Žáci jako spolužáci: participace žáků na výukové komunikaci v kontextu jejich vlivu ve třídě

This study is based on the fact that student participation in educational communication influences their academic achievement and that the extent of student participation is influenced by their position among their peers in the classroom. Therefore, this study inquires as to how students with the lowest and the highest level of dominance, as ascribed to them by their peers, participate in classroom discourse. Based on a sociometric rating-scale measure of dominance, this study investigates the participation of 12 Czech ninth grade students, out of which four have the highest and eight the lowest individual index of dominance. Our findings show that the participation of these students differs greatly, both in their choice of whether to participate and in their interpretations of why they do so. Our study also shows that teachers influence whether some students will participate by setting up beneficial conditions for participation. This study presents a significant finding: students who participate with argumentation and open the “dialogic space” are students who have a high index of dominance and the lowest academic achievement. We use this finding to propose implications for teaching and for emphasizing that teachers and how they establish regulative discourse in the classroom are important factors in deciding whether students participate with argumentation.