“You just say ‘yes!’ Say something more!” A study of pupils participation, active involvement, motivation and development through student discussion of factual texts about the concepts of climate and sustainable development. 

The purpose of this study is to investigate whether student-led text conversations about concepts in the subject of geography, with the help of support structures, can be designed in a way that promotes discussion between pupils. The further aim is to investigate how support structures for increased participation affect the dialogue in text conversations for pupils in upper primary school.

The research questions in this study were: How is pupils' participation in text conversations affected by different support structures? How are pupils' participation in text conversations affected by different support structures? How is pupils' dialogue in text conversations affected by different support structures? How do pupils experience structured text conversations as a form of work?

As this is a practical study based on the model of a lesson study, where the aim is to increase participation and promote dialogue between a group of pupils, a hermeneutic approach is used in the analysis. Hermeneutics is about interpreting meaning and actions by subjectively trying to put yourself in the place of a text author or participant. This is done by moving in the analysis between partial perspectives and holistic perspectives. In this study, conversation analysis has been used as an analysis tool. It focuses on detailed transcriptions of conversations and studies various aspects of the interaction, including overlaps, turn-taking and conversational structure. By analysing these elements, one can identify social norms, conventions and strategies used by participants to create meaningful interactions.

The result of the study can be interpreted as that with a high level of participation and active involvement from the pupils, the dialogue between the pupils was convulsive and bordering on monologic, however, in a dialogically well-functioning text conversation, instead, the participation and active involvement were low.