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The Study of Classroom Discourse: Early History and Current Developments
... Productive classroom discourse, in which teachers encourage students to share, discuss, argue, and reason about academic topics, aids student learning (Alexander, 2017;Mercer, Wegerif, & Major, 2019;Resnick, Asterhan, & Clarke, 2015). Teachers, however, often lack appropriate strategies to foster such talk, so they rely on monologic or recitation styles for classroom teaching (Mehan & Cazden, 2015;O'Connor & Snow, 2017;Resnick, Asterhan, Clarke, & Schantz, 2018). Researchers and educational policy makers are concerned with the challenges of enabling productive discourse in K-12 classrooms (Osborne, 2015;Resnick et al., 2018). ...
... Many teachers find it challenging to get students to articulate their own reasoning or evaluate that of others (Michaels & O'Connor, 2015). In K-12 classrooms, the dominant form of teacher-led talk is still recitation, in which teachers rely on the triadic structures of initiation-response-evaluation (IRE, Mehan, 1979;Mehan & Cazden, 2015) and initiationresponse-follow-up (IRF, Sinclair & Coulthard, 1975). In IRE and IRF interactions, teachers control the discussion and few students expand their ideas or engage with one another's thinking (Kane & Staiger, 2012;Osborne, 2010;O'Connor & Snow, 2017;Resnick et al., 2018). ...
... Further analysis of two excerpts from the case teacher's pre-and post-intervention lessons (Transcripts 1 & 2) suggests that the teacher's classroom discourse changed. Before the intervention, a triadic initiation-response-evaluation structure (Mehan & Cazden, 2015) was common. After the intervention, the teacher used varied APT strategies to encourage students to elaborate on their own ideas (e.g., revoice) and to think with others (e.g., agree/disagree, add on); the employment of APT moves was used in conjunction with developing students' conceptual understanding of mathematics and open inquiry. ...
How to help teachers learn and foster productive classroom talk? In what ways can video be used to support teacher learning? This article presents a randomized controlled trial examining the efficacy of using visualizations to enhance video use in a teacher professional development program. Free online copy is available at: https://tinyurl.com/yymhvksp
... In this research collaboration, she assumed the role of coteacher in a Grade 1-3 class in San Diego with linguistically and culturally diverse working-class students (Mehan, 1979;Mehan & Cazden, 2015). ...
... This project enabled her to return to the classroom to explore how knowledge she had gained through her research supported her teaching of these students, or not. In this project, Mehan captured her teaching on video in order to examine the processes and practices that she and her coteacher engaged in as they structured the class through their interactions with students (Mehan, 1979;Mehan & Cazden, 2015). In this way, she undertook a bifocal approach to explore theory-practice relationships and how these multiple lenses were necessary to uncover how and in what ways both teacher and researcher processes addressed ways of conceptualizing and developing knowledge SAGE critical to addressing complex educational problems that shaped educational opportunities for linguistically, culturally, and socially diverse students from different social worlds, nationally and internationally. ...
... Over the next three decades, Cazden developed further her bifocal perspective to her research, synthesis projects, and collaborations with theorists and researchers across disciplines and national borders. Through this body of work, she created a transdisciplinary approach that built on scientific studies of language and literacy across disciplines, while critically exploring strengths of, and limits to, each research program as she examined these directions through her point of view as a teacher (Cazden, 1986), and through dialogic collaborations with educators building research-and theory-based programs in education (e.g., Cazden, 1992;Mehan & Cazden, 2015). Taken as a whole, her synthesis work constitutes a form of encyclopedic SAGE understanding of the research across disciplines on child language (Cazden, 1972a), and later on, classroom discourse (Cazden, 1988(Cazden, , 2001, perspectives that she framed for educators in these seminal volumes. ...
Courtney Cazden (b. 1925) has been a central figure in conceptualizing and synthesizing research on how children from linguistically, socially, and culturally diverse backgrounds are supported in developing and extending their understandings and capacities for engaging in and with language, literacy, and communicative processes in classrooms across levels of schooling and other social spaces. Since the 1960s, Cazden has laid a foundation for educators and others seeking to understand the potential contributions of advances in the fields of psychology, linguistics, anthropology, and sociology to the study of child language, discourse processes, and social perspectives in and for education. This entry begins by highlighting Cazden’s impetus for studying the intersection of language, social knowledge, and education. A brief biography is then presented, followed by a section examining the development of Cazden’s theoretical and methodological ideas. The following sections explore the development of her bifocal perspective, and how she pointed to areas in need of further development of research.
... The so-called Initiation-Response-Evaluation (IRE) structure has been found in classrooms all over the world (cf. Mehan 1979;Mehan and Cazden 2015). This I-R-E structure (or I-R-F, Feedback) implies that the teacher takes the Initiative by posing a question to the pupil that aims to move the interaction forward. ...
... The dominance of this model of classroom instruction has been criticised for a number of reasons, not least since it often offers students a rather limited role in the interaction. Various models that support more productive talk and a more varied and active student role when it comes to how to contribute to classroom practices have been suggested (Mehan and Cazden 2015). In this shift of classroom communicative culture, a more dialogical and reasoning style emerges, where the teacher is coaching the students to reason and argue in a more elaborated and academically oriented way. ...
... In this shift of classroom communicative culture, a more dialogical and reasoning style emerges, where the teacher is coaching the students to reason and argue in a more elaborated and academically oriented way. The changes in many contemporary classrooms imply that teachers encourage students to use their own life experiences and insights generated from media and other settings to support their reasoning (Mehan and Cazden 2015). In these formats, the teacher seeks to encourage student agency and ownership of the activities so that the students' capacity for initiating and completing activities on their own will be stimulated (Bruner 1996). ...
This article is based on an extensive study of teaching-learning processes in special educational settings organised for children diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). There is a general assumption that children’s learning will be supported through placement in a special class with few students and one or more teachers present. The issues explored concern what educational practices unfold in these settings, i.e. what are the children learning, and how do they participate in the activities? The empirical study is based on video-recorded classroom interaction in eight ADHD-classes during a period of seven years, in total about 200 h. The results show that the interactional format dominating is characterised by one teacher instructing one child at a time. These situations usually seem to follow the well-known Initiative-Response-Feedback (I-R-F) structure. The contributions from the children are generally minimal, and there is no indication that the student’s role in such dyads is more active. Thus, there is little evidence that children’s learning will improve and that they become more focussed and assume a more participatory role in the interactional formats offered in special classes. Also, it is not obvious how experiences of this kind will prepare children for a return to regular classroom or develop towards becoming active citizens.
... Dabei gehen die Gespräche so lange hin und her, bis das von der Lehrperson Gedachte erraten worden ist . Es entwickelt sich eine regelrechte Abfolge aus geschlossenen Lehrpersonenfragen und Kurzantworten von einigen wenigen Lernenden (Mehan & Cazden, 2015;Pauli, 2010) . Dass sich ein kleinschrittiges Abarbeiten von Problemen oder Auf-gaben im Unterrichtsdiskurs etabliert hat, liegt sowohl an der Institution Schule als auch an der Heterogenität der Gruppe "Schulklasse" . ...
... Dies auch deshalb, weil auf divergente Eröffnungen mögliche konvergente Folgehandlungen der Lehrperson als Reaktion auf die Lernendenaussagen folgen können . Dies entspräche trotz divergenter Eröffnung einem kurzschrit-tigen Gesprächsmuster (Hennessy et al ., 2020;Mehan & Cazden, 2015;Wells, 1993) . ...
Klassengespräche haben ein großes Lernpotenzial hinsichtlich der Förderung
von fachlichen und überfachlichen Kompetenzen im Geschichtsunterricht. Zentrale
Qualitätskriterien sind dabei eine dialogische Gesprächsleitung und ein
diskussionsanregender Gesprächsanlass. Diese Studie untersucht, wie sich die
Gesprächsleitungskompetenz von drei Geschichtsleher*innen im Lauf einer einjährigen
Fortbildung zu dialogischer Gesprächsführung veränderte. Es wird dabei
aufgezeigt, wie gelingende dialogische Klassengespräche im Geschichtsunterricht
gestaltet werden können und wie sich die Qualität der Lernendenaussagen dadurch verändert. Anhand der Untersuchung können
Merkmale zur Gestaltung zukünftiger Fortbildungen für Lehrpersonen abgeleitet werden.
... Diskursen som føres i hvert klasserom vil derfor åpne og lukke for muligheter for kritisk tenkning. Det sosiokulturelle klimaet i klasserommet påvirker hyppighet og kvalitet på kritisk tenkning, og formes av laerer-elev-relasjoner (Alexander, 2014), der laereren skal hjelpe elever med å sosialiseres inn i en diskurs som åpner for kritisk tenkning (Mehan & Cazden, 2015). ...
... Flere av laererne trekker fram dette med å stille spørsmål og hjelpe elevene med å se ulike perspektiver og begrunne argumenter gjennom at laereren spør etter begrunnelser eller andre sider av saken. Dette er en del av en kritisk tenkende klasseromsdiskurs, der laereren skal sosialisere elevene inn i en kultur som er åpen for kritisk tenkning, og det kan gjerne begynne tidlig (Alexander, 2014;Kuhn, 2019;Mehan & Cazden, 2015). Å laere elevene å lytte, stille spørsmål, spille på hverandres argumenter og utforske og utfordre temaer sammen kan dermed vaere en hensiktsmessig måte å jobbe med kritisk tenkning på i barneskolen. ...
Kritisk tenkning har fått økt aktualitet gjennom Kunnskapsløftet 2020 (LK20). Selv om kritisk tenkning har fått en sentral posisjon, er ikke begrepet entydig definert. Definisjonsmakten er dermed gitt til mottakerne av læreplanen, lærerne. Vi ønsker i denne artikkelen å undersøke barnetrinnslæreres forståelse av kritisk tenkning ved å svare på følgende forskningsspørsmål: Hvilke perspektiver på kritisk tenkning vektlegger barnetrinnslærere, og hvordan beskriver de arbeidet med kritisk tenkning i klasserommet? For å svare på spørsmålene gjør vi en innholdsanalyse, der vi undersøker hvordan perspektiver på kritisk tenkning hentet fra teori og forskning kommer til syne i intervjuer med elleve barnetrinnslærere. Kategoriene er holdninger, kildevurdering, argumentasjon, perspektivmangfold, sammenhengsforståelse, makt, kunnskapssyn og kontekstualisering. Funnene viser at lærerne samlet sett er oppmerksomme på de fleste perspektivene av kritisk tenkning. Den enkelte lærer går imidlertid ikke så dypt innenfor hvert av dem. Dette tyder på at de forstår noen perspektiver på kritisk tenkning, men også at de ikke er bevisst andre perspektiver. Videre har vi sett at barnetrinnlærerne har ulikt syn på hva som bør vektlegges når det kommer til kritisk tenkning, noe som handler om hvilket kunnskapssyn de legger til grunn og hvordan de ser sin egen rolle i klasserommet. Dessuten tydeliggjør analysen at man trenger et egnet innhold for å jobbe med kritisk tenkning med elever, og at barnetrinnslærere trenger mer kunnskap om mulighetene for å tilrettelegge for kritisk tenkning i klasserommet.
... Engaging students in discourse with peers is now widely endorsed as a promising means to engage them intellectually and to promote their own individual intellectual development (Applebee, 1996;Cazden, 2001;Hildebrandt & Musholt, 2020;Mehan & Cazden, 2015;Resnick et al., 2010). The view that thinking and reasoning are at heart dialogic is not a new one, with advocates ranging as far back as Socrates and Mead (1934), who claimed that no thinking is independent of social process. ...
... Reviews of a growing literature are available on the success of peer discourse in classrooms (Cazden, 2017;Clarke et al., 2015;Lin et al., 2020;Mehan & Cazden, 2015;Mercer & Littleton, 2007;Murphy et al., 2014;O'Connor & Snow, 2018;Resnick et al., 2015;Van der Veen & Van Oers, 2017). This may be because thinking is inherently dialogic, as Gergen (2015) and Applebee (1996) claim. ...
Sixty college students either read a script of a dialog between two individuals holding contrasting positions on the issue of US immigration or read texts containing their two individual position statements on the issue, expressing their same respective views. With this material removed from view, participants expressed in writing their own views on the issue. We asked whether exposure to the dialogic framing would have a greater effect on argumentive thinking, compared to non-dialogic presentation of the same arguments. Essays of the two groups differed in several ways. The dialog group showed greater investment in the task by writing more. Additionally, 78% of the dialog group (vs. 48% of the individual-position control group) made reference to the views they had read, despite no instruction to do so, over half referencing them in a comparative way (vs. 21% of the control group). The substance of the essays showed richer thought by the dialog group, including more “However” clauses (connecting two opposing statements) and more meta-level statements about the issue itself, supporting the hypothesis of a benefit of dialogic framing. Theoretical and educational implications are considered.
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... Monologic classroom talk is characterized by a large amount of teacher talk and a focus on the reproduction of factual knowledge (Van der Veen et al., 2018). It often entails a dominance of the initiation, response, and evaluation (IRE) sequence, in which the teacher asks a closed question, a child provides a short response, and the teacher evaluates the response (often in terms of right or wrong; Al-Adeimi & O'Connor, 2021; Mehan & Cazden, 2015). In contrast, in dialogic classroom talk children actively participate and are positioned as thinkers. ...
... In contrast, in dialogic classroom talk children actively participate and are positioned as thinkers. In these types of conversations, children are encouraged to share their ideas, reflect on their own and others' contributions, and make an effort to understand one another (Mehan & Cazden, 2015;. ...
The first purpose of the present study was to examine the effect of dialogic classroom talk on
children’s language ability (i.e. oral communicative competence and receptive vocabulary
knowledge). The second purpose was to examine the effect of this type of classroom talk on
children’s social acceptance (i.e. theory of mind and social acceptance). A total of 17 teachers
and 311 children (aged 4-7 years) participated in this study. Eight teachers participated in an
8-week intervention directed at dialogic classroom talk. Multilevel analyses revealed that the
intervention had a significant effect on children’s oral communicative competence. No
significant effects were found on children’s receptive vocabulary knowledge, theory of mind,
and social acceptance. The results of this study indicate that dialogic classroom talk is
beneficial for children’s oral communicative competence. Further research is required in
order to investigate how dialogic classroom talk might affect receptive vocabulary knowledge
and social competence as well.
... For example, in a study of transcripts from the CHILDES database, Yu, Bonawitz, and Shafto (2019) found that pedagogical questions were more frequent in middle-class families than working-class families, and more frequent in families studied in the 2000s compared to the 1970s and 1980s. This supports the findings from earlier educational and anthropological research that known-answer questions are not typical across communities, instead they are a particular modern practice of middle-class white families with high levels of formal schooling (Heath, 1983;Mehan & Cazden, 2013;Tharp & Gallimore, 1988, 1991. Taking a critical perspective, and keeping deficit models in mind, it is important to check assumptions that these questions are the norm to which other groups should aspire. ...
... Taking a critical perspective, and keeping deficit models in mind, it is important to check assumptions that these questions are the norm to which other groups should aspire. In contrast, not only are these questions a less natural way to teach in many communities (Delgado-Gaitan, Heath, 1983), studies of classroom discourse have shown that known-answer questions may lead to less expansive discussion and limit students' engagement with inquiry (Mehan & Cazden, 2013;Tharp & Gallimore, 1991). It would be fruitful for developmental psychology research to integrate these long-standing critiques from other disciplines. ...
Parents who vary in their experience with formal schooling are likely to use different types of informal guidance with their children. However, rather than assuming a deficit approach we need evidence regarding how parents with limited schooling support their children’s learning. Forty U.S. families of Mexican-heritage, from two levels of schooling experience, engaged with their children in a sink-or-float activity. Parents’ questions and evaluations and children’s decision-making and questions were observed and coded. Parents with higher schooling asked more questions and made more evaluative comments about their children’s performance, whereas parents with basic schooling tended to evaluate their own performance more often. Parents made more decisions about items overall; however, children whose parents had basic schooling made more decisions and asked more conceptual questions than those with higher schooling parents. Children of higher schooling parents asked more procedural questions. These findings suggest that parents with basic schooling engaged with their children as collaborators, using open-ended inquiry. Conversely, parents with more schooling experience took an instructor-like role, which may have limited children’s opportunities to engage in critical thinking.
... Instructional Implications of the Sociocultural/ Interactional View While acknowledging cognitive processes and individual variation in language learning, we identify with the sociocultural view because of its alignment with the interactive, dynamic, and situative nature of learning in classroom activity (Tharp & Gallimore, 1988), as well as with the long-standing tradition of dialogic teaching (Mehan & Cazden, 2015). We highlight three instructional implications of the sociocultural view, critical for supporting all students whose everyday language practices are not reflected or, worse yet, understood as barriers to learning in classroom materials, activities, and interactions-students learning English as an additional language as well as English-only speakers, such as Blacks or Native Americans, whose everyday vernacular or dialect is marginalized in schools (Baker-Bell, 2020). ...
... Rich classroom discourse akin to ECT has long been the "holy grail of education" (Resnick et al., 2015, p. 6). Despite evidence that dialogic or discussion-based teaching enhances academic participation and performance, sustaining implementation of rich discourse practices such as ECT remains elusive (Mehan & Cazden, 2015). Implementation challenges are ubiquitous and hinder many desirable changes in practice. ...
Language in education for children and youth from low-income communities of color, including those learning English as an additional language, has been fraught for decades with ideological entanglements, conceptual ambiguities, and empirical limitations. Meanwhile, the teacher learning challenge to implement equitable teaching practices remains largely unresolved. With an eye towards improving equitable classroom talk (ECT)—i.e., meaningful participation in disciplinary practices through communal and connected language interactions—for all students from minoritized communities, we integrate research on additional language development, disciplinary practices, sociocultural classroom interactions, and teacher learning. We recommend researcher-educator collaborations (a) develop indicators of ECT, (b) use lesson videos to make ECT visible, and (c) develop and test materials to support and scale teacher learning to enact ECT.
... Consequently, discourse in Chinese classrooms is predominantly teacher-led lecturing or recitation that follows the initiation-response-evaluation pattern (Mehan, 1979). Teachers take primary responsibility for initiating questions and evaluating students' responses against predetermined answers, which often leaves few opportunities for children to engage in extended thinking and elaborated discussions (Alexander, 2018;Mehan & Cazden, 2015;Resnick & Schantz, 2015). In fact, Cheng et al. (2015) reported that in regular Chinese classrooms, although the ratio of speaking turns between students and teachers was almost one to one (48% vs. 52%), the students' speech was much shorter, with their total words being only about half of the teachers' utterances (38% vs. 62%). ...
... Dialogic pedagogies feature classroom discourse where students and teachers share equal opportunities and rights to talk, to construct meanings collaboratively, and to solve issues that often do not have preestablished answers (Reznitskaya & Gregory, 2013). Different from recitation where the classroom discourse is driven primarily by teachers asking "known-information questions" (Mehan & Cazden, 2015), dialogic pedagogies provide students with extensive opportunities to practice open-ended reasoning. Such pedagogies allow students to consider, compare, and integrate different perspectives raised by themselves and their peers to arrive at shared understandings . ...
Purpose
Dialogic pedagogies that provide students with frequent opportunities to talk have been shown to help students develop essential 21st-century skills. Many Chinese teachers, however, lack confidence and experiences in shifting from teacher-centered pedagogical practices to such student-centered practices. This study examined Chinese elementary school teachers’ reflections on learning to facilitate small-group collaborative reasoning (CR) discussions in their classrooms.
Design/Approach/Methods
Two fourth-grade teachers in a public school in Beijing, China, participated in the study, where they participated in seven semi-structured debriefing interviews and wrote 13 reflective journals. Thematic analysis of the debriefing interviews and journals was carried out to understand the teachers’ learning progress.
Findings
The results showed that although the teachers encountered major challenges, such as a drastic shift in their roles, the intense cognitive demands of scaffolding, and the emotional stress of handling the uncertainties of CR discussions, they also made noteworthy progress while learning to facilitate CR discussions. The teachers’ achievement goal orientations seem to have played a major role in how they responded to the challenges and whether they made progress.
Originality/Value
This study reveals insights into the challenges and progress that the teachers experienced when learning to use a discussion-based teaching approach. It sheds light on the motivational mechanism of teacher learning and provides guidance on how to support Chinese teachers through the use of small-group collaborative discussions.
... Decades of research on classroom discourse reveals that the recitation or initiation-responseevaluation/feedback (IRE/IRF) exchange structure (Mehan, 1979;Sinclair & Coulthard, 1975), in which teachers use "closed" questions to seek brief, accurate confirmation that students know the "right answer," remain the pedagogical default (e.g., Michaels & O'Connor, 2015;Nystrand, 1997). To move beyond the monologic dominance of teacher-centered talk, student-centered discourse that seeks to distribute the ownership of talk more equitably by emphasizing open participation, accountability, joint appropriation of discourse norms, reasoning, and reflective thinking on students' part (Applebee, 1996;Clarke et al., 2016;Mercer & Littleton, 2007;Wegerif et al., 1999) has been increasingly championed as a curricular method in classroom practice (Elmore, 2018;Howe & Abedin, 2013;Mehan & Cazden, 2015;Resnick et al., 2015;Sedova et al., 2019). ...
... The finding that students in the present study were capable of constructing, negotiating, and appropriating discourse norms without direct instruction or introduction of new modes of metalanguage from teachers might hold far-reaching implications for practice. Many researchers advocating studentcentered discourse approaches hold teachers accountable for employing conversational moves to evoke the desired features of student talk (Chen et al., 2016;, putting a significant burden on teachers as talk orchestrators (Kuhn, 2019;Mehan & Cazden, 2015;Resnick et al., 2018). The present study suggests that productive talk can stem entirely from peer interactions and, similar to the snowball phenomenon observed in Anderson et al. (2001), once a useful norm has been adopted by a student during peer discussion, it can potentially spread to other students and occur with increasing frequency. ...
Evidence is widely recognized as an essential component of argumentation. Existing research has primarily focused on students’ use of evidence to construct explanations or claims. In the present study, 54 11- to 12–year- old Chinese students participated in an extended discourse-based argumentation curriculum, along with an equivalent nonparticipating control group consisted of 50 students. We identified and traced progression in students’ meta-talk about evidence during peer-to-peer argumentive discourse and found that meta-talk grew more frequent over time, became increasingly focused on evaluating the source of evidence, and became better sustained over successive turns. Separate pre- and postassessments suggested that participants had become more advanced in epistemological understanding, manifested in a shift away from absolutist thinking, and were more likely to endorse the values of argumentive discourse. Implications for epistemic vigilance in the Information Age are discussed.
... Given the findings about the influence of teacher APT in the classroom (Mehan & Cazden, 2015;Resnick et al., 2015), it is nonetheless surprising that few studies exist on student perceptions and behaviours under dialogic instruction (notable exceptions include Asterhan & Schwarz, 2016;Fisher & Larkin, 2008;Kiemer, 2017;Pratt, 2006;Rop, 2003). For example, Asterhan and Schwarz (2016), in "Three-Node Argumentation for Learning Framework", include individual learner characteristics (e.g., the student's cognitive status, motivation, and epistemological beliefs) as influential factors that might inhibit or enable the implementation of argumentation dialogue. ...
... explaining, arguing, justifying, constructing, and building on the ideas of one another in the process of learning. Such student discursive engagement has been less focused on in empirical studies, which may be due to the tendency of seeing it as peripheral or a natural product of teacher-guided discourse (Hardman, 2019)-a common perspective that is likely to be influenced by the tradition of studying the triadic classroom discourse structures, such as initiationresponse-follow-up (IRF; Sinclair & Coulthard, 1975) and initiation-response-evaluation (IRE; Mehan, 1979;Mehan & Cazden, 2015). However, understanding student discursive engagement is not peripheral but important, especially in relation to teacher talk moves. ...
This study seeks to understand the emotional connection of teachers' academically productive talk (APT) with student learning from the students' perspective. Using a sample of 2,225 students (N7th grade = 1,146 and N8th grade = 1,079) from 16 middle schools in a city of China, we investigate the relationship between students' perceptions of their teachers’ APT, student emotions (enjoyment and anxiety) and their discursive engagement with others in the mathematics classroom. Results from structural equation modelling and mediation analysis show that after controlling for gender, family resources and mathematics achievement, student‐perceived teacher APT was positively associated with their discursive engagement with classmates. Furthermore, student enjoyment and anxiety in class mediated the relationship between student‐perceived teacher APT and student discursive engagement with classmates. Multi‐group analysis revealed that the model was invariant across genders and grades, indicating that the associations were applicable to male and female students as well as to seventh and eighth graders. These findings shed light on the emotional relationship of teacher APT with the discursive engagement of their students. Although prior research observes a positive relationship between teacher productive classroom talk and student discursive engagement primarily through classroom observations and teacher reflections, this study provides evidence from the students’ perspective and highlights the mediating role of student emotions in the relationship.
... Discourse-based approaches have increasingly become favorably regarded as curricular methods both in academic circles and in classroom practice, with a number of recent reviews tracing this development (Clarke, Resnick, & Rose, 2015;Resnick, Asterhan, & Clarke, 2015;Howe & Abedin, 2013;Mehan & Cazden, 2015;Murphy et al., 2018;O'Connor & Snow, 2018). Compared to teacher-centered discourse, student-centered discourse emphasizes open participation, accountability, reasoning and reflective thinking on students' part (Applebee, 1996;Clarke et al., 2015;Mercer & Littleton, 2007;Wegerif, Mercer, & Dawes, 1999). ...
... Most discourse-based student-centered approaches are implemented at the whole-class level (Michaels, O'Connor, & Resnick, 2008) or small-group level Nussbaum & Edwards, 2011;Reznitskaya et al., 2001). However, challenges have been commonly reported with respect to teachers' successful orchestration and management of whole-class or small-group discussion (Mehan & Cazden, 2015;Resnick, Asterhan, Clarke, & Schantz, 2018), as well as difficulty in including all students as participants (O'Connor & Snow, 2018). ...
... Despite the evidence that classroom discourse can positively shape learning, effective classroom talk is complex and often difficult to achieve (Mehan & Cazden, 2015;Michaels & O'Connor, 2015;Wilkinson, Murphy, & Benici, 2015). Epistemologically, this sort of teaching requires certain beliefs about how knowledge is acquired (transition versus construction) (Bakhtin, 1986;Johnston, Woodside-Jiron, & Day, 2000); requires shifts in teacher control (Alexander, 2008;Cazden, 2001); and requires purposeful execution of complex strategies of discourse (Michaels & O'Connor, 2015;Cazden, 2001). ...
... In closing, the findings in this study illustrate the intricacies of classroom discourse. These results are congruent with scholarly discussions (Barnes et al., 1969;Mehan & Cazden, 2015;Michaels & O'Connor, 2015;Nystrand, 2006;Wilkinson & Hye Son, 2011) that highlight the complexities of academic discourse and underscore the need for coaching teachers as they work to enrich their discourse repertoire. Future research should continue to examine how to improve classroom discourse practices including how such efforts might lead to deeper reading comprehension for middle school learners. ...
The Common Core State Standards shifted comprehension instruction to an analytic process commonly referred to as close reading. This multiple case study explored the academic discourse strategies of teachers and readers as they engaged in the practice of close reading. Framed by the Representation of Dialogue in a Joint Activity System, analysis suggested that educators embraced high-level questioning but neglected teaching readers how to examine texts flexibly through multiple perspectives. Additionally, like their teachers, readers had a rich questioning repertoire, but constructed meaning through a consensual but not exploratory process. The results of this study show promise in teacher questioning styles and illustrate the symbiotic nature of teacher and learner discourse styles. Moreover, findings add to the literature surrounding the complexities of classroom discourse.
... Productive classroom talk stands in contrast to traditional classroom talk, which has been criticized for being too monologic in nature, overly teacher steered, and mainly focused on the reproduction of factual knowledge. An example of this is the wellknown Initiation-Response-Evaluation pattern, in which the teacher asks a closed question followed by a short response from one student, after which the teacher evaluates this response (often in term of right or wrong; see, e.g., Mehan & Cazden, 2015;van der Veen, van Kruistum, & Michaels, 2015). In productive classroom talk, teachers aim to move beyond these patterns of recitation and involve their pupils in dialogic talk that supports their academic learning and thinking (van der Veen, de Mey, . ...
... In general, these talk tools seek to increase the participation of all students and to encourage them "to engage in more sophisticated forms of reasoning" (Mehan & Cazden, 2015, p. 19). Furthermore, they support both teachers and students to establish a classroom culture of shared thinking and communicating and to socialize students into academic discourse (see also Barnes, Grifenhagen, & Dickinson, 2016;Mehan & Cazden, 2015). An overview of the productive talk tools used in our MODEL2TALK intervention is given in ...
... A common manifestation of monologic talk is Initiation, Response, Evaluate (I-R-E; Mehan 1979;Mehan and Cazden 2015), where a teacher initiates a test-like question, a student responds, and the teacher evaluates the response before moving on to the next student. This discourse pattern is widely used in classrooms, often to elicit information (Nystrand et al. 2003;Elizabeth et al. 2012). ...
... The finding that oral communicative competence is related to social preference is interesting, because there are various means to affect oral communicative competence (Mol, Bus, de Jong, & Smeets, 2008 Veen, 2022). Dialogic classroom talk is a type of classroom talk during which teachers encourage children to actively participate, carefully listen to one another, share and expand their ideas, think together, and reflect on their contributions (Mehan & Cazden, 2015;Van der Veen, De Mey, Van Kruistum, & Van Oers, 2017;Van der Veen, Dobber, & Van Oers, 2018). In addition to oral communicative competence, it has been shown that dialogic classroom talk positively affects children's intrinsic motivation and vocabulary (Kiemer, Gröschner, Pehmer, & Seidel, 2015;Wasik, Hindman, & Snell, 2016). ...
... Over the last several decades, a focus on expansive and "dialogic" discourse in classrooms has grown, both in research on teaching and learning, and in national standards for instruction, such as the Common Core (National Governors Association, 2010) and the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS Lead States, 2013). This form of discourse is composed of talk that extends far beyond the traditional Initiation-Response-Evaluation (IRE; Mehan, 1979)-the three-part structure where the teacher initiates a question, a student gives a short response, and the teacher evaluates that answer (Mehan & Cazden, 2015). As in many fields, this has generated different labels which overlap and are often used interchangeably, such as "dialogic discourse" (Alexander, 2019), "inquiry dialogue" (Reznitskaya & Wilkinson, 2017), "academically productive talk" (Michaels & O'Connor, 2015;O'Connor & Michaels, 2018) or often just "classroom discussion." ...
This paper introduces the LIDO, or the Low-Inference Discourse Observation tool, that captures discourse moves produced by students and teachers in whole-classroom discussions. Coding methods are described, followed by analyses that explore validity of the LIDO through correlations among LIDO-coded discourse moves and between LIDO scores and scores on the Instructional Support domain of the Classroom Assessment Scoring System-Secondary, utilizing 643 audio-recorded classroom lessons. Observations were conducted in fourth through seventh grade urban classrooms, including English Language Arts, Mathematics, Science and Social Studies. Rates of teacher and student discourse moves correlated with each other and with CLASS scores in expected ways, providing evidence of internal and convergent validity. Implications for use in research are discussed, including specific advantages of this new approach, such as the capacity to tease apart teacher behavior from student behavior in the context of classroom interactions.
... Despite the recognition of the importance of reciprocal dialogue, the prevailing form of teacher-student interactions continue to be the traditional structure IRE (Initiation-Reply-Evaluation) (Mehan and Cazden, 2015) or IRF (Initiation-Response-Feedback) (Sinclair & Coulthard, 1975). This holds true in kindergartens as well. ...
The heart of this study is an analysis of teacher–child dialogue in a classroom environment. An authentic dialogue enables children to express their real thoughts and ideas, to present insights, to ask questions, to make comments and to argue about different interpretations. In an effort to help our future teachers improve the quality of their verbal and nonverbal interactions with children as well as emotional and social support, we created a “community of learners”. Mentors and eight students - teachers (Israeli Jews and Arabs) participated in a reciprocal process of learning through experimentation while building new knowledge. Their interactions were examined how the teachers’ verbal and nonverbal responsiveness helped them to open or close conversational spaces for children while enabling them to listen to their voices. The research methodology was a discourse analysis i.e. analyzing the use of language while carrying out an act of communication in a given context. It presents a qualitative analysis of 20 transcripts of students - teacher's conversations with Israeli Jewish and Arab children from ages 4 – 6 years old. The analysis revealed that as teachers provided open conversational spaces with children, authentic dialogue emerged. Both voices were expressed and the child’s world was heard. The significance of thisstudy isto demonstrate the importance that authentic dialogue between teachers and young children has on the learning process as well as teacher’s acknowledgment on how children think and feel. This offers an opportunity for them to learn with and from the children.
... More commonly, it is used either as a closing statement in order to move on to the next planned lesson or activity or as an opportunity for further learning thus extending the interaction. Classrooms which have followed this basic pattern of interaction have been noted to be limited in their ability to encourage participation (Mehan & Cazden, 2015). Essentially, lecturers would need to employ a more comprehensive style of questioning. ...
The paper inquired into the discourse practices in classroom teaching in a State university in Brunei Darussalam. Respondents comprised four (4), local Bruneian lecturers, from two (2) academic streams: STEM-driven and entrepreneurship programmes. Subjected to data saturation, teaching observations of each respondent were shadowed over several weeks. Data were recorded, transcribed, and analysed using the Classroom Discourse Observation Protocol (CDOP) to determine the types and frequencies of teacher-student utterances. Findings showed that the students were provided insufficient opportunities to interact meaningfully and that the lecturers who were leaning toward conventional teaching did minimal attempts to engage the students, failing to utilise appropriate prompts and basic questioning techniques believed to facilitate critical thinking and deep learning. Classroom discourse was propelled by a corresponding approach in teaching; hence continuous readiness in classroom teaching needs to be sustained, should students’ quality of learning be improved.
... However, while efforts have been made to introduce productive dialogue in the classroom in the past four decades (Howe & Abedin, 2013), a type of monologic teaching that perpetuates the traditional pattern of interaction still prevails (Mehan & Cazden, 2015). This has limited students' development of oral skills by creating a closed discourse where teacher talk predominates (Soto-Hinman, 2011;Walqui, & Van Lier, 2010). ...
The acquisition of oral communication skills is essential for lifelong learning and development. Despite their importance, specific approaches oriented to its acquisition and mastery in second languages (L2) are not widely established. Indeed, the prevalence of a monologic classroom discourse still hinders the opportunities to enhance language production. This article analyses the development of L2 oracy skills among secondary school students who have participated in Dialogic Literary Gatherings, a dialogue-based educational action, in Basque. The interactions of five students were observed and analyzed using the Cambridge Oracy Assessment Toolkit. The study also included an interview with the teacher, and a focus group with the participant students. The results show that L2 oracy skills of the students evolve when they participate in these dialogic encounters, especially in the cognitive and socio-emotional areas. Implications for the teaching of L2 spoken language are discussed.
... Within the limited classroom time, turn-taking between the teacher and students should meet certain learning objectives. For example, with the triadic structure of IRE classroom discourse, it is unlikely that students, in general, have lengthy turns because teachers seldom encourage real discussions and ask only confirmatory questions (Mehan, 1979;Mehan & Cazden, 2015). Therefore, the data on teacher and student turn lengths may contribute to our understanding of conversational features such as the speaker's intention, being either superficial or engaged in authentic classroom discussions (Nystrand et al., 2003). ...
Although classroom discourse that positions students as active participants benefits both their learning and cognitive development, teachers often find it challenging to implement dialogic instructions in the classroom. This study reports on a video-based teacher professional development (PD) program that leverages visualizations and analytics in supporting teacher change in whole-class dialogue in mathematics classrooms. Both experimental and comparison teachers (n = 24 and 22, respectively) were provided with information on dialogic instructions, and experimental teachers used the Classroom Discourse Analyzer to reflect on videos of their lessons and their peers' lessons in a year-long PD program. The intervention teachers significantly moved toward less dominant classroom talk—they reduced the number of words spoken per lesson, and their students significantly increased the number of words per turn in whole-class discussions, relative to the comparison teachers. Furthermore, analysis of the classroom discourse shows qualitative changes in the intervention teachers' discourse. PD workshop and teacher self-reflection data are analyzed to examine how visualizations and analytics in the PD program may serve as a cross-boundary object to support peer collaboration in reflective practice, and to increase teachers' awareness of their teaching development.
... The participation framework for a recitation script results in the marginalization of many nondominant students ( Mehan & Cazden, 2015 ). A tension is created for such students when their cultural and historical ways of speaking and interacting within their homes and communities are ignored or demeaned in the classroom script. ...
... 2016. С. 346-349.22 Сучасна українська мова : інтернет-словник. ...
... Box 4.1 Who is participating in classroom talk? Mehan and Cazden ( 2015 ) refl ect on their pioneering 1970s study of one elementary classroom over the course of a year. At that time they observed the typical chain of conversational turns that occurs when teachers initiate an exchange, students respond and the teacher replies with a simple evaluation (IRE). ...
... Box 4.1 Who is participating in classroom talk? Mehan and Cazden ( 2015 ) refl ect on their pioneering 1970s study of one elementary classroom over the course of a year. At that time they observed the typical chain of conversational turns that occurs when teachers initiate an exchange, students respond and the teacher replies with a simple evaluation (IRE). ...
... Box 4.1 Who is participating in classroom talk? Mehan and Cazden ( 2015 ) refl ect on their pioneering 1970s study of one elementary classroom over the course of a year. At that time they observed the typical chain of conversational turns that occurs when teachers initiate an exchange, students respond and the teacher replies with a simple evaluation (IRE). ...
... Box 4.1 Who is participating in classroom talk? Mehan and Cazden ( 2015 ) refl ect on their pioneering 1970s study of one elementary classroom over the course of a year. At that time they observed the typical chain of conversational turns that occurs when teachers initiate an exchange, students respond and the teacher replies with a simple evaluation (IRE). ...
... In the past few decades, interest and research in productive talk-intensive pedagogies, particularly those that fit with the concept of dialogic teaching, have grown rapidly (for reviews, see Howe & Abedin, 2013;Resnick et al., 2015;van der Veen et al., 2017;Mehan & Cazden, 2015). However, managing dialogic discussions places significant demands on teachers' resources and skills (Kuhn, 2019;Kumpulainen & Lipponen, 2010;Resnick et al., 2015;Reznitskaya & Wilkinson, 2017), prompting them to "revert to the more manageable IRE (initiation-response-evaluation) format, where the teacher controls content, thus managing clarity, coherence, and time" (O'Connor et al., 2017, p. 6). ...
Teaching controversial public issues is essential in preparing students for effective citizenship, with discussion and debate being widely held as the most appropriate pedagogical approach. Employing a design-based research approach, our research team collaborated with a teacher and used a popular Chinese movie, Dying to Survive, to promote dialogic teaching of controversial public issues in a Chinese 7th grade Morality and Law class. Discourse analysis showed that a large proportion of teacher's and students’ utterances were dialogic, and that the teacher transitioned between monologic, authoritative teaching and dialogic teaching to ensure student understanding and promote discussion. Students’ argumentative discourse was more common during dialogic interactions than monologic interactions dominated by teacher-centered lectures or recitations. We discuss the significance of our study in promoting deliberative discourse surrounding controversial issues to enhance civic skills and values in Chinese middle school students. We also summarize lessons learned and propose suggestions for future interventions.
... In short, cognitive self-regulation is best nurtured from an early age and is predictive of D. Kuhn, A. S. Modrek positive educational outcomes (Modrek & Kuhn, 2017;Modrek et al., 2019). Its importance becomes critical in scientific and indeed all higher-order thinking, where practice is a key to its development, both with peers and in apprenticeship with more skilled others (Arvidsson & Kuhn, 2021;Papathomas & Kuhn, 2017;Kuhn, 2018Kuhn, , 2019Mehan & Cazden, 2015;Mercer & Littleton, 2007;Rapanta, 2019;Resnick, Asterhan et al., 2018;Reznitskaya & Wilkinson, 2017). Yet, individual cognitive weaknesses, of the sort highlighted by the data presented here, should not be eclipsed by exclusive focus on the study of thinking in social contexts (Kuhn & Modrek, 2018). ...
Schooling traditionally affords students more experience in learning and practicing procedures than in identifying what a situation calls for. When asked to choose appropriate numerical data to support their causal claims, college students perform surprisingly poorly. In one case we describe, almost all chose limited, inconclusive data as sufficient evidence, despite having available the more comprehensive data needed to support their claim, and despite their established competence to employ such data for this purpose. Our objective in highlighting this weakness is to make a case that choosing one's evidence warrants the status of an important metacognitive intellectual skill and educational objective, one central to but that extends well beyond the domains of scientific and mathematical reasoning and hence warrants greater attention both in and beyond the science curriculum. People may choose evidence to justify their assertions in an ill-considered way, with potential adverse effects in both private and public communication.
... In short, cognitive self-regulation is best nurtured from an early age and is predictive of D. Kuhn, A. S. Modrek positive educational outcomes (Modrek & Kuhn, 2017;Modrek et al., 2019). Its importance becomes critical in scientific and indeed all higher-order thinking, where practice is a key to its development, both with peers and in apprenticeship with more skilled others (Arvidsson & Kuhn, 2021;Papathomas & Kuhn, 2017;Kuhn, 2018Kuhn, , 2019Mehan & Cazden, 2015;Mercer & Littleton, 2007;Rapanta, 2019;Resnick, Asterhan et al., 2018;Reznitskaya & Wilkinson, 2017). Yet, individual cognitive weaknesses, of the sort highlighted by the data presented here, should not be eclipsed by exclusive focus on the study of thinking in social contexts (Kuhn & Modrek, 2018). ...
Schooling traditionally affords students more experience in learning and practicing procedures than in identifying what a situation calls for. When asked to choose appropriate numerical data to support their causal claims, college students perform surprisingly poorly. In one case we describe, almost all chose limited, inconclusive data as sufficient evidence, despite having available the more comprehensive data needed to support their claim and despite their established competence to employ such data for this purpose. Our objective in highlighting this weakness is to make a case that choosing one’s evidence warrants the status of an important metacognitive intellectual skill and educational objective, one central to but that extends well beyond the domains of scientific and mathematical reasoning and hence warrants greater attention both in and beyond the science curriculum. People may choose evidence to justify their assertions in an ill-considered way, with potential adverse effects in both private and public communication.
... Besides, a large-scale study (n = 671 US prekindergartner classrooms) on classroom quality in prekindergarten showed that the instructional quality, including the quality of teacher-student interactions, was low for the majority of programs (Mashburn et al., 2008). Often times, one can observe that teachers frequently use the well-known Initiation-Response-Evaluation sequence, in which the teacher asks a question, followed by a response of a student (or more students in chorus), after which the teacher evaluates the correctness of this response often in terms of right or wrong (see for example, Cazden, 2001;Dickinson et al., 2008;Mehan & Cazden, 2015;Nystrand, 1997). As a consequence, students have limited opportunities to talk and think together. ...
The aims of the present study were to design and implement an intervention focused on dialogic classroom talk in early childhood education and to evaluate what it may contribute to children’s oral communicative competence. Together with four teachers we developed and implemented an ecologically valid intervention that supports teachers to use several dialogic talk moves. We evaluated our intervention using a one-group pretest-posttest design. Discourse analysis of pre- and post-observations of classroom talk revealed that teachers used more dialogic talk moves over the course of our intervention. Pre- and post-tests of children’s (N=92) oral communicative competence indicated that our intervention significantly relates to an increase of children’s communicative competence. Furthermore, analysis of pre- and post-observations of classroom talk showed an increase in the use of key linguistic features of oral communicative competence in the participating children. Although the set-up of the studies does not permit propositions about causal relationships, the results of this study show that dialogic classroom talk can be promoted even in early childhood education, and give reasons to suppose that further studies may show that this might be beneficial for children’s oral communicative competence.
... On the other hand, Hammond and Gibbons (2005) defend the combination of high expectations with effective scaffolding, of which collaborative interactions can be a fundamental component for language learning. Transforming teacher-centered classroom discourse into more collaborative discourses (Mehan & Cazden, 2015) makes the necessity of promoting language production easier to meet because, given that as Swain (1985) proposed in the Output Hypothesis, exposure to the target language was not enough to develop L2 learning effectively. ...
The increasing linguistic diversity of the students in schools poses a major challenge for inclusive educational systems in which everyone can learn the language of instruction effectively and, likewise, can have access to contents, being language the necessary tool to the latter end. Research suggests that there is a robust connection between interaction and language acquisition. Therefore, there is a need to identify the forms of interaction that are most effective for that purpose. In this sense, a greater emphasis on dialogic teaching and learning that increases quality interactions among students may facilitate the learning process. The present study analyses the implementation of a dialogue-based educational action called Dialogic Literary Gatherings (DLG) to promote teaching and learning Basque, a minority language, in a linguistically diverse context. Our research is an exploratory case study: 9 lessons were video-recorded and 2 interviews were conducted with a group of students and their teacher respectively. Results suggest that the DLG creates affordances for encouraging participation in collaborative interactions in the second language, promoting the inclusion of L2 learners, and fostering literature competence as well as a taste for the universal literature. We discuss the implications of these findings for second language learning.
... Two techniques for identifying and characterizing these themes within an ethnomethodological framework are Conversation Analysis (CA) and Discourse Analysis (DA). This study draws on DA to characterize how bilingual students engaged in translanguaging to achieve different purposes such as performing their bilingualism and engaging in meaningful talk about the content taught (Gee, 2012;Mehan & Cazden, 2015). This paper focuses on the analysis of participants' discourse and interactions during the morphology and syntax lessons, which are described next. ...
Translanguaging pedagogy is gaining widespread recognition as an approach that recognizes and builds on multilingual students’ linguistic resources. Research on translanguaging pedagogy has predominantly focused on classroom language practices, while studies on the design and enactment of translanguaged instruction are limited. This pilot study contributes to the knowledge base on translanguaged instruction through the design, implementation, and examination of students’ engagement with the content taught in a set of translanguaged lessons. These lessons were based on a language‐based English reading curriculum for Spanish‐English bilingual upper elementary students. Our approach to translanguaging pedagogy was characterized by a) use of bilingual texts; b) flexible language use; and c) bilingual language instruction. This article focuses on the lessons that addressed morphology and syntax instruction. Within an ethnomethodological approach, the discourse and interactions during the morphology and syntax instruction components of the lesson‐cycles were examined to understand how students engaged with the language structures taught, and how translanguaging manifested in their talk about language. Our analyses revealed translanguaging as enabling students to perform linguistic analyses in which they: (a) established connections between English and Spanish morphemes; b) compared English and Spanish morphology and syntax; and c) explored alternative syntactic structures. As such, translanguaged instruction supported students’ metalinguistic awareness and cognitive engagement, and enabled them to position themselves as expert linguists. This study provides evidence about the affordances of translanguaged literacy instruction, which is needed to continue stimulating the ideological shift from monolingual to multilingual perspectives in the education of bilingual students.
... Yet these kinds of public sensemaking are rare in science classrooms (Weiss et al. 2003;Osborne and Dillon 2008), in part because teachers and students are accustomed to recitation-style instruction where students are expected to reproduce knowledge by giving correct answers (Alexander 2015). More authentic discussions require teachers to be responsive to student thinking both in-the-moment and across lessons, signaling to learners that co-developing science explanations is worthy of sustained inquiry while socializing them into disciplinary-specific and dialogic ways of using language (Gee 2008;Mehan and Cazden 2015;Mercer 2010). Importantly, this knowledgebuilding unfolds across varied timescales-within a discursive episode, within a lesson, or over several lessons. ...
In science classrooms, the epistemic practices of explanation building and argumentation often extend over multiple episodes of talk during a single lesson or across several lessons. Analyzing this kind of discourse requires a way to identify patterns that emerge over time to better understand student participation and how teachers support students’ disciplinary work. In this paper, we share the development of a unique graphic representation of classroom talk which we call barcodes. These barcodes assisted our analysis of when and how, over multiple points in a school year, three elementary science teachers facilitated students’ science sensemaking during whole-class discussions in ways that ended up promoting, sustaining, or constraining students’ collective development of ideas. Barcodes allowed us to see that each teacher regularly engaged students in rigorous whole-class talk over a school year, yet each classroom had distinct patterns of teacher involvement and activity sequences that preceded or co-occurred with these conversations. Paired with transcripts, barcodes illuminated a relationship between teacher responsiveness to specific student ideas and higher discursive rigor. Finally, iterative cross-referencing between barcodes and transcripts sparked further inquiries into supportive conditions for talk that were not as apparent using transcripts alone. In this way, the barcode functioned both as an analytical tool and a final visualization of discourse events in a series of lessons from grades 5 and 6 science classrooms.
... However, the prevailing form of teacher-student interactions continues to be the traditional initiation-reply-evaluation (IRE) structure, in which the teacher initiates by posing a question looking for a preferred answer, the student responds, and the teacher evaluates the answer. Mehan and Cazden (2015) note that the classrooms which have followed this pattern have excluded many minority students, as it does not encourage them to actively participate in the classroom talk. Similarly, the initiation-response-feedback (IRF) format, originally recorded by Sinclair and Coulthard (1975), has been reported to be a common practice in classrooms worldwide (Nystrand et al., 1997;Wells and Arauz, 2006). ...
The science of dialogic teaching and learning has especially flourished over the last four decades across age-groups, cultures, and contexts. A wide array of studies has examined the uniqueness of dialogue as a powerful tool to lead effective instructional practices, transform the socio-cultural context and people’s mindsets, among many others. However, despite the efforts to extend the benefits of this approach, certain difficulties exist which have hindered the consolidation of dialogic pedagogies in the classroom. This review discusses the implications for social impact of the scientific developments on dialogic teaching and learning. Particularly, an overview of the state of the art on dialogic education is presented. Social improvements in academic attainment and social cohesion are some of the fundamental issues discussed. Those are especially relevant to address crucial needs in education and solve some of the most pressing social problems. A communicative mix-methods approach emerges as one of the critical aspects of this field of research in educational psychology to achieve social impact. Some limitations, such as teachers sustaining different forms of monologic discourse, and challenges for a broader impact are discussed in this review.
... Many studies have shown that teachers find it challenging to learn and integrate effective conversations into classroom practices (e.g., Mercer, Dawes, & Staarman, 2009;McNeill & Pimentel, 2010;Pimentel & McNeill, 2013). Other researchers have observed that classroom discourse often follows a monologic lecture or recitation style with the teacher dominating the interactive process, and discussion-based productive talk with the students elaborating on their own ideas and engaging in each other's thinking was largely absent (Clarke et al., 2013;Kane & Staiger, 2012;Mehan & Cazden, 2015;O'Connor & Snow, 2017;Webb et al., 2014). Therefore, researchers and practitioners are interested not only in how the structure and delivery of classroom talk relate to the quality of teaching and learning but also-and more importantly-how the analysis of classroom talk can inform teacher professional learning and classroom practice (Hennessy & Davies this volume). ...
Abstract
Video has been increasingly used in teacher learning and professional development (PD), due to many advantages for teachers to reflect on authentic classroom talk data. But meanwhile, because video-recording makes large amounts of classroom discourse data available to teachers, it is difficult for them to read and analyse all the data themselves. Some researchers cautioned that simply providing video in PD does not ensure the success of teacher learning. To address this challenge, this chapter presents a methodological proposal for employing visual learning analytics to support the analysis and representation of large amounts of video-recorded classroom discourse data, and illustrates how a visual learning analytics tool may support the reasoning process for teacher learning and development through human-computer interactions for exploratory data analysis. The chapter ends by a research agenda suggesting directions for future research.
... These findings suggest that the VLA approach to TPD is an effective way for teachers to learn and develop dialogic teaching, which is a persistent difficulty in TPD research. Many researchers have pointed out that dialogic teaching that positions students as active participants in classroom talk is still rare across educational levels from primary to higher education (Khong, Saito, & Gillies, 2017;Mehan & Cazden, 2015;Nystrand, Wu, Gamoran, Zeiser, & Long, 2003;Resnick et al., 2018aResnick et al., , 2018bSmith et al., 2004). Teaching teachers how to use effective classroom talk to guide students' elaboration, reasoning, and thinking with others probably is a prevalent TPD challenge. ...
The results suggest that, while attending knowledge-based workshops had, to some degree, positive effects on the control teachers’ beliefs and self-efficacy, these effects were not sustainable over time. In contrast, the use of visual learning analytics to support the treatment group’s reflection on the classroom data not only had significant and sustained effects on the teachers’ beliefs and self-efficacy but also significantly influenced their actual classroom teaching behaviour.
... Indeed, this principle is central to educational Socratic dialogues as well, since the main focus is on discourse, reflection, and deliberating competing ideas as opposed to a way of recitation, where teachers do most of the talking and limit themselves to asking closed questions-better known as the initiation-reply-evaluation [IRE] structure. (Mehan & Cazden, 2015) It is worth noting that Socratic dialogue clearly presupposes listening, yet, despite the apparent importance of listening, there is little research about its exact role and importance for educational contexts. Conversely, the importance of dialogue in education is often emphasized in debates and reports about our education system. ...
This paper is about dialogic listening as a precondition for meaningful engagement in Socratic dialogues and for music. In order to arrive at a better understanding of what constitutes dialogic listening in the context of educational philosophical dialogues, I first shed light on the practice of philosophy teaching based on Nelson & Heckmann’s neo-Socratic paradigm and link this practice to Plato’s dialogues. I then argue that the activity of listening to an interlocutor during Socratic dialogues on the one hand, and listening to music on the other, may in both cases be understood as a precondition for the process of engagement and, consequently, the co-creation of meaning as a central objective to the philosophical practice. I show this by discussing both Buber and Gadamer, combining their insights into three interrelated features of dialogic listening: 1) openness, 2) reciprocity, and 3) awareness, which apply to both philosophical dialogues and music. Ultimately, I attempt to make a case for the complementary application of music in the philosophical educational practice.
... Besides, a largescale study (n = 671 US prekindergartner classrooms) on classroom quality in prekindergarten showed that the instructional quality, including the quality of teacher-student interactions, was low for the majority of programs (Mashburn et al., 2008). Often times, one can observe that teachers frequently use the well-known Initiation-Response-Evaluation sequence, in which the teacher asks a question, followed by a response of a student (or more students in chorus), after which the teacher evaluates the correctness of this response often in terms of right or wrong (see for example, Cazden, 2001;Dickinson et al., 2008;Mehan & Cazden, 2015;Nystrand, 1997). As a consequence, students have limited opportunities to talk and think together. ...
In the current research project, we aimed to design and implement an intervention focused on the promotion of dialogic classroom talk in early childhood education, and to evaluate what it contributes to children's oral communicative abilities. Several studies have shown the great potential of dialogic classroom talk for students' subject-matter learning (Nystrand & Gamoran, 1991, O'Connor, Michaels, & Chapin, 2015), reasoning skills (Wegerif, et al., 1999), motivation (Kiemer et al., 2015). Given these findings, it is surprising that many classrooms still show a prevalence toward monologic talk that is overly teacher-steered, giving children only limited opportunities to develop their language abilities. We build on Vygotskij's cultural-historical theory to argue how dialogic classroom talk supports children to use language to think together. A mixed-methods approach was used using video-observations of classroom talk and a standardised test to measure children's communicative abilities. Ethical approval was obtained from the Ethical Review Board of the authors' Faculty. Participating teachers were informed about the purpose of the research. Parents of the children received information and could contact their child's teacher in case they did not want their child to participate. Teachers that participated in a PDP on dialogic classroom talk
were able to make their classroom conversations more dialogic. Findings suggest that classroom discussions in which children have space to talk and think together have a positive effect on children’s communicative abilities. Dialogic classroom talk is a
powerful context in which (young) children, guided by a skilful teacher, learn to communicate more effectively.
... Second, classroom research testifies to the way that the recitation or IRE (initiation-response-evaluation) exchange structure, which centres on closed questions, recall answers and minimal feedback and in many schools remains the pedagogical default, resists change despite abundant evidence that it wastes much of talk's discursive, cognitive and educational potential (Barnes, Britten, andRosen 1969, Sinclair andCoulthard 1975 3 ; Barnes and Todd 1977;Mehan 1979;Nystrand et al. 1997;Galton et al. 1999;Alexander 2001Alexander , 2008Cazden 2001;Hardman, Smith, and Wall 2003;Mortimer and Scott 2003;Smith et al. 2004;Galton 2008;Mehan and Cazden 2015;Resnick, Asterhan, and Clarke 2015). ...
This paper considers the development and randomised control trial (RCT) of a dialogic teaching intervention designed to maximise the power of classroom talk to enhance students’ engagement and learning. Building on the author’s earlier work, the intervention’s pedagogical strand instantiates dialogic teaching not as a single, circumscribed ‘method’ but as an interlocking set of permissive repertoires through which, steered by principles of procedure, teachers energise their own and their students’ talk. The repertoires are directed both to teaching’s improvement and to its larger epistemological, cultural and civic purposes. Its professional strand entailed teacher induction and training followed by a cyclic programme of planning, target-setting and review using mentoring and video/audio analysis. Supported by the UK Education Endowment Foundation it was piloted in London and trialled in three other UK cities with combined intervention/control cohorts of nearly 5000 year 5 (4th grade) students and 208 teachers. The independent evaluation calculated that after 20 weeks students in the intervention group were two months ahead of their control group peers in English, mathematics and science tests; while coded video data showed that the changes in both teacher and student talk were striking and in the direction intended. The RCT methodology affords limited explanatory purchase but insights are available from other studies. These, together with contingent questions and future possibilities, are discussed in the paper’s conclusion.
... In the majority of today's classrooms, the interactions among students and teachers is still dominated by recitation. Often times, this takes the form of the well-known Initiation-Response-Evaluation sequence, in which the teacher asks a question, followed by a response of a student (or more students in chorus), after which the teacher evaluates the correctness of this response in terms of right or wrong (see for example, Cazden, 2001;Mehan & Cazden, 2015;Nystrand, 1997). As a consequence, students have limited opportunities to talk and think together. ...
Now is an auspicious time to make student-centered discourse a centerpiece of social and civic education, as well as across the curriculum more broadly. We describe here the features of the middle-school program we have developed and implemented for this purpose, emphasizing its concentration on direct student-to-student communication, in contrast to the more common whole-class teacher-led discussion. The Covid-19 epidemic forced us to modify the way in which we implemented the program, eliminating face-to-face contact. What had been an in-person interactive discourse-based workshop we transformed into a remotely-experienced, technology-supported interaction between revolving student pairs. Each participant debated individually with a sequence of individual peers who held an opposing view on a series of social issues. This modified distance-learning approach revealed some unanticipated benefits that we share here. Most notable among them were the enhanced comfort in sharing their views that participants reported they experienced, due to the remote, text-only connection that concealed their personal identities.
While promises of equity mark (inter)national declarations and laws that contemporary democratic societies subscribe to, accessibility and participation for-all continues to remain out of reach for increasing numbers of people and “named-groups” across the global-North/South. Going beyond issues regarding gaps between progressive policies and people’s accounts of their experiences, this paper illuminates the mundane nature of participation by putting the spotlight on people’s everyday lives in and across different societal sectors. By doing so, it illustrates the mundane nature of processes that constitute the “policies of equity and language as participation”. Issues of promises in policies in contemporary democratic societies like Sweden are discussed as framings that need to be decentered and troubled through a multi-scale analytical gaze at the mundane, messy and wild nature of human life. The study draws on data from three projects where data generation has and is taking place through (n)ethnographic fieldwork and cross-scale policy sourcing. Drawing inspiration from the entanglements of two theoretical framings of significance to participation and equity – sociocultural integrationist perspectives and decolonial Southern theories, this paper maps human geographies and performative co-agencies, and illustrates how practices intrinsic to one arena are disrupted or maintained through practices in others. The study also discusses representations of “named-language”, “named-modality” and “named-identity” through a Southern analytical aperture that calls for acknowledging the roles of different types of semiotic resources when human meaning-making is made salient.
The present study investigated the efficacy of an intervention program to assist teachers in the development of conceptual and practical tools for engaging students in dialogic classroom discourse. Sixteen fourth-grade mathematics teachers received 28 h of the intervention over a semester of 4 ½ months. Compared to the nonintervention group, the intervention teachers showed a reduced tendency to evaluate student responses and were more likely to promote students to engage with others’ ideas. Students of the intervention group responded to the teachers’ changes by demonstrating increased amount of contributions in classroom discussion. The results indicate that increasing awareness on dialogic classroom discourse provides an encouraging platform for teacher professional development to improve the quality of disciplinary teaching and learning.
This essay is an account of how, throughout my 40-year career as an educational researcher and professor of Sociology and Education, mostly at the University of California, San Diego, I have tried to live my commitments to excellence and equity in practice to create a more just educational system. These values permeate my story, which is presented here in two parts. In the first part, broadly spanning 20 years, I focused on uncovering the roots of the seemingly inexorable social fact of educational inequality in US K-12 education, mainly through studying some of the policies and practices that produce those inequalities. My findings showed consistently that students of color from low-income backgrounds did not fare as well as their middle-income “majority” contemporaries. In the last 20 years, I have attempted to build educational environments that might produce more equitable possibilities for underprivileged young people based on the research that uncovered the stratifying practices that produced educational inequalities.Many of the directions that my professional career took were not thoughtfully and carefully planned. My participation in various projects was not entirely free, totally independent, or completely rational. They were often not entirely of my own making. Instead, I often responded to opportunities presented to me. In fact, I think that the concept of serendipity accounts well for the relationships that shaped my career trajectory.
Less than it is an individual ability or skill, critical thinking is a dialogic practice people engage in and commit to, initially interactively and then in interiorized form with the other only implicit. An argument depends for its meaning on how others respond (Gergen, 2015). In advancing arguments, well-practiced thinkers anticipate their defeasibility as a consequence of others’ objections, in addition envisioning their own potential rebuttals. Whether in external or interiorized form, the dialogic process creates something new, while itself undergoing development.
This perspective may be useful in sharpening definition of the construct of critical thinking and in so doing help to bring together the largely separate strands of work examining it as a theoretical construct, a measurable skill, and an educational objective. Implications for education follow. How might critical thinking as a shared practice be engaged in within educational settings in ways that will best support its development? One step is to privilege frequent practice of direct peer-to-peer discourse. A second is to take advantage of the leveraging power of dialog as a bridge to individual argument – one affording students’ argumentive writing a well-envisioned audience and purpose. Illustrations of this bridging power are presented. Finally, implications for assessment of critical thinking are noted and a case made for the value of people’s committing to a high standard of critical thinking as a shared and interactive practice.
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