La facilitazione della comunicazione in classi scolastiche: le azioni di formulazione

This paper presents a research on facilitation of students’ participation in classroom interactions, focusing on formulations. The paper uses the concept of formulation for the purpose of analysing promotion of a dialogic form of facilitation, in which students’ rights and responsibilities for access to and production of knowledge (i.e. epistemic authority) are enhanced by adult facilitators. Videotaped and transcribed interactions show that facilitators use formulations to enhance students’ epistemic authority in two situations. Formulations enhance epistemic authority in dialogue between facilitators and students as they are focused on students’ narratives, they are completed with questions that invite students to produce new narratives, they are produced in series and combined with other types of actions. Formulations enhance epistemic authority in dialogue among students if they stress diversity of contributions, if they are short and easily abandoned when they do not enhance students’ narratives, and are combined with facilitators’ minimal actions.