Abstract:

In the paper, we analyze question-answer relations as an essential pillar of spoken discourse in school lessons. The school lessons exhibit a highly dialogical character and as such, the relations of question and answer have an important role in the description of the school discourse construction. In the paper, we focus on the research task of which types of question-answer relations participate in text building most often and in what manner. For this purpose, we conduct both quantitative and qualitative analysis of school lessons recordings coming from the Schola2010 corpus.

The Schola2010 is a corpus mapping the school language environment. It contains recordings of the spoken language produced in school lessons (mainly standard lessons with a length of approx. 45 min). The recordings capture semi-formal and formal spoken Czech with a size of roughly 1 million tokens. It contains 204 interviews of 2,410 speakers. The total length of the recordings is 8,605 minutes. In the search query, we search for all questions (interrogative sentences) used during the lessons. In the corpus, they are formally captured by a question mark. In total, the corpus contains 3,949 of such instances in the speech produced by students (16,851.37 i.p.m., instances per million) and 16,501 instances produced by teachers (20,624.14 i.p.m.).

Then we provide a qualitative analysis of 200 of question-answer relations found in the corpus material (100 questions asked by teachers and 100 by students) and we present their detailed description. We analyze the types of questions from various perspectives, e.g. according to their form, function, topic or emotionality. Specifically, we examine their interrogative nature (i.e. questions with primary vs. secondary function), form (yes/no questions vs. wh-questions), topic (relating to the subject being discussed in the school lesson or to the course of teaching), emotionality (negative and neutral questions), situationality (immediate questions vs. citations) or the addressee (teachers vs. students).

As previously mentioned, question-answer relations are essential elements in building spoken discourse. Generally, discourse relations appear in language either as explicitly signaled (especially by expressions called discourse connectives like "but", "therefore", "because", "so"…) or unsignaled (implicit). Therefore, our next examination focuses on the explicit signals (discourse connectives) operating in question-answer relations. In the paper, we present the analysis of both textual ("Why didn't you come yesterday? Because I was sick.") and situational connectives ("So today we have math.") demonstrating the complexity of spoken discourse in school lessons.

A detailed analysis of question-answer relations and their discourse signals in speech produced during the school lessons helps to describe the complexity and dialogical nature of school discourse. In the conclusion part, we discuss how the social relationships between students and teachers project to their speech through mutual language interactions.

Keywords:

School speech, discourse, interrogative sentences, question-answer relations, spoken language.