reasoning and search for different perspectives. The teacher’s questions are interpreted not on the spot, but within the whole classroom discourse in the context set out by the essential question.
first step to build consensus amongst the group. For this purpose, students scaffolded the information with each other and learned the vocabulary coop- eratively in context.
The Role of Questions for Abstract Concepts
This section examines how students used questions for opinion for the pur- pose of understanding abstract concept. This type of question is produced through an understanding of the content, application of knowledge, and analysis of the application; students’ processing of their thinking can be observed in the data.
Class C was the class in which Intermediate 2-level (B2 CEFR) students studied second-language acquisition. The class observed and audio-recorded for this study discussed the theory of multiple intelligences (MI) (Gardner, 2006) which identifies eight intelligences such as spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, musical, linguistic, logical-mathematical, naturalistic, inter- and intra- personal intelligences. At the beginning of the class, the teacher explicitly stated the goals of this class, which were to understand the concepts of MI and make a summary of it. In other words, a question for defining, “What are MI?”, was set as an essential question. In order to accomplish this, the teacher organised various tasks in the class as follows. First, students shared with a group what they had found from their research on intelligence in second- language acquisition. Secondly, students in pairs made a list of characteristics of an imaginary friend called Susan, who is very intelligent (e.g., Susan can solve very difficult math problems). This task made the students aware of their current ideas of intelligence. Then the whole class watched a short video which explained each concept of eight intelligences and checked their under- standings in pairs. Afterwards, the teacher explained each intelligence with the whole class. Next, the students worked with a pair on the task to catego- rise Susan’s characteristics into the eight intelligences (e.g., achieving a high score on the math exam is classified as logical-mathematical intelligence).
While attending to this task, the students said “Katayotteru [our ideas are one- sided]!” by looking at their ideas and realised that the concept of intelligence that they had had was strongly biased toward academic achievement. Example 3 was taken from an interaction after the categorisation task where two stu- dents started to talk about their own intelligences, asking each other “Jibun dore ga tokui? [Which one do you think you are good at?]” They further devel- oped their dialogue as follows.
Example 3
1 S1 Musical ga arunara art mo atte iiyone. Mou ikko 2 kategorii. [If there is musical category, don’t you 3 think there could be art? Like one more category?]
4 (Question for opinion)
5 S2 Demo… [But…]
6 S1 Watashi, e ga sukidakara, e tokaga. Aato no 7 kategorii ga naino wa cyotto. [I like pictures and 8 others. I can’t believe that there is not an art
9 category.]
10 S2 Kore wa sensei ni iubeki jyanai? [Don’t you think 11 we should tell the teacher?] (Question for opinion) 12 S1 Uttaeru? [Shall we make a claim?] (Question for
13 opinion)
14 S2 Uttaeru. [I agree, we should.] 8 ko dake? [Only 15 eight items?] Aato ga nai desuyo. [There is no art 16 category.] Demo tashikani soudane. [But, certainly 17 it is.] Chotto kiite miyou. [Let’s ask him.] Why it not 18 it has … It has no art category. I want to nani?
19 [what?] Adding in this sheets
In Example 3, S1 wondered whether there should be one more intelligence (lines 1–4). They discovered that it is unusual that there is no category refer- ring to art; if there is a musical intelligence, S1 thinks that certainly, there should be an artistic intelligence category. This utterance can be categorised as question for opinion as it ends with “yone [shouldn’t we]”. We can assume that she wanted to confirm that her idea was right. Her opinion came from her own experience as “Watashi, e ga sukidakara, e tokaga. Aato no kategorii ga naino wa chotto. [I like pictures and others. I can’t believe that there is not an art category]” (lines 6–9). Finally, S2 says that art could be added as a cate- gory; this part shows “creation”, the highest level of thinking in Bloom’s tax- onomy (Anderson & Krathwohl, 2001), which describes six hierarchical cognitive categories: remembering, understanding, applying, analysis, evalua- tion, and creation, as art is her own original category. What is illuminating here is that the students autonomously went beyond the classification task and thought which intelligences applied to themselves. We can observe how deeply they were engaged in the content of the class from the interaction. It is noticeable that translanguaging (García & Wei, 2014) occured in the stu- dent–student interactions where L1 was used to tease out the meaning and naming of the categories. This may have been due to the fact that all students shared the same L1, Japanese, and that it was instinctive for them to do the cognitively challenging task in L1.
It is also enlightening that the excerpt shows that critical thinking can indeed be observed in the dialogue; interaction of critical thinking emerged naturally from students’ pair work. As Llinares et al. (2012) state, referring students’ personal experience may encourage the development of communi- cative functions. Hence, we can assume from this data that having the stu- dents think about the content as if it was their own experience could also trigger critical thinking in pair work. The students made questions for opin- ions based on their own experience (i.e., there should be an art category because she likes art), which encouraged critical thinking in the discussion.
This type of question based on the students’ personal experiences can be called personalised questions. It is also suggested in Musumeci (1996) that referen- tial questions “may act as links from the subject matter to the students’ per- sonal experience” (p. 299). Thus, asking personalised questions can be a useful way to foster critical thinking in student–student interaction because it can require higher-order thinking skills such as applying and creating (Anderson
& Krathwohl, 2001) based on an understanding of the content of the class.
As we saw in the excerpt where the pair work functioned well to have the students deepen their understandings of abstract concepts by asking person- alised questions, there are two points to note as premises to make a successful pair/group work. First, setting and sharing a clear goal of the class; in other words, establishing an essential question (in this class, “what are MI?”) served a crucial role because it could make students understand with ease where they are heading to. Thus, the students could deepen their understanding of the abstract concept collaboratively in the pair work without losing their direc- tion. Second, organising tasks in a proper way is important to lead the stu- dents gradually to have them understand abstract concepts. In Class C, we found the teacher arranged various tasks competently to be able to scaffold students’ understanding. These tasks could allow them to be autonomous learners who are highly engaged and collaborative, and to go beyond the teacher’s task arrangement. Therefore, the findings of this section suggest that a clear essential question and proper task organisation could foster students’
autonomy in student–student interaction to comprehend the academic concept.