Pauses, gaps and wait time in classroom interaction in primary schools

Few studies on turn-taking in classroom interaction have focussed on pauses, gaps and wait time. This exploratory study aims to describe and analyse the role of pauses in interaction taking place in 12 Italian primary school classrooms. A total of 15 h of recordings were transcribed and analysed using conversation analysis. Two main groups of findings are highlighted. The first one concerns the methodological difficulty of analysing the different kinds of pauses; in terms of classroom interaction, there were a few excerpts in which one cannot be certain whether a silence is a “pause” or a “gap”. The second group of results concerns a specific type of pause: “wait time”. Wait time fosters the pupils’ involvement and the quality of their answers, particularly if wait time is accompanied by interventions by teachers, encouraging the pupils’ collaborative participation.