Interpretive authority in classroom text discussion: The interactional management of interpretive space in a Grade 6 Chinese language arts lesson

This study examines how interpretive authority was interactionally enacted in a Grade 6 Chinese language arts lesson in which students reconsidered the conventional meanings of familiar fables. Research on classroom dialogue has often contrasted student participation with teacher authority, yet less attention has been paid to how teachers organise the conditions under which interpretations are introduced, developed, reformulated, and closed. Drawing on an interactional discourse analysis of one approximately 30-minute online lesson, supported by a semi-structured interview and video-stimulated recall, the study traces how interpretive space was managed across seven classroom segments. The analysis shows that authority was responsive and asymmetrical rather than fully teacher-controlled. The teacher framed reinterpretation as the lesson purpose, took up and consolidated student-generated alternatives, supplied scaffolding when students struggled to produce counter-readings, and determined when interpretive work was sufficient. Students also reshaped the planned pathway: one student pre-empted the teacher’s intended modelling, and a later teacher redirection was only partially taken up. The final teacher-led synthesis stabilised the lesson as a general procedure for questioning established meanings. The study offers a case-based account of interpretive authority as the management of how meanings become publicly available and pedagogically usable, while distinguishing the interactional consequences of classroom moves from the teacher’s retrospective accounts of his reasoning.