The discursive construction of knowledge and equity in classroom interactions

•There is an established relationship between student participation and learning.•Many teachers’ primary floor-allocation strategy is to call on students who volunteer.•Students who volunteer less often thus receive fewer opportunities to participate.•The main advantage of this strategy stems from teachers’ use of recitation scripts.•Abandoning scripts improves learning and erases this advantage, facilitating equity.

Given the established relationship between student participation and learning, an equitable distribution of turns at talk is critically important. This paper examines the discursive strategies teachers use in allocating such turns during teacher-fronted lessons, demonstrating that the predominant strategy in many classrooms—one in which teachers avoid dispreferred (incorrect or inappropriate) responses by soliciting volunteers and nominating only those students who actively seek the floor—is inconducive to the goal of equity insofar as it allocates fewer turns to students who (due to culture, personality, etc.) volunteer less often. It is shown that the advantage of this strategy stems from teachers’ use of monologic recitation scripts. Consequently, abandoning such scripts in favor of more dialogic classroom discourse—as has long been recommended—would reduce the desirability of volunteer-based turn allocation, thus freeing teachers to promote an equitable distribution of opportunities for student participation by nominating students regardless of whether they seek the floor.