Making Explicit the Implicit: Classroom Explanations and Conversational Implicatures

Abstract

Vygotsky proposed that schools have an essential role to play in the socialization of scientific or academic concepts. The aim of this article is to expand and revise Vygotsky's proposal using Grice's work on the informal logic underlying everyday conversations. We argue that both academic and everyday conversations rely on Grice's Cooperative Principle and his maxims of quantity, quality, relation, and manner. These two types of conversations do differ, however, in terms of the degree and type of accountability to which the participants are subjected. For example, even among familiar interlocutors, mathematics explanations must exhibit informativeness, logical coherence, veridicality, relevance, and clarity. One teacher's requesting and revoicing strategies (types of conversational metamessages) are examined to illustrate the contributions of a Gricean perspective to our understanding of the socialization of the mathematics register.