Accomplishing help : the social organisation of children's activity during a writing lesson

Understandings of classroom lessons are informed largely by studies which examine teacher-led activity during whole class or small group instruction. Many studies have established and considered the numerous ways that teacher-talk and activity dominates classroom lessons. The focus on teacher talk ignores the numerous occasions when students work independently of their teachers in classrooms, and leads to understandings of the social order of classrooms that foreground children’s activity in relation to their teachers. This paper examines interactions between children during a writing lesson where children were working independently of their teacher. The lesson was selected from a corpus of audio and video recordings made of daily writing in the classroom. Children in the classroom were in their first and second year of formal schooling, and the recording was made towards the end of the year. Conversation analysis of interaction examines “helping” sequences initiated when individual children approached other children for information about how to write words. The analysis focuses on sequences of talk initiated with a question or request for help, and establishes how children provided information and repaired trouble as they helped others. Analysis of these aspects of talk and interaction enables a detailed description of methods used by children to accomplish helping and to get writing done be seeking and providing help.In this study, children are shown to accomplish their activity in orderly ways when the teacher isn’t present or participating in talk. Discussion establishes how the social order of classroom interaction during independent activity differs from that provided by the classroom teacher, and teachers in general, during whole class instruction. That is, children’s talk more closely resembles ordinary conversation and differs markedly from the ways that children’s talk is often characterized in descriptions of classroom lessons. It is concluded that while examination of teacher-led instructional talk continues to dominate classroom research and understandings of learning as social activity, the focus on peer interaction has much to tell about the social organization of classroom activity.