Students as Actors in Supporting Roles - Video Analysis of Classroom Interaction Systems as Multi-Participant Events

This doctoral thesis is concerned with multi-participant interaction systems of school lessons in a seventh grade comprehensive school German class. The multi-participant factor is assumed to be crucial for the school lesson and thus for its analysis not only because the mere presence and specific ratification of school lesson participants constitute the very event in general. It is, moreover, argued that each participant is a co-producer of the social event as it emerges, develops, and turns out, and that only the cooperation of all the participants ensures the successful execution of the social event. With a conversation-analytical approach, the mechanisms of multi-participant cooperation in the classroom are primarily investigated with regard to all participants’ individual strategies of coping with the requirements of being a student or being a teacher during lesson discourses, which constitute the major part of the school lessons under scrutiny. Based on this, participation in classroom interaction can be described along the lines of leading and supporting activities conditioned by mutual attestations of inconspicuousness