Using student positioning to identify collaboration during pair work at the computer in mathematics

When students share a computer in a mathematics class, the types of interactions that constitute collaboration can vary from more typical group work settings. The way that students position themselves towards one another through utterances and exchanges has implications for how students collaborate. In this paper I illustrate a method that uses techniques from Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) to analyze how collaboration can be traced to strings of individual utterances and acts. Drawing on positioning theory and techniques from SFL, I pose the question, how can episodes of collaboration be operationalized through individual utterances and actions? These methods allow for comparison between different models of computer-based interaction and suggest how to foster collaboration in technology-rich settings. Additionally, this study suggests how a broad phenomenon such as collaboration could be described and measured by considering collaborative episodes on a small scale.