Nodding without Understanding: An Explorative Study of How Adolescents Listen to Their Teachers

The aim of this paper is to explore, using an original procedure, social signals of listening occurring during interactions involving adolescents and their teachers. This procedure is based on a game simulation played out by dyads composed either of one adult and one adolescent or of two adolescents. A pilot study using this procedure has been conducted in an educational setting, since listening detection may be seen as a basic competence for successful scaffolding interactions, by which adults not only enhance but also orient adolescents' development. Among the different data resulting from our pilot study, in this paper we focus our attention on multimodal annotation schemata relating to adolescents' nodding when listening to their teachers expressing their personal judgments on some moral dilemmas - assuming that the capacity to take a stance on moral values is one of the main developmental tasks adolescents have to cope with. Although widely recognized -- starting from the classic work of Darwin on the expressions of emotions in man and animals -- as a social signal of acceptance of the other's message, in our pilot study nodding proved at times to be a signal that the adolescents weren't comprehending the words of their teachers at all. Selected examples of multimodal observations are presented of features characterizing adult-adolescent interactions when this specific kind of nodding without understanding occurs. In the final part of the paper, limitations of this procedure are discussed. Finally, a perspective for future works is presented.