Designedly Incomplete Utterances and student participation

•Some teachers use DIUs extensively, others sparingly.•Non-transparent DIUs tend to fail.•DIUs often coerce students to participate.•Learning opportunities engendered by DIUs seem limited.•Extensive use of DIUs goes hand in hand with monologic – rather than dialogic – teaching and learning.

This paper analyzes Designedly Incomplete Utterances (DIUs), which are an instructional practice commonly used by teachers when eliciting information from students. When producing a DIU, the teacher halts his/her turn before it has reached its grammatical completion, and by doing so invites the students to complete the turn. The study is based on a qualitative analysis of a fully transcribed corpus of whole-class instruction sequences, in grades 5–8, in Virginia, USA. The main focus is the relation between DIUs and student participation. It is demonstrated that frequent use of DIUs might indeed increase student participation, but this participation seems to be by coercion, rather than by students’ substantive engagement in the learning process.