Responding beyond the informative content: Pupils conforming their answers to question expectations in whole-class interaction

The article explores a type of pupils’ answers to teachers’ questions in whole-class instruction activities in three primary schools in one Northern Italian region. Our aim is to document the pupils’ competence in overcoming situations when, owing to the highly competitive setting of plenary classes, they realise that the projected answer is not anymore consistent with the requirements of the question. The research is based on a corpus of video-recorded classes that we collected in third-year class groups, with children aged 8-9. The analysis focuses on a specific set of answers: those that go beyond the mere provision of the requested information. By looking at the material that children add to the informative item, the analysis shows how children master a sophisticated interactional competence enabling them to designed appropriate answers in situations where, owing to unexpected contextual conditions, they do not align (anymore) with the expectation of the question they aimed to respond.