„Was hast du damit gemeint?“. Mittels Fragen explanative und argumentative Diskurse im schülergeleiteten Klassenrat ermöglichen

This article focuses on the central practices of questioning, explaining, and arguing in student-led class councils in primary school. The class council is a didactic format that aims to give pupils (co-)responsibility for shaping their class community and to promote their social and linguistic skills. The student discussion leader thereby acting as an important authority: she or he steers the discussion, distributes the right to speak, and creates opportunities for her or his classmates to participate. Requests for information, as well as the opinions of the participants can play an important role in the realisation of this task. In the context of these observations, this article draws empirically on two examples from a videotaped longitudinal study to examine which types and forms of questions the discussion leader uses to co-constructively involve her classmates in the discussion rounds (quantitative approach using coding) and which opportunities the students take to clarify issues or contribute their own opinions (qualitative approach using conversation analysis). In free discussions (‘core phase’), both these explanatory and argumentative statements show a high degree of mutual orientation towards the contributions of others, which is reflected in co-constructed explanations and explorative argumentation across all turns. In routinised discussion phases, on the other hand, contributions tend to be made on a solo basis. The discussion requires discourse skills at the contextualisation level (e. g., recognising conditional relevance for explaining), textualisation level (e. g., specifying the explanatory activities of others) and marking level (e. g., using “because” reasons), which emphasise the potential of student-led class councils to promote the acquisition of discourse depending on different roles (e. g., discussion leader) and topics (e. g. conflict resolution, determination of a new class goal).