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Dialogic Pedagogy: An International Online Journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu 
DOI: 10.5195/dpj.2023.546  |  Vol. 11 No. 3 (2023) A65 

  

 
 
Authentic questions as prompts for productive and 
constructive sequences: A pragmatic approach to 
classroom dialogue and argumentation 

 
Chrysi Rapanta 
Universidade Nova de Lisboa, 
Portugal 

 
Fabrizio Macagno 
Universidade Nova de Lisboa, 
Portugal 

  

Abstract 
Goal. The problem of the authenticity of teacher questions has not received sufficient attention from educational 
researchers interested in the intersection between dialogue and argumentation. In this paper, we adopt a definition of 
authentic questions as dialogical units that prompt teacher-student interactions that are both productive (i.e., several 
students participating) and constructive (i.e., students produce arguments of high complexity). Our goal is to analyze 
whether and how specific types of dialogue prompts can encourage students’ engagement in more sophisticated 
argumentative interactions, as manifested through the construction of high-complexity arguments. 
Method. We describe the implementation of our analytical approach to a large corpus of classroom interactions from 
five European countries. The corpus was segmented into dialogical sequences, which were then coded according to 
the argumentation dialogue goal expressed in the sequence. We also coded students’ arguments according to 
Toulmin’s elements and distinguished between low- and high-complexity arguments from a structural point of view. 
Findings. Our findings show the predominance of the so-called Discovery questions as prompts that are both 
productive and constructive and Inquiry questions as prompts of argumentative constructive interactions. We discuss 
the importance of these findings for teacher professional development purposes. 
 
Keywords: authenticity, dialogue, argumentation, Toulmin, Walton 

Chrysi Rapanta (Ph.D. in communication, 2011) works as a researcher in the field of Argumentation and 
Education at the Institute of Philosophy at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa. She has coordinated national 
and international projects on argumentation and dialogical practices in education, closely collaborating with 
teachers from various contexts and educational levels. She has authored several papers on argument-
based teaching published on major international peer-reviewed journals such as Review of Educational 
Research, Educational Research Review, Educational Psychology Review, Teaching & Teacher Education, 
and Learning, culture & social interaction. She is also the author of “Argumentation strategies in the 
classroom” (2019, Vernon Press). 

Fabrizio Macagno (Ph.D. in linguistics, 2008) works as an assistant professor in the departments of 
Philosophy and Communication at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa. He has coordinated national and 
international projects on dialogical practices in different contexts, including education and medical 
communication. He authored several papers on definition, informal fallacies, argumentation schemes, and 
dialogue theory published in major international peer-reviewed journals such as Journal of Pragmatics, 
Intercultural Pragmatics, Argumentation, Philosophy and Rhetoric, Informal Logic, and Pragmatics and 
Cognition. His most important publications include the books Argumentation Schemes (Cambridge 

ISSN: 2325-3290 (online)  



Authentic questions as prompts for productive and constructive sequences  
Chrysi Rapanta, Fabrizio Macagno 

 
 

Dialogic Pedagogy: An International Online Journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu 
DOI: 10.5195/dpj.2023.546  |  Vol. 11 No. 3 (2023) 
 

A66 

University Press 2008), Emotive language in argumentation (CUP 2014), Interpreting straw man 
argumentation (Springer 2017), and Statutory interpretation: Pragmatics and argumentation (CUP 2021). 

ÏÏÒ 

Introduction 
Teacher questioning techniques have been the focus of extensive research since the last century, 

which showed a lack of authenticity and the predominance of a pre-defined, ready-to-use, and not an open-
to-dialogue pattern, known as Initiation-Response-Evaluation, henceforth IRE (Lemke, 1990; Mehan, 1979; 
Sinclair & Coulthard, 1975). Although IRE has served as a basis to represent the regularities and cohesion 
of moves in educational contexts (Howe et al., 2019; Khong et al., 2019; Littleton & Howe, 2010a), its use 
in educational research and classroom interventions and, more importantly, its limitations thereof, revealed 
the problem of a shared definition of what counts as a dialogical interaction (Bohm, 1996; Nikulin, 2010). 
Can dialogues be analyzed and stimulated through discourse structures? How are participants’ dialogical 
dispositions and values related to dialogical engagement? What are the defining features of a dialogue, 
and is its outcome one of them? Answers to these debated questions involve philosophical, linguistic, and 
pragmatic considerations that need to be woven together (Bunt, 2000; Ganesh & Holmes, 2011; Kecskes, 
2017).  

These complex theoretical questions underlie a very practical problem in education, namely 
determining the conditions that affect the quality of classroom dialogues (Howe & Abedin, 2013). The 
general definition of productive dialogue as a dialogue in which students actively construct understandings 
from the possibilities presented (Littleton & Howe, 2010b, p. 6) leaves out an important dimension of 
dialogicity (Hähkiöniemi et al., 2019; Linell, 1998), which is students’ development of accountable thinking 
and reasoning (Michaels et al., 2008).  On the other side of the classroom dialogue research continuum, 
argumentation scholars emphasize the need to look for arguments-as-products of reasoning with others as 
an indicator of classroom discourse quality (see, for instance, Kuhn, 2015; Reznitskaya et al., 2008). 
Although such approaches have often been characterized as highly instrumental (Matusov, 2009), as they 
consider dialogue as a means to argumentative reasoning, they are proven useful when it comes to 
teaching teachers how to create and maintain a productive discourse classroom environment (see for 
instance, Osborne et al., 2019; Webb et al., 2008). The two fields, namely dialogic pedagogies, on the one 
hand (aiming, in general, at the creation of norms and conditions that foster genuine interactions and 
inquiries between teachers and students and among students alike), and argument-based pedagogies, on 
the other (aiming, in general, at the reasoning by-products of a productive classroom dialogue), are 
complementary in view of fostering classroom interactions that are both inclusive and sophisticated.  

One problem that cuts across the fields of dialogic and argument-based pedagogies is defining the 
type of questions-prompts that elicit high-quality student talk. The dialogic teaching efforts of performing 
dialogue facilitatory moves, such as uptakes, revoicing, mirroring, etc., are normally studied independently 
of the effect they may have on students’ talk. When the two aspects (teachers’ efforts and students’ talk) 
are studied together, the focus is on students’ dialogic learning outcomes, such as elaborations and queries 
(Hennessy et al., 2021; Howe et al., 2019; Vrikki et al., 2019). Moreover, most of the studies are dialogue-
oriented, in the sense that they focus on the process of developing arguments rather than the quality 
thereof. However, to understand how and to what extent students’ talk is of high quality – and thus whether 
the teachers’ moves actually affect students’ argumentative discourse – it is necessary to analyze the 
complexity of the reasoning manifested in their arguments.  

This paper focuses on the interrelationship between teachers’ dialogue prompts and students’ 
reasoning outputs. More specifically, our goal is to analyze whether and how specific types of dialogue 



Authentic questions as prompts for productive and constructive sequences  
Chrysi Rapanta, Fabrizio Macagno 

 
 

Dialogic Pedagogy: An International Online Journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu 
DOI: 10.5195/dpj.2023.546  |  Vol. 11 No. 3 (2023) 
 

A67 

prompts can encourage students’ engagement in more sophisticated argumentative interactions, as 
manifested through the construction of high-complexity arguments. To fulfill this goal, we propose the 
present exploratory study grounded on three different aspects of classroom dialogue analysis: (a) Dialogue 
quality of whole-class dialogical sequences, defined as productive dialogues (as defined by the number of 
students participating with arguments), constructive dialogues (as defined by the higher complexity of 
arguments produced), or both productive and constructive dialogues (Rapanta & Felton, 2022); (b) Types 
of dialogue prompts, based on Walton’s (2010, 2022) argumentation dialogue types (explained below); and 
(c) Types of student arguments, analyzed in terms of their structural complexity based on Toulmin’s (1958) 
Argument Pattern.   

Our work has three basic objectives. First, we intend to provide a dialogical classification of the 
questions used by the teachers to interact with students, operationalizing their detection and use and 
empirically identifying the types of prompts that can lead to and stimulate dialogues of higher argumentative 
quality. This analysis aims at operationalizing the concept of “authentic questions” normally used in 
education. Second, from a practical point of view, this classification can become a useful tool for teachers 
to develop their dialogical activities in the classroom. Finally, from an academic perspective, the use of 
argumentation theories for addressing a crucial issue in dialogical pedagogy (the use of questions) and the 
relationship between questions, dialogues, and arguments can show how the two fields of dialogical 
pedagogy and argument-based teaching can be considered as complementary to each other in some 
crucial respect. Even though the former is focused on the process and the dialogical exchanges and the 
second on a specific product of dialogues (the arguments), the instruments and the perspectives of the two 
approaches are not incompatible – indeed, they can be integrated and developed for both practical and 
theoretical purposes. 

Literature review 
Research on the relationship between dialogical activities and learning has led to the development 

of the broad field of dialogic pedagogy (Wegerif et al., 2020; Wilkinson et al., 2017). Different trends and 
currents characterize this area, as well as theoretical foundations (Baktinian, Vygotskian, Freirian, 
Habermasian, among others), so it is maybe more correct to speak about dialogic pedagogies rather than 
using one definition that fits all purposes. Rather than focusing on the differences among dialogic pedagogy 
scholars, which is not among our goals (you may see Asterhan et al., 2020; Kim & Wilkinson, 2019, for 
useful insights on such diversity), we will briefly overview some commonly accepted distinctions, which will 
serve as the basis for outlining our approach to classroom dialogue. After that, we will focus on a central 
aspect of it, which is teacher questions-prompts, and the problem of defining their authenticity. 

Our approach to classroom dialogue 

The first distinction that characterizes research on educational dialogue is between classroom 
dialogue and classroom interaction. While dialogues are interactive, interactions are not necessarily 
dialogic: a teacher-students interaction, for example, can be authoritative (and not dialogic) when one 
meaning [the teacher’s one] is presented as true. This interactive scenario does not allow the expression 
of other points of view, and the students cannot make sense of the teacher’s discourse by setting their “own 
answering words to the words of the teacher” (Mortimer & Scott, 2003, p. 122). This distinction is 
successfully grasped by Mercer’s (1995) distinction of three types of classroom interactions: the 
disputational, which is interactive but not dialogical, as participants do not share a common goal; the 
cumulative, which is dialogical but not interactive, as participants are not interested in interanimating their 
ideas; and the exploratory, which is both dialogic and interactive, as participants engage critically and 
constructively with each other’s ideas.  



Authentic questions as prompts for productive and constructive sequences  
Chrysi Rapanta, Fabrizio Macagno 

 
 

Dialogic Pedagogy: An International Online Journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu 
DOI: 10.5195/dpj.2023.546  |  Vol. 11 No. 3 (2023) 
 

A68 

A second difference is drawn between classroom dialogue and classroom talk. A talk is not 
necessarily a dialogue – only when it meets specific characteristics. An example is the “accountable talk,” 
which is defined by the participants’ use of certain talk moves that instantiate a culture of deliberation, 
therefore, a culture of dialogue (Resnick et al., 2010). This talk instantiates reasoned, socialized discourse 
and thus manifests a high-quality dialogue. The disputational talk mentioned above is an example of a non-
dialogue, as certain dialogue norms are not respected. An example of cumulative talk is a low-quality 
dialogue, as the focus is not on the construction of shared meanings and their negotiation thereof, which is 
a key aspect of dialogue (Banathy & Jenlink, 2005).  

Third, not all classroom talk/interaction events are dialogically the same, as authentic dialogue can 
be manifested in some events while in others it may not emerge or appear in lower degrees. Certain 
moments are more productive or constructive than others, depending on the participants’ compliance with 
the implicit or explicit norms of discussion and reasoning. For example, participants may differently abide 
by discussion norms such as the conversational ground rules (Mercer & Howe, 2012), mirroring Alexander’s 
dialogic teaching principles of collectivity, reciprocity, and supportiveness (Alexander, 2018). Also, they can 
apply – to different degrees – reasoning norms, such as the epistemological norms governing 
argumentative discourse and dialogue. These norms are gradually internalized while children and 
adolescents engage in dialogic argumentation. For example, students may use strategical meta-argument 
statements criticizing, defending, or just considering the merits of a specific argument (Zillmer & Kuhn, 
2018).  

To understand which moments of dialogue are more dialogic than others, it is possible to distinguish 
between two different perspectives. From a dialogic Vygotskian approach, certain moves are considered 
better than others because they result in a higher dialogue quality. In contrast, from a teleological 
Vygotskian approach, certain moves are considered to be more productive than others because they lead 
to better dialogue outcomes (for the distinction between dialogic and teleological perspectives, see Clarà, 
2021). A common aspect between these two approaches is that dialogue quality/productivity is grasped by 
similar processes or outcomes such as the level of interthinking – or the development of a dialogue on 
previous contributions (Littleton & Mercer, 2013; Mercer, 2002); the presence of sophisticated arguments 
– namely claims supported by clear evidential support and explanations of the links between the claim and 
the support (McNeill, 2011); or the manifestation of metadialogue or metatalk, namely the talk about the 
quality of the dialogue itself (Krabbe, 2003; Newman, 2017).  

In this study, we adopt a teleological Vygotskian approach to classroom dialogue, focusing on those 
dialogue moves that are more productive or constructive than others because of their facilitation of students’ 
participation in the construction of arguments. We understand that other dialogue by-products, such as 
students’ uptakes or expansions of others’ contributions, are also important; however, we focus our 
attention on students’ arguments. These are defined considering the shared and common definition used 
in argumentation theory as “a social and verbal means of trying to resolve, or at least to contend with, a 
conflict or difference that has arisen or exists between two (or more) parties” (Walton, 1990, p. 411). 
Argumentative moves are thus captured by considering the disputable nature of the subject matter (Labov 
& Fanshel, 1977), and include any expression of a justification, reason, or comparison between arguments 
about an issue at hand, which moves the dialogue forward (see also Hennessy et al., 2016; Macagno et 
al., 2022). 

Moreover, we adopt a pragmatic analytical approach to educational dialogue (see, also, Rapanta 
& Macagno, 2022), according to which for a dialogue to exist, participants’ shared goal should be 
manifested through discourse, so that a dialogue can be defined as a certain activity type (Levinson, 1992), 
such as an inquiry, a negotiation, a deliberation, a persuasion, etc. (see Walton, 2022, 2010 for a typology 



Authentic questions as prompts for productive and constructive sequences  
Chrysi Rapanta, Fabrizio Macagno 

 
 

Dialogic Pedagogy: An International Online Journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu 
DOI: 10.5195/dpj.2023.546  |  Vol. 11 No. 3 (2023) 
 

A69 

of argumentation dialogues). For such a decision to be taken a posteriori, namely what is the participants’ 
shared goal in a classroom dialogue transcript1, analysts may look for specific dialogue moves that initiate 
a micro-dialogue on a particular topic and decide which dialogical intention of all parties involved 
predominates in discourse. In practice, this may mean that a participant, e.g., a teacher, initiates a 
sequence with the goal of having students persuade each other about an issue, but the other party, in this 
case the students, may have difficulty understanding the task, and therefore an information-seeking 
dialogue may be initiated instead (for more about dialogue shifts see Walton & Krabbe, 1995). 

The question of authentic questions 

Although questioning is the most common teaching strategy for eliciting student responses, to be 
effective, they should stimulate high order thinking, such as analysis and inquiry, and encourage students’ 
reflective and creative answers (Eadie et al., 2022; Myhill, 2006). In the educational literature, authentic 
questions are usually separated from non-authentic ones on the basis of whether the question invites 
several often conflicting answers or only one pre-defined answer, i.e., the one that is “in the teacher’s head.”  
In other words, authentic questions are considered the ones “for which the asker does not maintain 
interpretive authority and does not indicate a pre-scripted answer” (Levine et al., 2022, p. 194). Therefore, 
the use of such questions implies a non-authoritative epistemological stance (Boyd & Markarian, 2015). 
The question that arises is: How can such a stance be manifested in discourse and, particularly, in 
dialogue? This question gets even more problematic to answer if we consider the growing interest in the 
field of education in analyzing the questions’ function rather than their semantic and syntactic form (Myhill, 
2006; Schaffalitzky, 2022). From a communicative point of view, an apparently “closed” question (which 
semantically provides only a limited set of answers) may open the dialogue space, while an apparently 
“open” question (which can be answered in different ways) may close it. Moreover, the vast majority of 
dialogic teaching researchers have focused on how to transform “the third turn” in the IRE pattern by 
replacing the “evaluation” with other, more dialogic talk moves, such as revoicing, uptaking, mirroring, etc. 
(Edwards-Groves et al., 2014; Nystrand et al., 2003). The “first turn,” namely the Initiation part of a dialogical 
sequence, has been much less investigated. What kind of questions may serve as authentic dialogue 
initiation prompts, and what are the differences between them?  

Based on other scholars (Boyd & Markarian, 2011; Lefstein, 2010; Levine et al., 2022) and 
expanding on our own work (Macagno, submitted.; Rapanta, forthcoming), we will try to look at questions 
as part of a dialogue, and not as isolated pieces of discourse. In other words, defining the “openness” or 
“authenticity” of a question only makes sense when it is situated in an authentic or genuine dialogue. In 
everyday contexts, “a true, meaningful dialogue requires (a) some common ground among participants (to 
escape dialogue-of-the-deaf), (b) some significant differences (to avoid echo-dialogue), (c) a willingness of 
both to be open to ‘the other’” (Fishelov, 2008, p. 336), and (d) a “we intention” in dialogue, namely a shared 
dialogue goal among participants (Weigand, 2010). In the next section, we will argue that these four 
conditions are met by the so-called argumentation dialogues. 

Argumentation dialogues as authentic dialogues 

Argumentation theory may offer a solution to the problem of classroom dialogue authenticity, as 
the epistemic and communicative goals coincide: participants engage in argumentation because there is 
always something they need to know more, better, or differently (unless they want to impose their own 
ideas, therefore leading to eristic argumentation). Therefore, an argumentation dialogue is developed in 
classroom discourse when the participants (teacher and/or students) align to the goal of resolving an issue 
for which more than one perspective is necessary. In this sense, argumentation goals and dialogues are 

 
1 We are aware of the trascription paradox of assigning certain intentions to participants without having direct access to them. For 
more about transcription as an interpretive act see Bird, 2005. 



Authentic questions as prompts for productive and constructive sequences  
Chrysi Rapanta, Fabrizio Macagno 

 
 

Dialogic Pedagogy: An International Online Journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu 
DOI: 10.5195/dpj.2023.546  |  Vol. 11 No. 3 (2023) 
 

A70 

potentially authentic because the other’s perspective is genuinely searched for and considered. According 
to Hadjioannou (2007), authentic discussions “are motivated by authentically dialogic purposes, and the 
participants’ objective is to reach new and more sophisticated understandings” (p. 371). Therefore, when 
an argumentation dialogue goal is mutually pursued by the classroom discussion participants, we can infer 
that an authentic dialogue takes place.  

Different argumentation goals may emerge, according to participants’ initial and final epistemic 
states, as argumentation theorist Douglas Walton (2022, 2010) suggests. Among these goals, he 
distinguishes information-seeking (we rename it to information-sharing to make it more appropriate for 
classroom contexts), inquiry, negotiation, deliberation, persuasion, and discovery. The metadialogical 
dialogue is also included Based on several authors (e.g., Bereiter & Scardamalia, 2016; Hennessy et al., 
2016; Krabbe, 2003), which consists in negotiating the conditions for making dialogue possible. Table 1 
presents a synthesis of the different argumentation dialogue goals. 

Table 1. Types of dialogue goals 
TYPE INITIAL 

SITUATION 
MAIN GOAL PARTICIPANTS’ 

AIMS 
SIDE BENEFITS 

1. Persuasion  Conflicting 
points of 
view 

Resolving such 
conflicts by 
verbal means 

Persuading the 
other(s) 

• Develop and reveal 
positions 

• Build up confidence 
• Influence onlookers 
• Add to prestige 

2. Negotiation  Conflict of 
interests & 
need for 
cooperation  

Making a deal Getting the best 
out of it for 
oneself  

• Reach an agreement 
• Build up confidence  
• Reveal positions 
• Influence onlookers  
• Add to prestige 

3. Inquiry  General 
ignorance  

Increasing 
knowledge and 
reaching an 
agreement 

Finding a “proof” 
or destroy one 

• Add to prestige 
• Gain experience 
• Raise funds 

4. Deliberation Need for 
action  

Reaching a 
decision or an 
evaluation  

Influencing the 
outcome  

• Reach an agreement 
• Develop and reveal 

positions 
• Express preferences 

5. Discovery Need to find 
an 
explanation 
of facts 

Choose best 
hypothesis for 
testing 

 

Find and defend 
a suitable 
hypothesis 

• Develop and reveal 
positions  

• Gain experience 
• Reach an agreement 

6. Information-
sharing 

Personal 
Ignorance  

Spreading 
knowledge and 
revealing 
positions 

Gaining, passing 
on, showing, or 
hiding personal 
knowledge 

• Reach an agreement 
• Develop and reveal 

positions  
• Add to prestige 

7. Meta-dialogue Unclear or 
unshared 
meanings or 
unshared 
purpose of 
the 
interaction 

Reaching an 
agreement 
concerning the 
interaction  

Establishing a 
more strategic 
meaning or 
purpose 

• Clarifying concepts 
• Acquiring knowledge  
• Reach an agreement 

about the nature of 
task/type of dialogue 

 



Authentic questions as prompts for productive and constructive sequences  
Chrysi Rapanta, Fabrizio Macagno 

 
 

Dialogic Pedagogy: An International Online Journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu 
DOI: 10.5195/dpj.2023.546  |  Vol. 11 No. 3 (2023) 
 

A71 

Walton’s types of dialogues were intended to describe whole dialogues or sequences. However, 
they have also been developed partially or fully into coding schemes that capture how interlocutors propose 
different types of dialogue through their moves (Bereiter & Scardamalia, 2016; Macagno & Bigi, 2020; 
Rapanta & Christodoulou, 2019). Under this latter perspective, adopted in this paper, the proposal of a 
dialogue type (usually by the teacher) may be manifested in an initiating question-prompt, which can be 
accepted and continued by the student, or rejected by ignoring it or shifting the dialogue to another type. 
Clearly, this latter option is possible when the dialogue mirrors a real-life conversational exchange (such as 
in the aforementioned dialogue types); in the context of an examination or testing, opting out or negotiating 
the dialogical activity is much more difficult due to the authority of one party (the teacher). In case of the 
aforementioned dialogues, the students’ (adequate or inadequate) response to the prompt can be identified 
in two ways: (a) the dialogue sequence continues the dialogue and does not shift to another type (usually 
via a different type of prompt); and (b) as most of the dialogue types are argumentative (in the sense of 
promoting argument-as-process), arguments-as-products emerge within the discussion. 

This pragmatic, dialogical approach to questions as invitation moves within and for a dialogue 
(White, 1993, p. 30) can provide a theoretically grounded alternative to the classical dichotomy between 
“authentic” and “inauthentic” questions (Nystrand & Gamoran, 1991). As Widdowson pointed out, a move 
(such as a prompt or a question) can be described according to  two types of appropriateness: to the 
linguistic context and to the communicative situation. Questions whose answer is already known by the 
teacher (the so-called “unauthentic” questions) are situationally unnatural as their communicative function 
does not correspond to the normal, ordinary one (Widdowson, 1978, pp. 6–7). As pointed out above, 
“unauthentic” questions propose a dialogical activity (the examination) that is defined by a specific 
institutional setting (the school) and specific authoritative roles (teacher vs. student). However, this setting 
does not mirror real-life dialogical activities – and thus the ordinary joint verbal activities through which the 
interlocutors develop a shared understanding and construct their knowledge through the use of arguments.   

Widdowson underscored that “unnatural” or inauthentic questions result in limited learning effects 
(Widdowson, 1972, 1978, p. 18), as students learn only a narrow dimension of the subject matter, ignoring 
other crucial aspects. The distinction is thus not between the relationship between the teacher and the 
information requested from the students, but among the types of dialogue that a question proposes and 
that can promote in different degrees specific abilities or aspects of knowledge construction (Bereiter & 
Scardamalia, 2016, p. 14). On this perspective, the dichotomy between authentic vs. inauthentic questions 
can be interpreted as a difference between simulated (or testing) exchanges, and dialogues that mirror real-
life learning situations, namely in which the participants are confronted with a problem, doubt, or lack of 
information, and they need to overcome it through the use of arguments. 

The present study 
In this study, we focus on teacher questions emerging in a large, multi-country and multi-age 

classroom discourse corpus (see Data collection about details), and in particular, the questions-prompts 
that mark the beginning of a teacher-student argumentative interaction (therefore on initiation, rather than 
follow-up questions). In particular, our goal is to identify what types of teachers’ questions engage students 
in developing dialogues mirroring real-life learning and dialogical experiences and encouraging the co-
construction of knowledge (Segal & Lefstein, 2016), represented in the aforementioned argumentative 
dialogue types.  Our research question is: What types of teacher questions may function as prompts 
initiating argumentative whole-class dialogues that encourage more complex types of arguments? We 
follow a microanalytic approach such as the one used by O’Connor et al. (2015) to research the use of 
“academically productive talk” in classrooms. In addition, we define dialogue quality in terms of argument 
construction, identifying three different types of whole-class discussion instances, namely: (a) teacher-



Authentic questions as prompts for productive and constructive sequences  
Chrysi Rapanta, Fabrizio Macagno 

 
 

Dialogic Pedagogy: An International Online Journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu 
DOI: 10.5195/dpj.2023.546  |  Vol. 11 No. 3 (2023) 
 

A72 

mediated productive (at least three students producing arguments) but not constructive (Level 1 arguments 
only, see Data analysis below) sequences; (b) teacher-student constructive exchanges (at least two 
subsequent argument moves by same or different students on the same issue with the latter being of higher 
complexity than the former); (c) teacher-mediated both productive and constructive sequences (at least 
three students producing arguments, with at least one argument being of a higher complexity). 

Data collection and analysis 
The data analyzed in this paper come from a large-scale educational study as part of a European 

project aiming at the development of cultural literacy learning skills among students from 5 to 15 years old. 
In particular, we focus on a corpus2 of transcribed interactions from 111 lessons distributed across five 
countries (UK, Portugal, Spain, Cyprus and Germany) and three age groups (preprimary, primary, and 
secondary). All lessons focused on cultural literacy discussions, defined as discussions around cultural 
literacy themes and dispositions such as tolerance, empathy and inclusion, essential as part of any civic 
education curriculum (see also Rapanta et al., 2021). Also, all lessons used a cultural text (pre-selected 
short animated film or picturebook) as a springboard for discussion. 

Our micro-analysis took into consideration two types of moves: (a) teachers’ questioning prompts 
at the beginning of a dialogical sequence or exchange3; and (b) students’ reasoning moves emerging as 
part of the same sequence or exchange. We only considered sequences in which at least three different 
students participated with arguments, and exchanges in which teacher’s mediation resulted in an argument 
with a higher complexity (see below) than the one previously stated. As mentioned previously, our goal of 
analysis was to define the types of teacher initiating dialogue prompts – herein defined as proposals of 
dialogues  – that can encourage students’ engagement in authentic dialogue, manifested in (a) students’ 
active participation in the sequence, and (b) students’ construction of arguments. 

Coding of  dialogue prompts 

We define initiating questions as dialogue prompts; therefore, we consider them not as isolated 
constructs but as intentional units manifesting a shared dialogue goal such as the ones presented in Table 
1. The following prompts initiating productive and constructive sequences and exchanges emerged in our 
corpus: (a) information-sharing prompts, aimed at promoting the expression of personal viewpoints and 
information but without establishing interpretative connections with the cultural text at hand; (b) inquiry 
prompts, aimed at encouraging the identification of textual information that can be used as evidence to 
support a pre-defined viewpoint; (c) discovery prompts, intended to elicit interpretations about certain 
aspects of the text; (d) persuasion prompts, aimed at encouraging students to adopt a perspective and 
justify it with evidence (either personal or found in the texts); (e) deliberation prompts, consisting in 
requesting taking up a stance as part of a dichotomous issue and justifying it with evidence (either personal 
or found in the texts); and (f) metadialogical prompts, encouraging a discussion on the nature and goals of 
dialogue itself. Table 2 shows an example of each. 

 

 

 
2 The corpus is available at Rapanta, Gonçalves, et al., 2021. 
3 The corpus was segmented into sequences according to the topic and goal shift criteria described by Schegloff, 2007. The 
identification of exchanges, as parts of sequences, was only done when a higher complexity reasoning structure was elicited at one-
to-one level as part of teacher-student interaction. 



Authentic questions as prompts for productive and constructive sequences  
Chrysi Rapanta, Fabrizio Macagno 

 
 

Dialogic Pedagogy: An International Online Journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu 
DOI: 10.5195/dpj.2023.546  |  Vol. 11 No. 3 (2023) 
 

A73 

 

Table 2. Types of questions as dialogue prompts. 
Type of dialogue prompt Example 
Information-sharing 

T And [the father] thought [boxing] was for girls ... and what's your 
opinion on the fact the father thought it was for girls? 

S 
I think it doesn't matter whether dancing is for girls or for boys, it's all 
the same, like football or rugby, they are all sports and hobbies are 
for everybody, there's not for boys or girls because we are all equal. 

 

Inquiry 
Τ 

He felt very sad. So how did you know he was so sad? S11. How did 
you understand it? 

S11 From the expression on the face. 

Τ From the expression on his face. Very nice. S1? 

S1 From the eyes. 

Τ What did the ey- 

S From the posture of his body. 

Τ And from the posture of his body. Yes, but what did his eyes have? 

S1 Drops were falling. 

Τ Drops were falling. What were these drops S1? 

S1 His tears. 
 

Discovery 
T2 The movie was showing the baboon on the Moon. Why did the 

SOUNDS of the forest appear before the Earth was shown?  

S23 Because he wanted to go to the Planet Earth and could not… 
 

Persuasion T Shhh. Let’s have a look, Ok? The boy was…different. Why did we 
say that he was different?    

S11 Because he liked a specific thing, and the father wanted that he liked 
a different thing.  

T And why is he different if he likes – I can also like bananas and dislike 
apples, and I am not diff- 

T AND WHY IS HE THE ONE who is different, and not his father?  

S6  Because the father was a champion and … […] 

S1 For the father, it the son who is different, but for the son, the father is 
different! […] 

T And for society? […] What do you think? 

S7 
Nobody is different. Because everyone does what they like, and for 
someone a specific thing is normal, for someone else it is not; 
someone likes it and others do not like it… 

 

Deliberation  T What would you do if you were the Baboon [left alone on the moon]? 

S1 Morse code. 
S3 Morse code. 

T Explain that. 

S3 Well, since he can turn on and off the Moon, then we’d do Morse 
Code to communicate with humans. 

 

Metadialogical  T What is home?   
S [I think home means {unclear} really nice people]. 
S5 That you live in. 



Authentic questions as prompts for productive and constructive sequences  
Chrysi Rapanta, Fabrizio Macagno 

 
 

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T What is home? Somewhere you live? OK. I'll write that in here. (Writing) 
Some [...] where you live. S33. 

S33 It's somewhere safe. 

S23 It's where we sleep. 
S19 It's somewhere you buy it. 

 

 

Coding of students’ arguments 

Students’ arguments were first identified using a pre-constructed coding scheme that aimed at 
grasping dialogical discourse units. The “dialogicity” coding scheme is explained in detail in Macagno et al. 
(2022). Here, we only focus on students’ Reasoning moves, defined as moves providing justifications in 
support of a viewpoint or advancing arguments against others’ positions, or synthesizing/comparing ideas. 
For simplicity, we call these Reasoning moves ‘arguments.’ In order to grasp the quality of students’ 
arguments, we further identified their level of complexity, as explained below. 

Arguments’ complexity. In Toulmin’s (1958) model, the core structure of an argument (or 
“skeleton pattern,” as Toulmin puts it) is represented by the triad Data-Claim-Warrant, as they are the 
necessary parts of an argument. Claim is the statement put forward by the arguer, Data is the necessary 
premise supporting the Claim, and Warrant is the inferential rule through which Data connects to the Claim. 
Toulmin further distinguishes three elements that increase the complexity of an argument, namely the 
Qualifier, the Backing, and the Rebuttal. The first two concern the strength of one’s argument, which is 
protected against possible criticisms by limiting the generalizability of the conclusion or its certainty 
(Qualifier) or defending it by providing evidence supporting either the warrant or the data (Backing). The 
Rebuttal is the anticipation of the possible conditions under which the argument is no longer acceptable. 
This model, also known as Toulmin’s Argument Pattern, is represented in Figure 1. 

Figure 1. Toulmin’s Argument Pattern (Toulmin, 1958), divided into levels of complexity. 

 

DATA CLAIM

WARRANT

BACKING

REBUTTAL

QUALIFIER



Authentic questions as prompts for productive and constructive sequences  
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The use of the distinct elements that are an extension of the skeleton pattern reveals different 
argumentative skills and, therefore, different levels of complexity. The use of Backings and Qualifiers 
mirrors the speaker’s awareness that his or her arguments are defeasible, and their premises can be 
questioned or attacked. In particular, the use of evidence as a Backing to support a claim reveals students’ 
epistemological awareness (Sandoval & Millwood, 2005). Similarly, the use of Qualifiers (e.g., “most 
probably,” “to a certain degree,” etc.), largely corresponding to the epistemic modals (Rocci, 2019), 
indicates an advanced knowledge of the epistemological norms guiding argumentation and in particular the 
defeasible nature of the conclusions that can be supported by natural arguments (Walton, 1990, 2006). 
Therefore, the presence of Backings and Qualifiers can be considered a higher level of complexity than the 
mere use of the core structure (Claim, Data, and Warrant). The use of Rebuttals is an even more complex 
capacity (Foong & Daniel, 2010), as it implies the anticipation and thus acknowledgment and representation 
of a possible or actual different perspective. The presence of this element manifests two distinct kinds of 
sophisticated argumentative skills, namely 1) a dual perspective – in which another’s opposing point of view 
concerning the subject matter under discussion is taken into account – or 2) an integrative perspective – 
i.e., the weighting of pro and con arguments in the presentation of a viewpoint (Felton & Kuhn, 2001; Kuhn 
& Crowell, 2011; Kuhn & Udell, 2007; Nussbaum, 2021). For this reason, the use of Rebuttals corresponds 
to the highest level of complexity. The increased complexity of arguments identified by the appearance of 
Backings, Qualifiers, or Rebuttals was used as a criterion of the constructiveness of the argumentative 
interaction. 

The coding process 

The coding of the whole corpus, publicly available at (Macagno et al., 2022; Rapanta, Gonçalves, 
et al., 2021), was carried out by the second author, while 20% of the coded data was double-coded by the 
first author for inter-rater agreement purposes. For the coding of teachers’ questioning prompts, the 
percentage of agreement between the coders was 82.5%, while for the coding of Toulmin’s elements, upon 
which the arguments’ complexity was decided, the agreement was 90%. All discrepancies were resolved 
through discussion, and the second author’s coding was maintained in all instances. 

Findings 
As previously mentioned, we segmented our corpus in sequences according to the productivity and 

constructiveness criteria, and we looked at the types of teachers’ prompts initiating each sequence 
(although we acknowledge that a student may also initiate a classroom discourse sequence, this was not 
the case for productive and constructive sequences). Table 3 shows the distribution of types of prompts 
across types of sequences (N = 189)4. 

Table 3. Types of teacher prompts distributed across productive and constructive sequences. 
  Information 

sharing 
Inquiry Persuasion Discovery Deliberation Metadialogical 

Productive & 
constructive 

24 12 23 43 5 5 

Only 
productive 

12 3 6 26 1 3 

Only 
constructive 

0 19 5 0 0 2 

 
As shown in Table 3, the productivity of teacher-student interactions relates to a type of prompt that 

we defined above as Discovery because of the discovery dialogue goal it promotes. Discovery moves 

 
4 This number refers to number of sequences, consisting of several turns each, occurring in whole-class discussion activities. The 
total corpus also included small-group activities, not considered here. 



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involve a request and provision of a reason of a specific type – namely, the best possible explanation of a 
fact, a text, an action, or an element that is at present unexplained. This type of reason is not simply an 
explanation of a personal perspective (information-sharing): in discovery moves, the speakers ask and 
provide an interpretation of an objective and external state of affairs, not of a personal perspective. While 
information-sharing moves cannot be objected to (I cannot reject the reason why my interlocutor came to 
hold a certain belief), discovery moves are open to discussion, as they concern an observable 
phenomenon.  

Discovery moves are also different from persuasion moves. The difference lies in two aspects, 
namely, the overall dialogical goal and the subject matter. The goal of the participants in a persuasion 
dialogue is to change the opinion of the interlocutor – so that one view “prevails” over the other. Discovery 
moves are intended to assess the force of a hypothesis and test the best possible explanation. Moreover, 
while persuasion moves normally concern opinions – and thus they involve values, preferences, and 
decisions propositions that are generally accepted and not necessarily true (Aristotle, Rhetoric, 1357a 30-
32; Walton 1990) – discovery moves address an observable state of affairs, which cannot be denied by the 
interlocutors. The interlocutors engage in finding the best possible (causal) relation that can explain it in a 
sort of “retroduction.” In discovery dialogues, it is expected that several students participate expressing 
their personal theories and interpretations about a specific concept or phenomenon at hand (note that 
personal opinions and viewpoints about general topics cannot be considered “theories”). An example of a 
Discovery dialogical sequence is presented in Table 4. 

Table 4. An example of a dialogical sequence initiated by a Discovery prompt (in bold). 
Line Speaker Speech Argument 

complexity 

12022 T Who's catching my attention {unclear}?  Right, any - I want to bring this back 
to whole class now. So anybody who would like to share a thought about 
where they THINK the baboon belongs, and you can if you would like to 
make a connection where you think home is FOR the baboon and then to 
finish, we need to just unpack this idea of home a little bit more, like what it 
means for somewhere to be home. 

  

12023 S22 Well what I was thinking, that I think his home is on EARTH because he might 
have been of - like long ago, I don't know, like 60s or something, NASA used 
to send animals to space like cats and dogs and monkeys and things like that. 
He may [...] he may have actually been on earth but he's been TAKEN and 
tested to be put on a rocket, SENT to the moon and then he may have lost 
power or something so he's lost signals with uhm earth, and then he may 
have just crash-landed onto the moon. And he's used the resources used 
from the rocket to build a home there and things like that. 

CDB 

12024 T So you said to build a HOME on the moon. Just leaving that out there a little 
bit. Thank you, S22. And S7 had made that connection as well to kind of some 
of the NASA investigations using animals in doing so. So S7, can we come to 
you if you've got something to add? 

  

12025 S7 I'm going to add on someone else on this. I agree with S22 and I'm thinking 
about something that S16  said 'cos uhm I think that [...] I think that his like 
home is the moon - no no, his home is the earth and he's done something 
with like NASA to come from somewhere. He's done kind of like - sent him up 
there and then his things like exploded or like shut down and that, like nobody 
knows how, and it goes - crash-land onto the moon, and then he uses all of 
like his savings and I don't {unclear}, what he's got to help him survive. 

  



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12026 T So in your view although he's LIVING there, his home is somewhere else. So 
home's not so much necessarily to do with where you physically are. 

  

12027 S7 Like I could go and live in Australia for a month, but that wouldn't be my home. 
My home is back here. 

B 

12028 T OK. S18.   
12029 S18 I'm adding onto S22's, because that - well, I didn't know 60 years ago that 

NASA did do that or if it didn't, but if he does crash-land into space with the 
rocket, then he would use like the rocket parts. But then I'm also challenging 
S22 because I don't think that a rocket would have or would be made of like 
wood and have like paint in it like have like the square windows that you would 
normally have on like a house or [a door]. 

RB 

12030 S12 [Yeah, he could use the] glass or something [from the rocket]. R 

12031 S18 [I know but there]- but normally if you saw like a rocket, it would be like circles, 
not squares or lines. 

R 

12032 T So you're saying that [although there's]-   
12033 S12 [This is all them years ago].   

12034 T this theory with some of you that it's a rocket that's crash-landed, you think 
from the visual we've had that that's not - not a possibility based on what you 
know about what a rocket might have on it and look like, yeah? S25? 

  

12035 S18 Maybe.   
12036 S25 I think that his home is on the moon and he was born on the moon, but his his 

mum and dad raised him, but they realised he got too old for them to stay with 
him so maybe they went back to earth and just left him there. 

CD 

12037 T So they were initially from earth, but he was born on the moon and they've 
gone back again? 

  

12038 S25 Yeah.   

12039 T So home home being home to him meant 'cos that's where he was born.   
12040 S25 Yeah.   

 
The excerpt above is from a primary school classroom in the UK. The class discusses a short 

animated film, ‘Baboon on the moon’ (Duriez, 2002), and the teacher’s initiating question is about where 
the Baboon belongs to. Five different students participate in the discussion, and all formulated arguments 
at some point. S225 starts with a medium complexity argument, composed of Claim (C), Data (D), and 
Backing (B), which is then extended by S7 on line 12027. Then S18 challenges S22 with an evidence-
based Rebuttal (RB), S12 adds to the challenge, and S22 replies back. Finally, on line 12036, S25 
expresses a different theory regarding where the Baboon is from. In all these instances, the teacher is 
supportive, revoicing students’ contributions and making reformulations when necessary. This was 
considered a sequence that was both productive (as at least three students participated with arguments) 
and constructive (as there was at least one argument with a higher complexity). 

In our corpus we also had a relatively high number of Discovery whole-class discussion sequences 
that were productive, but the level of students’ arguments remained low, meaning that the participant 
students did not feel motivated to go further in their theories’ construction and justification. An example of 

 
5 All students were given codes for anonymity reasons; no pseudonyms were used due to the large size of the corpus. 



Authentic questions as prompts for productive and constructive sequences  
Chrysi Rapanta, Fabrizio Macagno 

 
 

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a low-argument (productive but not constructive, in the terms we used above) Discovery dialogical 
sequence is presented in Table 5. 

 
 
Table 5. An example of a low-argument dialogical sequence initiated by a Discovery prompt (in bold). 

Line Speaker Speech Argument 
complexity 

7036 T (…) Now, I'm going to say this again uhm is the babOON AT home? Now, let's 
turn this around and look at our - earlier earlier on, I asked you about what is 
HOME or what is a home. This is what you said. (uncovers the board) Now, IS 
the baboon at home? 

 

7037 S No. 
 

7038 T Put your hand up if you think yes. Put your hand up if you think no (several 
hands raised). Wow! Noone thinks yes? Goodness me. Right, everyone thinks 
the baboon is NOT at home?   

 

7039 Ss No. 
 

7040 T Interesting. 
 

7041 S12 No, I think he is at home. 
 

7042 T Because? 
 

7043 S12 Because uhm his home was there and I think […] his […] house got on - was 
being rolled onto a rocket and taken to the moon. 

CD 

7044 S6 I agree with S12 because, actually, the moon might be his home if - 'cos he 
might have lived on earth but then he might have moved house and he wanted 
to go to the moon and that is where he might've wanted to live. But then  he 
might've wanted to go back to earth and he might have wished he didn't move 
to the moon. 

CD 

7045 T Right. Interesting. I'm coming to you in a minute (pointing to S11). 
 

7046 S8 I agree with S12 'cos – cos the {tornado} might've picked up the house and 
moved it to the moon 

 

7047 T Right. So, we've got two different theories here.  He may have accidentally 
ended up on the moon or he may have moved to the moon and realised, 
'Actually, I'm not sure if I like the moon anymore. I'd like to go home.' Do you 
want - what would you like to say (indicating to S11)? 

 

7048 S11 Well his ACTUAL home was ACTUALLY over here, where earth is (indicating 
on floor). 

 

7049 T Right. 
 

7050 S11 And then he probably got cut down 'cos someone might have took him from 
his normal house to the moon. 

CD 

7051 T What got cut down? 
 

7052 S11 Cut down so he can't be with his family again. 
 

7053 T So, what, what got cut down? 
 

7054 S11 That they could never be together again. 
 

7055 T What so like his HOUSE or? 
 



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7056 S11 Well that - well […] he probably didn't WANT to be cut down from earth all the 
way to the moon, which is over HERE (indicating on floor), but then he actually 
realised that his actual family wasn't on the moon.  It's actually back where - 
on the earth. 

 

7057 T Right. I'm gonna open this up ONE more time. So, I'm gonna let you talk when 
you like but try not to speak over other people, using that sentence stem 
(pointing to board) one last time. 

 

7058 T So, who - do you agree with S6, S12, S11? And then I'm gonna let you guys 
go {unclear} for a couple of minutes, OK? 

  

7059 S24 I agree with […] S2 because a tornado could only be in one place. CW 
7060 S5 [I agree with S8 it's because uhm if a tornado would suck up a person, it would 

maybe send him up into space and he would maybe [{unclear}]. 
  

7061 S11 I disagree with S5 because […] a tornado - a tornado can't fly and it can't barely 
fly. 

CD 

7062 T I wonder if anyone's got any viewpoints that are not about tornados.   

7063 S [I disagree with S8 because] you do know that tornadoes can only spin on land. CW 

7064 T We have - we've, we've talked about that, yeah.   

7065 S They can't fly in the - from the space - from the moon to the earth.   
7066 T We, we have - I think we've established that. So, [as I said]-   

7067 T Guys? We're thinking about whether the babOON feels he BELONGS on the 
MOON or whether the baboon IS at HOME or not. 

  

7068 S I - I disagree with S6 because, if tornadoes can go - reach high and they can 
go up to the moon. I think S8's correct because tornadoes can go very high. 

CD 

 7069 T Right.   

 
The excerpt above is about the same film (Baboon on the moon), and the teacher’s initiating 

question (“Is the Baboon at home?”) is similar to the teacher’s question in Table 4. The goal of the dialogue 
is for students to discover the most plausible theory regarding whether or not the Moon is Baboon’s home. 
At least six students participated (in some instances, it was difficult to identify which student was speaking, 
which is why the code S), formulating their theories. However, the level of argumentative reasoning remains 
low (at a “skeleton” pattern). No evidence from the film was used to support one theory or another, and no 
evidence-based rebuttals were made. Moreover, it seems that students were “stuck” on one theory (the 
idea that Baboon was moved to the Moon by a tornado), which was not constructive as there was no 
evidence to support or rebut it. The teacher asks students to change to a different theory (Line 7062), but 
with no success. 

Both dialogues in Tables 4 and 5 were prompted as Discovery dialogues; however, only in the first 
one were students genuinely absorbed in the task of discovering the best explanation based on evidence. 
This difference was possibly due to different task interpretations and expectations by different participants 
(see, for example, Richards & Pilcher, 2015, for dialogical differences in what counts as “discussion”). 
Clearly, other conditions that affect students’ reasoning quality may apply, for example, age. Actually, the 
second, low-argument-quality excerpt presented above is from a younger age group than the first one. Still, 
the problem remains about what the teacher in the second dialogue could have done to further prompt 
students’ argumentative reasoning. Our further analysis reveals a possible answer: Almost all teacher 
prompts leading to a higher level of argument complexity as part of teacher-student dialogical exchanges 



Authentic questions as prompts for productive and constructive sequences  
Chrysi Rapanta, Fabrizio Macagno 

 
 

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were Inquiry prompts, i.e., relating to the dialogue goal of identifying proofs to support a theory. This implies 
that a possible effective teaching strategy to use throughout a sequence is the use of inquiry prompts to 
expand on students’ reasoning. Table 6 presents some examples of these prompts. 

Table 6. Examples* of constructive exchanges with the use of Inquiry prompts (in bold). 
Line Speaker Speech Argument 

complexity 
6395 T Why was he playing the trumpet? 

 

6396 S23 So his family knew where he was. D 
6397 T Do you think his family might have been able to hear him? How do you 

know his family weren't on the moon? 
  

6398 S23 Because there was only one. B 

7635 T Is he - is he dying?  
7636 S28 No, he's just missing his family. D 
7637 T Can you build a bit more on that, S28? How do you know he's missing 

his family, when thinking [about him]? 
 

7638 S28 [Because] he was crying in the film. B 

8238 S2 I think he wanted to go go back to earth because his family lives there. CD 
8239 T You think he wanted to go back to earth because his FAMILY lives there. 

That's right. He wasn't with his family on the moon, was he? 
 

8240 S11 He was [all alone]. B 
*The examples are from different classes using the same lesson plan. 
 

All three examples of constructive teacher-student exchanges presented above show the passage 
from a low-complexity argument element (C, D) to a higher one (B). To achieve this, the three teachers use 
Inquiry prompts, i.e., asking students to search for proof of what they say in the film, therefore substantiating 
their interpretations. Moreover, in the third example, the higher-complexity argument (use of Backing) 
comes from a different student, further adding to the dialogicity of the class discussion. 

In summary, our qualitative analysis of the corpus shows that the types of prompts can be related 
to the quality of the argumentative interaction. When teachers ask questions prompting a Discovery 
dialogue, it is more likely that the following interaction is both productive (several students participating with 
arguments) and constructive (high-level arguments appear). However, for this to occur, students must 
understand what Discovery is about (their theories need to coordinate with evidence that is available to all), 
and teachers need to recognize and intervene when students’ theories tend to be grounded on personal 
assumptions rather than on evidence-based reasoning. When the justifications used by students cannot be 
put under discussion because they remain at a hypothetical level, as in the example of Table 5, then a low-
argument sequence may emerge instead. The teacher, in that case, may opt for shifting the dialogue to a 
different type, for instance, an Inquiry dialogue, which would remind the students to search for disputable 
evidence available to everyone, in that case, from the film they were shown, as in the examples of Table 6. 

Discussion 
The way teachers enact their questioning strategies is central to effective instruction (Buchanan 

Hill, 2016; Eadie et al., 2022; Wilen & Clegg Jr, 1986). As a consequence, examining how teachers actually 
formulate their questions, even in “dialogic” classrooms, is key to understanding how teacher-student 
communicative relations can be improved. In this paper, we looked at teacher questions as goal-oriented 
pragmatic units, which are aimed at proposing a specific dialogical activity. We classified these dialogue 
prompts based on Walton’s dialogue type categories, summarized in Table 1. Then, we identified the 



Authentic questions as prompts for productive and constructive sequences  
Chrysi Rapanta, Fabrizio Macagno 

 
 

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prompts leading to more complex student arguments and promoting students’ participation and reasoning 
(namely, productive and constructive prompts). 

Our analysis was based on a large (approximately 53.000 turns) multi-country dataset (Rapanta, 
Gonçalves, et al., 2021) and revealed that the type of teacher prompt that is more productive and 
constructive is the so-called Discovery prompt. Discovery prompts are used when teachers invite students 
to interpret a specific concept or idea, formulating their own theories with the view of discovering the theory 
that best matches the available data. In addition, to scaffold students’ arguments at an exchange level, 
teachers in our corpus also effectively used Inquiry prompts, explicitly asking students to use available 
evidence as a support to their theories. Together, these two strategies were shown to be effective in terms 
of classroom dialogue quality. Moreover, we concluded that shifting from one dialogue type to another can 
be an effective strategy for achieving classroom discourse sequences that are both productive and 
constructive. These findings can be used for teacher professional development purposes, as they root 
teacher questions’ authenticity in concrete dialogue functions rather than abstract or irrealistic ideas such 
as teachers’ genuine ignorance (Long, 2018) or epistemological stance (Lefstein, 2009). 

From a theoretical point of view, the paper contributes to a pragmatic operationalization of what 
authentic questions may look like in whole-class discussions, drawing on a multi-country and multi-age 
corpus (which adds to the generalizability of our findings). We defined authentic questions as prompts for 
authentic dialogues and authentic dialogues as verbal interactions characterized by joint goals that promote 
the development of knowledge through arguments. Clearly, authentic dialogue is an activity that is 
negotiated among the participants, and for this reason, when an argumentation dialogue goal is initiated 
but not mutually pursued by the interlocutors and shifts to non-argumentative dialogues (such as in the 
example in Table 5), then its productivity and constructiveness decrease. In these cases, the speaker may 
have missed opportunities for developing his or her dialogue prompt into an authentic dialogue.  

The difference between a prompt and the following dialogical sequences can be considered as a 
key difference between an “authentic” and an unauthentic dialogue. A prompt in authentic dialogue is not 
an imposition but a mere proposal extended to interlocutors equally responsible for the interaction. Such 
an authentic prompt can be thus taken up, ignored, or rejected by the interlocutors in a negotiation of 
dialogical goals between free agents (Kecskes, 2008). Thus, the authenticity of a prompt needs to be 
distinguished from the authentic dialogue that follows, which can only be determined by looking at the 
dialogue sequence as a whole. In this sense, while in “unauthentic” dialogues – characterized by the 
request of recollection and repetition – the teacher can impose the dialogical goal without leaving room for 
negotiation (the authority can test the students, and students need to comply with the authority), authentic 
dialogues depend only in part on the teacher’s prompts. A prompt can be accepted when it is meaningful 
to students, who are invited to act as parties equally responsible for the success of the interaction.   

This characteristic of authentic dialogues can also explain the fact that in our analysis we have 
found no student-initiated authentic dialogue sequences, despite the presence of prompts thereof. This 
finding leads to the problem of determining to what extent teachers are able to grant dialogical agency to 
students: while they have been shown to grant them the agency to accept, continue, or reject a dialogue 
proposal – enabling them to be active co-constructors of an interaction –, it seems that granting the agency 
to propose a dialogue is more complex. Future research may look at the proposals of authentic dialogues 
made by students and why/how those potential dialogues were dismissed by the teacher. 

The study also has some limitations that can suggest future work. For instance, we only focused 
on teacher prompts, leaving out prompts made by students. A comparison between teacher-guided whole-
class discussions and teacher-free small-group discussions is to be addressed in future research. 



Authentic questions as prompts for productive and constructive sequences  
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Moreover, we looked at students’ reasoning as only being moderated by teacher talk, leaving out other 
conditions, such as age. A cross-sectional analysis of students’ arguments is also part of our future projects. 
Finally, this approach is grounded on a specific definition of (educational) dialogue as a goal-directed 
activity whose purpose – at the macro, meso, or micro level – can be identified through discourse analysis. 
This view is not shared by other researchers who view dialogue as ‘unfinalizable’ (Nikulin, 2010) and 
‘potentially endless’ (Matusov et al., 2019). 

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