Children’s practices for handling relevance in whole-class interaction

This article examines third-year primary school pupils’ orientations to relevance, namely to the interconnected-ness between their own and others’ utterances/turns. Our aim is to shed light on how pupils handle relevance in its relation with the conversational coherence and the topic dealt with, within the sequential organization of plenary classroom interactions. Starting from an overview of studies that from multiple perspectives have been dedicated to these notions, we then present the interactional data collected and the empirical analysis carried out by adopting a conversational analysis approach. The study highlights the practices and resources utilized by pupils for three distinct types of action: 1) displaying relevance; 2) displaying the absence of relevance; 3) playing within the relevance frame. Specifically, the design and functions of metacommunicative turns through which children index the relevance of their contributions or account for its absence are examined, as well as their ability to construct playful actions within the relevance frame and sequential coherence, and the effects thereof.