Defining openness in teachers’ ‘open’ questions

Extensive research has focused on analysing teacher-student discourse within whole-class dialogic interactions, and several descriptive tools have been proposed so far to cover possible variations. However, what still remains unanswered is what types of teacher questions are ‘better’ than others. To answer this question, I propose a pragmatic analysis of teacher-student interaction based on the criteria of authenticity and dialogicity. The analysis focuses on two types of dialogue moves, ‘information-seeking’ and ‘inquiry’ moves and their subtypes, as assessed on the basis of their degree of dialogicity, emerging from the dialogue sequence in which the moves are situated. The discussion focuses on how such a normative analysis of interaction can help teachers guide more productive dialogues with their students.