Explainer moves

Affect and motivation

A good teacher/tutor bolsters student motivation, confidence, and self-efficacy while mastering the material.

Diagnostic query

An utterance by which ”the speaker is testing whether a listener knows a piece of information by asking them to supply the information”. The speaker, normally the tutor, already knows the answer. They are often questions, but can be also requests: ”tell me how electricity flows through the circuit”

Elaborating

This is an assertion by the tutor that fills in missing information that the tutor regards as important, but otherwise might be missed by the student. In essence, information is simply transmitted from the tutor to the learner, as opposed to having the learner generate the information \parencite{GRAESSER199935}.

Elicited responses

elicited responses would be a type of constructive and interactive ones in which the tutors make a move, such as asking a question, and the students respond to such elicitation. For example, if a tutor sets a goal or provides a procedural hint (for a problem solving dialogue), and a student responds by taking a step toward reaching that goal or elaborating upon that hint, then such a dialogue would be both constructive and interactive \parencite{CHI2001471}.

Feedback, error diagnosis, and remediation

A good teacher/tutor should quickly give feedback on the quality of student contributions. When a student makes an error, the teacher/tutor should identify the error, correct the error, diagnose the misconception that explains the error, and rectify the misconception \parencite{graesser1995collaborative}.

feedback segment

A feedback segment can be either a short positive (e.g., “right”) or negative (e.g., “no, no”) response about the correctness or incorrectness of what the Tutees said or did, or it can be more extensive, in terms of correcting what the Tutees did incorrectly (e.g., “No, the Earth”) or elaborating further on what the Tutees did or stated (e.g., “No, it should be accelerating towards A and B”) \parencite{chi2008observing}.

Generating a recast

In the adult–child interaction, the adult generates a recast when he or she "....expands, deletes, permutes, or otherwise changes the [child’s utterance] while maintaining significant overlap in meaning" Sometimes, recasts provide a corrective contrast with the child’s immediately prior turn through the provision of an enhanced version of the child’s ill-formed utterance, as in the example below reproduced from Saxton \parencite{clark_bernicot_2008}.

    Child: It might get loosed down the plughole
    Adult: Lost down the plughole?

Equally, some recasts give no clear-cut correction but still offer potential for facilitation of acquisition by providing a structural contrast with an errorless sentence produced by the child as in the following constructed extract, which illustrates an adult expanding the child’s utterance into one that is more complex:

   Child: That's a big horse. 
   Adult: Yep, that's a big horse with lots of black spots.

Sometimes, recasts may introduce multiple changes, as in the following example,whereby the adult both expands on and corrects components of the child’s utterance:

   Child: Why does he that? 
   Adult: Mmm, I am not sure why he does that. 

Hinting

Hinting is an explanation move and a type of scaffolding where something is suggested or indicated indirectly or covertly. Examples: "The hard disk can be used for storage" or “What about the hard disk?” "When the student is having problems answering a question or solving a problem, the tutor gives hints by presenting a fact, asking a leading question, or reframing the problem. A hint may be a memory cue or a critical problem-solving clue. Hints are frequently indirect speech acts, so they run the risk of being missed by an insensitive student" \parencite{GRAESSER199935}.

Immediate feedback

Graesser documented some of the dialog moves that tutors generate to nurture the collaborative building of explanations. There is positive, neutral, and negative feedback, as illustrated below \parencite{GRAESSER199935, person:hal-00197320}.

  (1) Positive immediate feedback. ‘That’s right,’ ‘Yeah.’ 
  (2) Neutral immediate feedback. ‘Okay,’ ‘Uh- huh.’ 
  (3) Negative immediate feedback. ‘Not quite,’ ‘No.’  

After this immediate feedback, the tutor normally issues a more substantive dialogue move such as pumping and prompting.

Introducing extraneous information

Introducing extraneous information is an explanation move where an explanation is enhanced by providing extraneous information and a more complete and coherent understanding.

Open option

An utterance that suggests a course of action or states a possibility. Imperatives are normally not open options.

Prompting

"The tutor supplies the student with a discourse context and prompts him / her to fill in a missing word, phrase, or sentence. An example in the context of computer literacy would be ‘The primary memories of the CPU are ROM and... .’ The prompt is delivered with intonation, facial expressions, and gestures that signal the learner to fill in the missing word or phrase. The one or two words that precede the missing word are drawn out, with a complex, bending intonation contour. Then there is a pause that gives the floor to the learner and invites the learner to fill in the missing information. Sometimes the facial expression or hand gestures have an encouraging stance, as if to say, ‘Give me the next word.’ Prompting is a scaffolding device for students who are reluctant to supply information. Students are expected to supply more content and more difficult content as they progress in learning the domain knowledge." \parencite{GRAESSER199935, person:hal-00197320}.

Karagjosova and Tsovaltzi \parencite{karagjosova2005dialogue} define prompt as an utterance that requests the hearer explicitly to proceed with the task and provide further information. Examples of such a move are as follows:

  Examples:
   -What's next?
   -How could that work?
   -How could it go on?

Pumping

Pumping is a scaffolding mechanism which is used if a tutor wants the student to contribute more information in the dialogue and thereby be more active. The tutor pumps the student to elaborate an answer by giving positive or neutral feedback (e.g. ‘uh huh’, ‘okay’, head nod) and then pausing for the student to supply more information.

"The tutor pumps the student for more information during the early stages of answering a particular question (or solving a problem). The pump consists of positive feedback (e.g., ‘Right,’ ‘Yeah,’ dramatic head-nod), neutral backchannel feedback (‘Uh-huh,’ ‘Okay,’ subtle head-nod), or explicit requests for more information (‘Tell me more,’ ‘What else?’). The tutor pumps for one or two cycles of turns before the tutor contributes information. Pumping serves the functions of exposing knowledge of the student and of encouraging students to construct content by themselves." \parencite{GRAESSER199935, person:hal-00197320}.

repetition to place information in common ground, reformulation, Embedded correction

Repetition has multiple functions in conversation \parencite{clark_bernicot_2008}. One pervasive use, for example, is when a speaker adds to common ground new information offered by another. Here, the speaker’s repetition achieves two things: it acknowledges or ratifies the contribution of the other, and, in so doing, signals that a specific piece of information is now in common ground . As an example in child-adult interaction, some adult repetitions are characterized as ‘reformulations’. These are repetitions of erroneous child utterances in which adult speakers have corrected the child errors, underlined, as in (1):

 (1) Child: Don ’t fall me downstairs!
     Parent: oh, I wouldn't drop you downstairs.
     Child: Don ’t drop me downstairs.

The parent, in repeating the child’s utterance makes the relevant deictic shifts (this is typical in adult repeats) and substitutes causative drop (new information) for the child’s erroneous intransitive fall. The child takes up the adult’s correction in the next turn. Such reformulations are typically produced in the next turn after the child has made an error. Research on such reformulations in English has shown that, adults rely mostly on side sequences within the exchange in producing their reformulations, as in (2), where the adult repeats the child’s utterance with rising intonation and with the error(s) corrected, and the child then acknowledges the adult’s version (the side sequence is contained in the lines marked by an initial ||, with the repeated word underlined;

 (2) Side sequence 
     Child: Milk. Milk.
     || Father: You want milk?
     || Child: Uh-huh.
     Father: Ok. Just a second and I’ll get you some.

Adults also make some embedded corrections, as in (3), where the correction of the erroneous form is (fell) offered in the next turn by the father:

 (3) Embedded correction
       Child: He falled, he falled again.
       Father: Ok he fell, but no, he’s at the boat, now put him in front of the car
       

Request/Directive question

Request/Directive questions are formed according to the following abstract specification: "The speaker wants the listener to perform an action". An example of Request/Directive question would be: "Would you add those numbers together?" \parencite{graesser1994question}

splicing

splicing is considered as a scaffolding strategy. When a student’s contribution is error-ridden, the tutors tend to jump in quickly and splice in a good answer. Thus, immediate corrective feedback is given by the tutor. The metaphor of ‘splicing’ is used because normally the tutor and student are jointly constructing a connected structure of ideas when the errors occur.

"The tutor jumps in and splices correct information as soon as the student produces a contribution that is obviously error-ridden. The tutor needs to be able to recognize errors, bugs, and slips in order to do this. Deep misconceptions in the student are more difficult to detect and are not handled by splicing." \parencite{GRAESSER199935, person:hal-00197320}

summarising

summarizing is considered as a scaffolding strategy where the tutor supplies a summary or recap of the answer.

"Unskilled tutors normally give a summary that recaps an answer to a question or solution to a problem. This summary serves the function of succinctly codifying a lengthy, multiturn, collaborative exchange when a question is answered or problem is solved. A skilled tutor might encourage the student to construct the summary instead of the tutor supplying one. This would promote a more active construction of knowledge on the part of the student, an activity that is known to facilitate learning."\parencite{GRAESSER199935, person:hal-00197320}.

Requestioning

The tutor re-asks the original main question when the thread of the tutorial dialog is moving off course or on a tangent \parencite{GRAESSER199935}.

Understanding query

An utterance that asks “the listener whether they understood, rather than making them prove it. It takes a “yes” or “no” as an answer \parencite{karagjosova2005dialogue}.

Difference to diagnostic query: the tutor does not know the answer. The realisation of the two can be the same (”Do you understand?”), but the obligations that they pose are different: diagnostic queries require more than ”yes” or ”no” as an answer.

Difference to info request: It asks for signalling understanding.