Drawing on recent developments in dialogic approaches to learning and teaching, this contribution examines classroom practices in everyday teacher-pupils interactions and verbal exchanges. More in particular, the aim of our study is to investigate the classroom discourse interactive sequences generated by the teachers’ questions.

Research investigating the dynamics of classroom discourse requires fine-grained data, referring on the nature and type of classroom discourse (the specific interactions between pupils and teachers). For this purpose, we collected observational data in three Italian primary school classes through the videorecordings of several activities. In total, our material comprises 587 minutes of recordings (almost ten hours).

Analyses were carried out on all the questions that teachers directed to their pupils, and on the successive sequence of interaction (answers by pupils and uptake by teachers). Teachers’ questions were coded in three categories (Nystrand et al., 2003): authentic questions (that do not have a pre-specified answer), close questions (with a pre-specified answer) and control questions. The interactive sequences generated by each type of question were then examined.

The results show that everyday discourse in classroom is dominated by patterns of discourse which are more concerned with the teacher telling and controlling the interaction, using questions with pre-specified answer or control questions, than with acknowledging or utilising children’s experiential or cognitive prior knowledge elicited by authentic questions. These results are consistent with those reported by other authors (Myhill and Brackley, 2004). In our data, authentic questions are the ones that elicit longer answers from the pupils, which are eventually used by teachers for the construction of collective and real dialogic discourse.

In line with the most recent studies on learning and teaching (Fisher and Larkin, 2008; O’Connor and Michaels, 2007), this study gives evidence to the presence of a type of monologic discourse in class. Implications are discussed with reference to the “good practices” that may reduce the teachers’ voices and encourage those of the pupils.