III focuses on the
6-week instructional unit on whales. These narrative profiles (Boyd, 2000) were
the sources for information provided here regarding the four elements of related
context: research site, teacher, students, and curriculum.
Research Site
We wanted to examine a class in which engaged student talk would be a hall-
mark of the classroom discourse. However, we were aware of research that re-
veals that although teachers might think they are promoting engaged student
talk, it is rarely produced in the classroom (e.g., Marshall et al., 1995). We there-
fore carefully selected a “best case scenario” (Le Compte & Preissle, 1993): a
fourth- and fifth-grade ELL classroom of small group size (6 students) where the
teacher, Ms. Charlotte (a self-chosen pseudonym, as are all the names in this
study), was recognized as an instructional leader in ELL throughout the school
district. To confirm the status of this classroom as a best case scenario with re-
spect to valuing and promoting student talk, the first author observed once a
week for 4 months before formal data collection commenced. Moreover, ex-
tended time in the classroom prior to data collection allowed the students to be-
come familiar with the presence of a researcher and allowed the researcher to
become familiar with the norms of classroom participation. In addition, we se-
lected a class in which the students had already spent at least 1 year learning
English. A further characteristic of this classroom that appealed was the
teacher’s lack of a prescribed curriculum. This teacher was free to tailor content
of instruction to match the needs and interests of her students.
Teacher
Ms. Charlotte, an experienced, well-respected teacher, had been teaching for 15
years and had been recognized by her district as Teacher of the Year. Her principal
describer her in a field interview as “a first-class educator … and a friend to inter-
150 BOYD AND RUBIN
national students and their families.” She was fluent in English and Spanish and
held a master’s degree. Ms. Charlotte planned conscientiously and with access to
considerable resources, many of which she had purchased herself, and she de-
scribed herself as first and foremost responsive to students’ interests and needs.
The first author witnessed several classes in which Ms. Charlotte entirely set aside
an excellent lesson plan to instead develop and respond to student concerns, inter-
est, or lack of interest. Ms. Charlotte was very involved with the immigrant com-
munities in which her students lived. She often explained a student’s behavior in
class in relation to a new home development. For example, in one interview, Ms.
Charlotte explained why she was refraining from pushing one particular student to
participate. The student’s mother had just been involved in a car accident and she
was giving this student “some space.”
Students
The class consisted of 6 fourth- and fifth-grade students who were members of a
pull-out ELL program for 3.75 hours per week. The 4 boys and 2 girls included one
set of twins and another set of siblings. The first language backgrounds of the stu-
dents were Mandarin, Spanish, and Urdu. Family backgrounds ranged from par-
ents illiterate in their mother language to parents studying in English at the univer-
sity nearby. Each of the students was in at least the second year of learning English,
and each was able to communicate age-appropriate thoughts and ideas in English.
Students were pleased to be in Ms. Charlotte’s classroom; it was not uncommon
for them to rush to class early and complain when they had to leave to return to
their regular classes.
Curriculum
Ms. Charlotte’s approach to teaching ELL was thematic and literature based. She
described the thematic units as at times teacher selected and at times student re-
quested. The 6-week instructional unit under study was selected by the teacher and
pertained to whales. It was a unit she had taught before, and it dovetailed with the
annual fifth-grade marine field trip.
More than 100 texts related to whales were housed within the classroom for in-
dividual perusal, reference, and home reading. At least 30 printouts from the
Internet were also available to students in the classroom. A total of 14 picture
books (fiction and nonfiction) and poems were read out loud by Ms. Charlotte to
the whole class. The shared read-aloud experience typically framed the classroom
discourse. This unit culminated in two connected major activities. One was an in-
dividual research project on a particular whale (written report and illustrations),
and the second was hosting a booth at the school-wide fair that showcased the stu-
dents’ research on whales.
Data Collection
The first author, Maureen, spent more than 5 months in this classroom, although
formal data collection comprised only the final 6 weeks. As one lesson cannot rep-
resent all kinds of classroom talk, we wanted to capture the cycle of activities that
make up a complete instructional unit spanning an extended period of time: variety
of texts, tasks, and interactions. Maureen played no part in the selection of the in-
structional unit, however. As an English as a second language and English litera-
ture teacher herself for almost 15 years, she functioned as a “participant-observer”
(Glesne & Peshkin, 1992, p. 54). That is, she responded in an authentic fashion
when students addressed her or asked for her help, but she initiated no interactions
in the classroom other than exchanges of greetings and pleasantries.
Maureen interviewed (and audiotaped) Ms. Charlotte every lunch period, im-
mediately after class. She collected class artifacts, assignments, and teacher
planning notes and received written responses from Ms. Charlotte about her
choice of the 14 class texts. Entire class sessions were observed and video- and
audiotaped for 21 class meetings during the 6-week span of the whales unit. All
students were present and class was uninterrupted by assemblies or other extra-
neous events on 14 class meetings, and these 14 days comprised the corpus on
which discourse analyses were conducted. After eliminating the socioemotional
and procedural talk that typically began each class session and preceded talk re-
lated to the whales unit (a range of 3–16 minutes were eliminated, or an average
of 9 minutes per day), 10.4 hours of recorded talk became the primary data
source.
From these audio recordings, text transcriptions were made of all topical epi-
sodes containing at least one SCT. To identify these episodes, first all uninter-
rupted student utterances of 10 seconds or more were located. (Unacknowledged
cotalk was acceptable, such as a teacher’s affirming “aha” or a student bid for the
floor that was unacknowledged by the speaker.) One hundred fifty-six such longer
turns of talk appeared within the corpus. These longer turns of talk qualified as
SCTs if they met the additional criteria of coherence and uptake from a previous
turn of talk. Two independent coders identified (a) longer turns of student talk, (b)
beginning and ending boundaries of the topical episodes in which those long turns
occurred, and (c) all utterances meeting all three criteria for SCTs. Interrater reli-
ability (Scott’s Pi) for all these coding decisions exceeded 93% following training
on a discourse sample that was excluded from the data set.
Each turn of talk (TOT) or continuous utterance—including SCTs—was
treated as embedded in a topical episode. Topical episodes were defined as all
TOTs or utterances lying between topic shifts. Topic shifts were coded as ex-
plicit topical markers uttered by teacher or students to take the conversation into
another direction. They were established a posteriori and with deep familiarity
with the data, and they represented the researchers’ best attempt to impose the
152 BOYD AND RUBIN
smallest possible units that had internal coherence. Sometimes, for example, a
student anecdote that was then built on by the other students in retrospect turned
out to have initiated a topical shift. For example, “This lady she was swimming
in a beach and …” might mark the beginning of a topical episode if the subse-
quent discourse asked for clarification of this event or commented on it. It was
important to define boundaries of these episodes because contingencies among
utterances were considered only within boundaries of topical episodes. No
cross-episode relations among utterances were analyzed (although of course in a
class such as this these cohesive links across episodes were plentiful). In all, 52
SCTs appeared in 45 different topical episodes.
Coding Teacher Utterances

A total of 187 intelligible teacher utterances (as compared with 348 student utter-
ances) occurred within the 45 topical episode sequences at points preceding SCTs.
Each teacher utterance was coded for participant role and communicative function.
The communicative functions of teacher utterances pertain to how an utterance
functions, that is, the ways in which the teacher enacted a participant role. A
23-category coding was closely adapted from Ernst’s (1994) functional analysis of
student and teacher utterances. This coding scheme included options such as ex-
plaining, interrupting, editing, elaborating, and reading text aloud.
Among those 23 coded communicative functions are the three key categories
of importance in this study: display questions, authentic questions, and clarifica-
tion requests. If the teacher was presumed to know the answer to the question,
we coded the question as a display question. If the teacher was presumed not to
know the answer to the question, then the question was coded as authentic. A
clarification request was a message directed to bring about explanations or
redefinitions of a preceding utterance. Distinguishing authentic questions from
display questions on the basis of the transcript—and especially in light of rich
knowledge of classroom context—was rarely difficult. We knew the teacher had
read the texts under discussion, and so when she asked an information question
about the content of a text (absent cues to the contrary), her utterance was as-
sumed to be a display question. Two independent coders achieved over 95%
simple agreement in applying the full taxonomy of 23 communicative functions.
The first author resolved discrepancies.
Of the 187 teacher utterances preceding SCTs, 94 were coded as question
functions—either authentic, display, or clarification. These questions were then
coded for the participant roles (i.e., teacher roles) they supported. Participant
roles pertain to one of five general purposes of a classroom utterance derived
from the classic taxonomy of Flanders (1973) and updated by more recent revi-
sions (e.g., Almasi, 1996): (a) to initiate interaction, lead, or direct the discourse;
(b) to respond to what has been said (can be a question depending on the con-
text); (c) to evaluate by challenging each other’s ideas, by telling whether they
agree or disagree and telling why; (d) to facilitate interpretation by restating or
trying to question what others have said if not clear, or by relating a topic or is-
sue to one’s own experiences to assist understanding; and (e) to facilitate interac-
tion by encouraging participation, ensuring students stick to the topic, or ensur-
ing that all members take turns.
Further categorization, in addition to communicative functions and participant
roles, was performed on the 94 teacher questions appearing in the data. We made a
distinction between questions that (a) built topically on previous student utterances
and (b) merely sought to elicit student recitation of known information for assess-
ment purposes. The latter perform the initial bid in an IRE-type sequence. In con-
trast, questions that built on, extended, or responded to preceding student utter-
ances were deemed to be contingent questions. If a question appeared as the first
turn of an episode—a not infrequent gambit for initiating a new topic—it was nec-
essarily coded as noncontingent (in the local context of the topical episode). Other
more clearly recitative questions were those that, for example, repeated an earlier
teacher question within the same topical episode without acknowledging any inter-
vening student response. On the other hand, questions that invited students to com-
ment on or expand another student’s answer or that asked students to continue an-
other student’s line of response were coded as contingent. The first author and
another researcher unfamiliar with the data achieved 98% simple agreement cod-
ing teacher question contingency.
Some teacher educators have expressed concern that closely text-based effer-
ent questioning is likely to stifle student talk (see, e.g., Vacca & Vacca, 2005, pp.
143–145). Therefore, we were also interested in whether teacher questions pre-
ceding SCTs in this classroom were directly related to the literature that was the
lesson focus. Because this class was thematically organized around the topic of
whales and was literature based, all the talk was to some degree related to the
texts. To impose a coding scheme that would be procedurally consequential, we
determined that for an utterance to be classified as text-based, it required direct
experience of the text for the utterance to be formulated and for the denotation
of all reference to be understood. That is, text-based utterances are unlikely to
have been formulated by someone lacking direct knowledge of one of the spe-
cific texts used in this thematic unit. They could not be formulated just on the
basis of prior knowledge. For example, a question mentioning the name of a
character would be coded as text-based. Non-text-based references included ut-
terances that may have been stimulated by the text but could also have been for-
mulated on the basis of prior knowledge. For example, a stream of conversation
relating to how to build an igloo in Episode 25 was as a non-text-based refer-
ence. In point of fact, the topic of how to build an igloo was inspired by a read-
ing of Kayuktuk: An Arctic Quest (Heinz, 1996), but the utterances could have
been based on knowledge and opinion drawn from other experiences. The first
154 BOYD AND RUBIN
author and another researcher unfamiliar with the data achieved 100% agreement
coding for text- or non-text-based questioning.
RESULTS
One way to ascertain the conditions that facilitated student talk was to examine
the utterances sequentially preceding each SCT (within the bounds of the the-
matic episodes in which those SCTs were embedded). Questioning, especially

teacher questioning, was a dominant discourse pattern within the talk episodes
that contained SCTs. A total of 122 questions were tabulated, 77% (94) of which
were issued by the teacher. That contrasts with the teacher’s overall output of
talk, which comprised less than one third of the total utterances. Over 50% of
Ms. Charlotte’s 187 utterances were questions. Teacher questions occurred in
84% (38) of the 45 topical episodes containing SCTs. The teacher’s top three
communicative functions—of the 23 functions coded—were display questions
(19%), authentic questions (18%), and clarification requests (14%). We consider
these three types of questioning in turn to assess the extent to which each ques-
tion may be contingent, that is, builds on, extends, or responds to student utter-
ances. In contrast to contingent questioning is recitative questioning, or teacher
talk that engenders a fill-in-the-blank performance response. Table 1 provides
summary data.
Clarification Requests
Twenty-eight percent (26) of Ms. Charlotte’s questions were clarification requests.
These appeared in 18 out of the 45 episodes that contained SCTs. Clarification re-
quests by definition build on previous utterances because they request clarifica-
tions of those utterances. It is therefore not surprising that virtually all of the 26
TABLE 1
Cross-Tabulation of Question Contingency With Communicative Functions
of Teacher Questions Contained in Episodes
Engendering Student Critical Turns
Display Authentic Clarification Total

Questions Questions Requests Questions
No. of turns of talk/episodes 35/15 33/25 26/18 94/38

Initiate topic 2 13 1 16
Contingent on previous utterance 31 19 25 75
Recitative 2 1 0 3
Note. Seven episodes containing student critical turns contained no teacher questions.
teacher clarification requests were coded as contingent on student utterances. (The

single anomaly was coded as noncontingent because our coding conventions
counted any episode-initial utterance as noncontingent in the context of that epi-
sode.) It is equally unsurprising to find that clarification requests are in prominent
use in an ELL class. ELL teachers are trained to engage in restatement or recasting
of learner utterances to model correct pronunciation or grammar. In this class,
most of the clarification requests were short verbal or factual clarifications. For ex-
ample, a student’s contribution, “on the net,” results in the teacher clarification,
“Internet?” When another student asks, “Can you read that again?” the teacher
clarifies, “The last one?” Longer clarifications do occur when students are relating
personal experiences, and the teacher seeks to get the facts clear. For example,
when a student is reporting about what he had seen on TV (“They say, I think, they
said that it was a whale ’cause she was pregnant and she was swimming in the
beach and then something attacked her”), the teacher requests clarification (“And
they thought it was a whale that attacked her?”). Moreover, Ms. Charlotte’s display
questions provided the kind of elaborated help and practice needed to encourage
students to “clarify and reorganize the material in their own minds to make it un-
derstandable to others” (Webb, Farivar, & Mastergeorge, 2002, p. 13).
Clearly, Ms. Charlotte listened to student contributions and facilitated their in-
terpretation using clarification questions. Even the single clarification request that
was anomalously coded as noncontingent because it was deemed the first turn of a
new episode does build on a previous student utterance (one located in a previous
episode). The teacher clarifies, “OK, so what you are saying [is] that when the
whale comes out, the man might think that the whale cares about him?” The
teacher thus renders socially significant the student’s contribution in the previous
episode (about the whale caring) by making the student comment the focus of fur-
ther discussion in a new topical episode (Bloome & Egan-Robertson, 1993), de-
voting an entire new topical episode to the student’s interest.
Authentic Questions
Teacher educators generally advocate authentic questions for promoting student
talk. For example, Soter and Rudge’s (2005) review of nine instructional ap-
proaches to discussion concludes “we believe that our analyses have confirmed the
value of authentic questions (and what they elicit) as a useful measure for captur-
ing high level thinking during the course of the discussion” (p. 17). To be sure, in
these data, authentic questioning was the focal teacher’s second most prevalent
communicative function, constituting 18% of all her total pre-SCT utterances (33
out of 156 utterances) and 35% of her total pre-SCT questions. It was no surprise to
uncover that 39% (13) of these authentic questions were the first turns of talk in
their respective episodes. That is, authentic questions were commonly used to ini-
tiate a new topical episode. Four of these episode-initiating questions incorporated
156 BOYD AND RUBIN
“who [or what] do you think …” into the question, and four explicitly invited per-
sonal opinion resulting from experience. These included questions such as “Could
that happen to anybody … ?” or “Do they believe you … ?” As topic-initiating ut-
terances, those 13 authentic questions were ineligible to be coded as contingent,
however.
Of the remaining 20 authentic teacher questions preceding SCTs, all were
coded contingent. Talk Sample 1 contains two authentic questions at TOTs 5 and
18. (She begins another likely authentic question at line 7, but students talk over it.)
Talk Sample 1: SCT 40, Episode 37 (SCT is indicated by bold; teacher authentic
question is indicated by bold italics and underlining)
1 Ms. Charlotte: Only kill it for the things you need, ah
2 Zach: Yeah
3 Ms. Charlotte: And not kill it for
4 Zach: For food
5 Ms. Charlotte: The fun of killing it. Do you think that ever happens?
6 Zach: Yes and no
7 Ms. Charlotte: Do you think whales ever …
8 PD: You would be in jail if you did that
9 Ms. Charlotte: huh?
10 PD: You would be killed if you do that
11 Steve: It’s the law
12 Jordan: They might not notice you kill the whale
13 PD: If you just kill the whale for no reason
14 Zach: For fun
15 PD: You would go to jail
16 Zach: No, you going to get killed
17 Jordan: You might not even get caught just find a dead whale
18 Ms. Charlotte: Ah, so do you think sometimes people might get away with things
like that?
19 Steve: Yeah
20 Jordan: Yes, because they might not even know if they killed
21 Zach: Everybody didn’t, the police only like killed, like, um like, in a
year only like 1,000 people killed whale and the police like only
caught 100 people. Nine hundred people get away.
22 Ms. Charlotte: So there are people that get away with
23 Zach: Nine hundred people.
The likely but incomplete teacher authentic question ignored by the students in
Talk Sample 1 was an attempt by the teacher to redirect the discourse (TOT 7: Do
you think whales ever …). No wonder the students ignored her. She had ignored
Zach’s contribution of “yes and no.” Perhaps she was about to restate her earlier
question to further scaffold his utterance, or perhaps she was moving the discus-
sion on with her question. In any case, she was interrupted by PD. The conversa-
tional nature of the student talk is captured as they repeatedly interrupt each other
(and the teacher). Kachur and Prendergast (1997) claimed that interruptions by
teacher or students can be a sign of dialogic engagement or shutting down. Clearly
in this case the students were not shut down. Rather, they built on each other’s con-
tributions. PD took over the conversation at TOT 8, and Steve and Jordan inter-
jected at TOT 11 and 12. Student talk continued and the teacher contributed to the
discussion (TOT 18) with an authentic question that three students answered in
turn—Steve (TOT 19), Jordan (TOT 20), and Zach, who produced an SCT (TOT
21). The contingency of Ms. Charlotte’s question at TOT 18 is evident in the fact
that it abandoned completely the line of questioning she had unsuccessfully at-
tempted to insert back at TOT 7. That is, Ms. Charlotte was evidently willing to
drop her former agenda and adopt that of the children. The students’ dominance in
this discourse episode was asserted again in its final turns. Although in TOT 22 the
teacher followed up Steve’s SCT, she was again interrupted with the students’ em-
phatic confirmation: “Nine hundred people” (TOT 23).
Display Questions
Display questions were the most frequently deployed communicative function
overall for this teacher, making up 19% (35) of her total pre-SCT utterances and
37% of her total questions within episodes containing SCTs. This dominance of
display questions was an unexpected finding, because classroom discourse re-
search does not typically associate display questions with student discussion (e.g.,
Chinn et al., 2001; Nystrand, 1997; Soter & Rudge, 2005). Yet, we had systemati-
cally and comprehensively documented these students as producing more utter-
ances and more dialogic chains of utterances than is typically reported for tradi-
tional classrooms. In fact, the very reason why these particular 52 episodes of talk
were subjected to intense analysis was their highly dialogic nature; they all con-
tained at least one SCT. Thus display questions were used with considerable fre-
quency, but apparently not with the expected deleterious consequences.
Of the 35 teacher display questions, two were the first turns of talk in their re-
spective episodes (and so were coded as noncontingent by virtue of their initiating
the episode). Of the remaining 33 display questions, only two were coded as
noncontingent or recitative. In one of these cases the teacher was explicitly refer-
ring to the text in front of the students. Her utterance “But then, look at this thing.
What is this thing?” (Episode 2, TOT 3) directs the students’ attention to a picture
in a trade book they were reading. The other display question (that occurred in an
eligible slot) coded as noncontingent was sandwiched into a cascade of questions
that was central to Talk Sample 3, presented and discussed later. The teacher’s dis-
play question, “Now where can we find his address, I wonder” (TOT 5) constitutes
an intrusion on her part. (Note, however, that even this intrusion does not repress
the overall direction of the conversation.)
158 BOYD AND RUBIN
Eighty-eight percent (31) of the teacher display questions were not intrusions;
they were contingent on prior student utterances. The following excerpt encom-
passes a cascade of display questions initially eliciting the characteristic one-word
student responses found in many IRE sequences. However, Ms. Charlotte did not
accept such responses. Rather she continued her display questioning, albeit in a
most contingent manner, and succeeded finally in prying loose an extended
response.
Talk Sample 2: SCT 32, Episode 29 (SCT is indicated by bold; teacher display
1 Lucy: It could happen
2 Rosey: Yeah, but when mother fox, I mean when he, I mean she walked it
didn’t leave a track, how come when, um …
3 PD: Because she didn’t walk on snow
4 Steve: Yes she was
5 Lucy: Yes she was
6 Zach: A little
7 Ms. Charlotte: OK, was she walking on any snow, ever?
8 Steve: Yes
9 Lucy: Yeah
10 PD: Yes
11 Jordan: No
12 Ms. Charlotte: OK, let’s go back to what Zach says, Zach says that he could take
out one of the baby foxes and put the fox print into the snow. What
do you think would happen if he reached in to take one of the
foxes? What had happened …
13 PD: Oh yeah
14 Ms. Charlotte: What had happened when he got close to
15 Zach: HSSSSSSSS, HSSSSSSSS
16 Ms. Charlotte: So what do you think she would probably do?
17 PD: Bite
18 Ms. Charlotte: What would she do? (no response) OK, so do you think that he
picked up the fox? What do you think Steve? -you had your hand
up
19 Steve: I was thinking about the other question you did, about leaving the
print in the snow
20 Ms. Charlotte: OK, what did you think?
21 Steve: I think his um like when he’s walking he’s uses his tail going like
that and the snows cover his print. The snow after his tail is go-
ing like that
22 Ms. Charlotte: OK, so he is brushing away the print
In this excerpt the class was discussing the picture book Kayuktuk: An Arctic
Quest (Heinz, 1996) and the clues in the story that showed how the elders knew
that Kayuktuk had successfully completed his quest, but had chosen not to capture
the fox. All but one of the seven teacher utterances in this episode were questions.
(The exception is the teacher affirmation following the SCT in TOT 22.) Four of
the seven teacher turns were display questions. Ms. Charlotte was not satisfied
with the one-word responses her students were proffering. Through her rapid-fire
questioning she was leading the students to an understanding of an earlier student
question (TOT 2: Rosey: Yeah, but when mother fox, I mean when he, I mean she
walked it didn’t leave a track, how come when, um …). Furthermore, although the
teacher’s stream of questioning focused on what Kayuktuk did, when Steve wanted
to return it to Rosey’s original question about the lack of tracks in the snow, the
teacher sanctioned that move. The entire series of Ms. Charlotte’s display ques-
tions shows that she was listening to student utterances, taking them seriously, and
then crafting questions that acknowledged student contributions and allowed stu-
dents to shape and redirect the focus of the talk.
Patterns can be characterized by what is not present in them, as well as by what
is. Central to this pattern of teacher discourse—so facilitative of student talk de-
spite its frequent display questions—is the lack of teacher evaluation, the typical
terminal element in normative IRE classroom discourse. Ms. Charlotte’s disincli-
nation to use evaluation moves is even more evident in Talk Sample 3. Even when
Zach (at TOT 32) has explicitly contradicted her explanation, she withholds any
evaluative comment.
Talk Sample 3: SCT 1, Episode 1 (SCT is indicated by bold; teacher display

1 Zach: Is he dead? Or alive?
2 Ms. Charlotte: He’s still alive
3 Rosey: He’s alive
4 PD: You can tell his [unintelligible] on [unintelligible]
5 Ms. Charlotte: Where might we find his address I wonder?
6 Rosey: In the computer
7 Zach: Computer
8 Jordan: Yeah
9 Zach: Dictionary
10 Ms. Charlotte: Where would we look in the computer? In the dictionary?
11 Zach: No, on the other … Encarta
12 Lucy: No, in the other card catalog
13 Zach: Not dictionary
14 PD: On the net
15 Zach: Yeah, on the net, On the net
16 Ms. Charlotte: Internet?
17 Zach: Yeah, yeah the Internet
18 PD: Encarta
19 Ms. Charlotte: Internet. If we put in Ed Young’s name, we might
160 BOYD AND RUBIN
20 Zach: Find more books about him

21 Ms. Charlotte: We might find his address, because a lot of times, well, we could
find but if we were looking on the Internet, we also might find his
address.
22 Zach: Yeah
23 Ms. Charlotte: Does anyone in here have the Internet at their house?
24 Lucy: No.
25 Zach: No. I think the library XX do, I think the library do
26 Ms. Charlotte: Would you like to put his name in and see if you could find his ad-
dress because a lot of times they put in where he lives. If you click
on the one that says People
27 Steve: People Search
28 Ms. Charlotte: Right, People Search
29 Zach: Ms. Charlotte, um, I know, um in the library when they have a spe-
cial kind of CD that says on the Internet
30 PD: It’s Encarta 97
31 Ms. Charlotte: Encarta. OK, Encarta is not like an Internet, Encarta is like an ency-
clopedia. It is just on a CD.
32 Zach: No, I think it’s a different one see. I think that the library book
like the name book, the name and then pushy, pushy, pushy and
then then the author and then tell you where he live
33 Ms. Charlotte: Does it?
34 Zach: Yeah
The class was discussing one of their favorite illustrators, Ed Young. Zach
asked if he was dead or alive (TOT 1), and Ms. Charlotte answered factually (TOT
2). Another two students also responded. It then appeared that Ms. Charlotte de-
cided to exploit this student interest to teach a study skill—finding information.
The focus of this class was a K-W-L chart (a graphic organizer to document what
students Know, what students Want to know, and what students Learned; Ogle,
1986) on whales. Ms. Charlotte had already planned to teach a component on
where and how to obtain further information. She adapted her plan by weaving the
student contributions about Ed Young into the formula. “Where might we find his
address I wonder?” (TOT 5) was a display question, as the teacher surely knew
some research strategies. Student suggestions included computers and the dictio-
nary, so she wove both student utterances into her formulation of another display
question, “Where would we look in the computer? In the dictionary?” (TOT 10).
Students then publicly explored this display question (TOTs 11–15). Ms. Charlotte
posed an authentic question at TOT 23, and ultimately, her line of questioning led
to Zach’s SCT at TOT 32. This SCT constituted a complete refutation of Ms. Char-
lotte’s explanation at TOT 31. Clearly the sequence of teacher display questions—
as enacted in this particular discourse climate—did not constrain student response
as some authorities on classroom discourse might predict, but instead, the teacher
display question here helped enable it.
How, then, do display questions in this episode differ from authentic questions
in affecting student production of extended, dialogic talk (Research Question 1)?
The display questions are more directive and function to elicit specific details or
further develop the logic of a thought. In fact, it can be argued that they facilitate
higher level thinking in that they push the student to further articulate or defend his
or her contribution (see Wilkinson et al., 2005, for a similar conclusion). These dis-
play questions therefore enable teachers to scaffold a more elaborated student re-
sponse than might otherwise be the case. Central to this purpose, however, is that
the teacher’s questions build on previous student utterances.
How, then, do patterns of teacher questions that are contingent on previous

student utterances affect student production of extended, dialogic talk (Research
Question 2)? As in the preceding talk samples, Ms. Charlotte not uncommonly
produced a stream of questions in a series. She pushed the students to provide
more information until the students were able to launch themselves into an elab-
orated response: an SCT. Scaffolding students to elaborated and articulate
speech is the function of these contingent display questions. The teacher often
gave the student back his or her own words, often rephrased or restated in more
native-like grammar for the student to respond to again (Research Question 2).
This teacher’s recasting in display questions is reminiscent of the recasting pre-
viously seen in clarification questions. Like recasting strategies parents use
when socializing young children into appropriate discourse practices (Snow &
Hoefnagel-Hohle, 1982), Ms. Charlotte appears to integrate into her questioning
the recasting strategy that is the stock-in-trade of ELL teachers for purposes of
modeling target language (Lyster, 1998).
Our third research question concerned patterns of teacher questions that are
based on texts versus based on student experience and how they affect student
production of extended, dialogic talk. In analyzing content-based reading discus-
sions (e.g., Alvermann, Dillon, & O’Brien, 1987) such as those utilized in the
literature-based curriculum at this research site, the degree to which questions
were text-based or non-text-based questions is of central interest. Teachers are
often trained to begin discussions of readings with text-based questions to ascer-
tain lower levels of comprehension (e.g., elements of plot or characterization;
Alvermann & Phelps, 2005). Ms. Charlotte’s query, “Singing whales indeed.
Have your parents or anyone or anyone else ever told you a story that maybe
other people wouldn’t agree with or think that is foolish to think about those
kind of things?” (Episode 38) illustrates non-text-based authentic questioning
drawn from these data. It is non-text-based because a student need not have read
The Whales’ Song (Sheldon, 1991) to answer it. But what about the contingency
of such questions? Is it possible that text-based questions can be just as contin-
gent on preceding student talk as are non-text-based questions?
Table 2 displays frequencies of text-based and non-text-based teacher questions
across the functions of communication. Display questions were comprised of a
162 BOYD AND RUBIN
TABLE 2
Cross-Tabulation of Question Text-Based Status With Communicative
Functions of Teacher Questions Contained in Episodes
Engendering Student Critical Turns
Display Authentic Clarification Total

Text-based questions 16 (45.7%) 11 (33.3%) 14 (53.8%) 41 (43.6%)

Non-text-based questions 19 (54.3%) 22 (66.6%) 12 (46.2%) 53 (56.4%)
fairly equal proportion of text-based (16 out of the total of 35, or 46%), and non-
text-based (54%) questions. “What kind of whale was it? Do you know?” Ms.
Charlotte asked Jordan as he recounted a story the class had read of a man attacked
by a whale (Episode 18). A similar proportion was found for clarification requests;
just about half (14 out of the total of 26, or 54%) of teacher clarification requests
were text-based.
Not surprisingly, however, the distribution of text-based and non-text-based
teacher questions presented a different picture in the case of authentic questioning.
There were twice as many authentic non-text-based questions (22 out of the total of
33, or 66%) as text-based questions. Clearly, this teacher utilized authentic ques-
tions often to reach beyond the text, to tap into personal experience and opin-
ion-based utterances. The authentic questions here invite an “expressive” stance as
discussion gives prominence to the reader’s affective response to the text, to the
reader’s own spontaneous emotive connection to all aspects of the textual experi-
ence (Jakobson, as cited in Wilkinson, 2005; see also Soter & Rudge, 2005). For
example, in Episode 11 Ms. Charlotte asked, “How else might he change?” to
ascertain possible effects of the whale’s song on the character in the text.
Table 3 considers just contingent questions and cross-tabulates their text-based
status with their communicative functions. Consider first those teacher display
questions that are contingent on previous student utterances. Because they are dis-
play questions (the teacher already knows the answer), these are inauthentic ques-
tions to be sure. They foster a more efferent stance, but as demonstrated earlier in
this article, they nonetheless can promote student talk, as their contingency on pre-
vious student comments makes them likely to engender an SCT from some com-
pliant student. The data in Table 3 reveal that such teacher contingent display ques-
tions were equally likely to be text-based or non-text-based questions. In other
words, when the teacher was following up a student comment by trying to get stu-
dents to articulate a known answer (known to the teacher, that is), she was as likely
to draw from student experience or prior knowledge as from text-based content.
A similar pattern emerged for teacher questions that functioned as clarification
requests. Virtually all of these, as stated earlier, were contingent on previous stu-
TABLE 3
Cross-Tabulation of Contingent Teacher Questions Contained in Episodes
Engendering Student Critical Turns by Text-Based Status
and Communicative Function
Total
Display Authentic Clarification Contingent
Contingent text-based 14/16 (88%) 5/11 (45%) 13/14 (93%) 32/39 (82%)
questions/total text-based
questions
Contingent non-text-based 17/19 (89%) 14/22 (64%) 12/12 (100%) 43/55 (78%)
questions/total non-text-based
questions
dent utterances, and they were as likely to probe students’ comments about text as
about nontext.
However, the contingent teacher questions that were authentic—that is, ques-
tions with answers she did not know in advance—tell a different story vis-à-vis their
text-based status. Two thirds of these authentic questions were non-text-based ques-
tions; that is, they queried about student experience and prior knowledge rather than
about responses to the text per se.
Contingent authentic teacher questions that were based on knowledge of text
were far rarer in this classroom than were non-text-based contingent authentic
questions. The overall pattern regarding contingency, authenticity, and text-based
status was this: When Ms. Charlotte created dialogic discourse focusing on text,
she did so by skillfully probing with display questions. When she used authentic
questioning to create dialogue, that dialogue was much less likely to focus on the
texts being read.
DISCUSSION
One purpose of this study was to understand how an elementary ELL teacher used
questioning to facilitate student talk. In particular, we were interested in contrast-
ing the distribution of authentic questions with nonauthentic or display questions.
The commonplace has it that display questions result in minimal and fragmented
student responses, but we suspected that the degree to which a teacher question is
contingent on previous student utterances might be more important than its authen-
ticity, in terms of the question’s likelihood of engendering elaborated student talk.
Our operationalization for the kind of student talk that one would wish to pro-
mote, especially among ELL students, was an extended, coherent, and socially
164 BOYD AND RUBIN
engaged utterance—that is, the SCT. We selected a particular focal classroom of

elementary school ELL, because pilot observation and subsequent analysis of
this ELL classroom had suggested that this classroom might be particularly rich
in SCTs.
The teacher in the focal classroom was found to utter less than one third of the
classroom utterances in those episodes that contained SCTs. This amount of
teacher speech is lower than the norms reported for ELL (“two thirds of classroom
speech can be attributed to the teacher”; Ernst, 1994, p. 293) or mainstream
(“Teachers talk about two thirds of all instructional time”; Christoph & Nystrand,
2001, p. 250) classrooms. However, when Ms. Charlotte did speak in these epi-
sodes, over half the time she asked a question. That rate of teacher talk that posed
questions to students was lower than the 91.6% of teacher turns reported in one
study in what was classified as recitations and 70.8% in what was classified as dis-
cussion format (Chinn et al., 2001).
As often as any other form of questioning (37% of all her questions in the
topical episodes under investigation), this teacher utilized outright display ques-
tions. She asked students clearly inauthentic questions in that she already knew
the answers she was soliciting. Many authorities have claimed that inauthentic
display questions are antithetical to elaborated student talk (Cazden, 2001;
Nystrand, 1997). Yet clearly this class produced the type of individual student
talk and dialogic classroom discourse that is apparently rare in most mainstream
U.S. classrooms.
For sure, display questions played a dominant role in this teacher’s contribu-
tions to the classroom discourse, and equally clearly these students were not dis-
couraged from talking. To the contrary, not only did these ELL students talk pro-
portionately more than students in most U.S. classrooms (two thirds vs. the one
third for first language and second language classrooms as reported by Christoph
& Nystrand, 2001, and Ernst, 1994, respectively), their utterances provided evi-
dence of substantive student engagement, as engagement is one of the criteria for
identifying SCTs.
How, then, can we reconcile Ms. Charlotte’s dominant use of display questions
and the rich student production of SCTs? According to Christoph and Nystrand
(2001), teachers who succeed in engendering dialogic instruction exhibit three key
strategies: (a) an ethos of involvement and respect, (b) specific ways of phrasing
questions to encourage discussion, and (c) making space for the presence of stu-
dent interpersonal relationships. For the most part, authentic questions seem to fit
that prescription. However, can teacher nonauthentic display questions likewise
function to promote student talk? Results of this study indicate that there is no in-
herent reason why nonauthentic questions, even in profusion, cannot also contrib-
ute to a flow of dialogic classroom communication.
Because the analysis of this classroom discourse confirmed that authenticity is
not a necessary characteristic of teacher questions that encourage student talk, we
considered instead the role of question contingency. Contingent questions, as op-

posed to recitative questions, probe or build on preceding student utterances. The
notion of contingency was highlighted by Wells and Chang Wells (1992), who
showed the importance of teachers “leading from behind” by responding to student
utterances and scaffolding further articulation and inquiry by building on stu-
dent-initiated contributions. In our sample, 57.5% of Ms. Charlotte’s authentic
questions preceding SCTs were contingent in this way. In addition, a surprising
88.5% of her display questions preceding SCTs were likewise contingent. We con-
clude, therefore, that question contingency is more crucial for elaborated and en-
gaged student talk than is question authenticity.
An Ethos of Involvement and Respect

The extent to which students feel involved and respected shapes the way they re-
spond to directions and questions and their level of comfort with their learning. To
contingently respond to anything, one must be paying attention to the stimulus.
Therefore, the presence of contingent questioning—questioning that builds on pre-
vious student contributions—is clear evidence of a classroom ethos of involve-
ment and respect. One way that Ms. Charlotte took her students seriously was by
listening to their contributions, acknowledging them, and incorporating them into
the discourse by restating, extending, and sometimes requesting clarification of the
student contribution.
Further evidence of Ms. Charlotte’s taking her students seriously was her will-
ingness to discard lesson plans to exploit the potential of building on student inter-
est. This is a kind of contingent teaching on a macro scale, consistent with her
questioning strategies that we have been examining at the micro scale. An example
of that more macrolevel contingency is captured in Talk Sample 3. Ms. Charlotte
had planned a K-W-L chart on what students knew about whales and wanted to fo-
cus on where students could find information. The students, however, were inter-
ested in talking about an illustrator, Ed Young, who had been prominent in the pre-
vious lesson. In this instance, Ms. Charlotte was able to build on this student
interest to achieve her original instructional goal of determining what resources to
use to find information.
As a trained ELL teacher, Ms. Charlotte consciously modeled correct usage of
language. She routinely recast student contributions using appropriate pronuncia-
tion or grammar in her clarification requests or elaboration (Peregroy & Boyle,
2005). In this way, she phrased questions to scaffold student talk so they could in-
deed participate in class discussions. More important than the form of the teacher
language used is the teacher timing (within the topical episode) and the climate set-
ting (lack of evaluation). Talk Sample 2 provides a telling example of her willing-
ness to ask “What do you think?” (TOT 20) rather than evaluating, and the stu-
dents’ willingness to respond in an elaborated fashion.
166 BOYD AND RUBIN
Making Space for Text and for Students’ Lives

In the focal classroom, literature provided a shared class experience. The teacher’s
pattern of questioning revealed in this analysis assured that students would be led
to extract details from their reading and speak about them in a coherent fashion.
Half of her relatively numerous display questions (as well as half of her clarifica-
tion questions) were text-based questions. That rate of text-based questioning
might seem excessive, given many prescriptions suggesting a greater emphasis in
literature discussion on reader response and other higher order thinking skills
(Wilkinson et al., 2005). In the focal classroom a distinctly efferent as well as an

expressive stance was promoted in student discussions. The text-based display
questions, however, tended to be contingent. That is, even when probing students
about the contents of their literature reading, this teacher followed the topical leads
her students established. Display questions were not used to move students along
to new topics, not used to “cover” more material. To the contrary, when this teacher
moved the class talk away from student-initiated topics, she was most likely to do
so with authentic questions of her own, querying about students’ prior knowledge
or life experiences. To use display questions contingently, as in this case study, al-
lows students to dwell on aspects of the text that they themselves had nominated.
CONCLUSION
Contingent questions are one way of capturing classroom instructional practices

that both value student contributions and provide the scaffolding to expect more.
Contingent questioning can take students from where they are and launch them
further. The teacher is responsive to the individual student and particular moment.
Instead of traditional classrooms where the teacher talks and the students listen,
contingent questioning requires the teacher to listen and to bring a student to a
point where he or she can launch himself or herself into more literate talk. Contin-
gent questioning operates within the individual student zone of proximal develop-
ment (Vygotsky, 1986/1994). It provides the structure the student needs to move
beyond his or her independent level, and with practice the student will automati-
cally elaborate or extend his or her utterance.
We assert that it is not sufficient to look at the structure or type of question. One
must inquire how the question functions within the stream of discourse. Although
it is of value for researchers to code a question as open–authentic or closed–dis-
play, research also shows the limitations of such coding. Sometimes questions can
appear authentic, but they function to close down student dialogue (Christoph &
Nystrand, 2001; Kachur & Prendergast, 1997). Most likely that happens when the
teacher’s question, authentic though it may be, fails to build on what students have
been talking about. On the other hand, display questions, when posed in a class-
room environment that takes student responses seriously, can further scaffold a
deeper understanding of content and a more literate articulation of meaning. How-
ever, it must be acknowledged that this study was based on data drawn from a small
class of 6 ELL students. In such a small group the teacher has the luxury of taking
the time to respond contingently to student contributions. It is possible that in a
larger class the teacher might feel that he or she needs to exercise more control than
this kind of freewheeling contingent questioning. Nevertheless, the time required
might be well rewarded. These findings suggest that teachers should aim for con-
tingency in their questioning if they wish to encourage elaborate student talk, and
not necessarily authenticity. Display questions may function quite handily to en-
courage sophisticated student oral performance, so long as they are contingent on
the students’ own stream of dialogue.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
This article is based on data collected in conjunction with the Maureen Boyd’s dis-
sertation study, University of Georgia, 2000.
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How Contingent Questioning Promotes Extended Student Talk: A Function

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How Contingent Questioning

Research on traditional classrooms paints a picture of teachers controlling talk pat-

Correspondence should be addressed to Maureen Boyd, School of Education, Binghamton Univer-

some of our professional observations, as well as in some previous research (Boyd

nates classroom discourse; teachers typically produce two thirds of classroom

classroom fare of IRE or IRF discourse is often attributed to teachers’ reliance on

enact key conversational roles: to initiate topics of discussion, to elaborate on

could have been made without having read the text).

The general body of instructional research on teacher questioning valorizes au-

Although authentic questions may help produce classroom climates favorable

This article is based on observations originally conducted in conjunction with

Purpose of This Study

RQ1: How do patterns of teacher display questions versus authentic questions

Context as a Funneling Frame

SCTs appeared in 45 different topical episodes.

Coding Teacher Utterances

matic episodes in which those SCTs were embedded). Questioning, especially

Display Authentic Clarification Total

No. of turns of talk/episodes 35/15 33/25 26/18 94/38

teacher clarification requests were coded as contingent on student utterances. (The

Talk Sample 3: SCT 1, Episode 1 (SCT is indicated by bold; teacher display

20 Zach: Find more books about him

How, then, do patterns of teacher questions that are contingent on previous

Display Authentic Clarification Total

Text-based questions 16 (45.7%) 11 (33.3%) 14 (53.8%) 41 (43.6%)

engaged utterance—that is, the SCT. We selected a particular focal classroom of

considered instead the role of question contingency. Contingent questions, as op-

gaged student talk than is question authenticity.

An Ethos of Involvement and Respect

Making Space for Text and for Students’ Lives

(Wilkinson et al., 2005). In the focal classroom a distinctly efferent as well as an

Contingent questions are one way of capturing classroom instructional practices

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