In classroom settings, students' competence is regularly evaluated through a default practice named Initiation-Response-Feedback (IRF) or Initiation-Response-Evaluation (IRE). In the feedback or evaluation turn, the teacher normally uses acknowledgement tokens (such as uhm, yeah, okay). These tokens perform an active role of maintaining…

Establishing a communication-rich classroom can be difficult. This article describes the process and findings of a practitioner action research study addressing the question of how teachers can interact with their students while they are working in groups to encourage and enhance student-to-student communication. Recommended research-based teacher…

Suggests taking Habermas's notion of communicative rationality as a reference point from which to organize educational activities and evaluate their "being educational" in the classroom. Communicative rationality in the classroom provides a perspective from which one can establish a normative standard for being educational. (Contains…