Expressing Personal Opinions in Classroom Interactions: The Role of Humor and Displays of Uncertainty

Abstract

We set out to uncover how young people deal with the challenges of expressing personal opinions in the classroom. Based on a corpus of video-recorded French L1 lessons in a secondary school in Switzerland, we scrutinize the interactional resources students put to use to do so, among which humor and claims of uncertainty feature as a means of dealing with the potentially delicate nature of opinion expression. We show how the expression of personal opinions and related resources are responded to in the classroom, both by teachers and by peers. The study sheds light onto students’ interactional competence by documenting the accountable ways in which, when expressing personal opinions, they subtly balance between assertiveness and uncertainty in response to the local circumstantial details of the ongoing interaction.