The Study of Social Interaction in Educational Settings: Accomplishments and Unresolved Issues1

In: Human development, Band 41, Heft 4, S. 245-269

Abstract

The study of face-to-face interaction in educational settings is placed in historical context. The major themes of interactional analysis – that social and cognitive structures are constructed in social interaction, human behavior is context-specific, cultural discontinuity helps explain educational inequality, and learning is a sociocultural process – are reviewed, and the contributions of these findings to theory, methodology and pedagogy are assessed. The paper concludes with a discussion of two unresolved issues: the integration of social structure and interaction in interactional analysis and the reconciliation of conflictual and consensual dimensions of learning.