Session Information
ERG SES D 08, Parallel Session D 08
Paper Session
Contribution
This paper deals with spatial factors and their influence on an educational communication in an elementary classroom. Space as one of the key features of educational communication has long been attracting attention of educational research. Spatial factors such as seat location of individual students and teacher´s positions in a classroom can influence the way teacher and students interact. According to confirmed hypothesis that a response comes from a person placed in a vision field of asking person (Steizor, 1950), there might be areas in a classroom with which teachers are more likely to interact and get the answers from. Best known and the most often cited research in this area was conducted by American researchers Adams&Biddle (1970), who came with a new finding that in classroom with desks organized in a standard row and column arrangement the most student responses tend to come from the front and central seats creating a zone of reversed T shape. They called this area an action zone. According to the action zone theory teacher pays more communicative attention to these seats and that is why an interaction with students in these areas is more vivid. Koneya (1976), subsequently raised a question whether existence of the action zone really depends only on teacher´s activity and assumed that these are seats generally more preferred by verbally active students. He conducted a research on a sample of university students and confirmed existence of the action zone in a shape of reversed triangle narrowing from front positions towards the centre of the third row. At the same time he confirmed a hypothesis that communicatively active students prefer to sit in central positions of a classroom. Empirical evidence about existence of the action zone was brought by further research (Marx et al., 2000; Schnitzerová&Račková, 1995; Wulf, 1977;), which confirmed that teachers target their communication activities more towards students sitting in front and central positions of a classroom and these seats at the same time correspond with places with higher rate of student communication activity. However, not every all research in this area managed to confirm such findings (Delefes&Jackson, 1972; Jones, 1990; Saur, 1984). A research question therefore is How spatial arrangement of actors of educational communication influence their interaction within an elementary school classroom?
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
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