Abstract:
A growing body of international research suggests that children need to talk in order to think and to learn, and that children's literacy also benefits from greater classroom emphasis on talk. In particular, how teachers ask questions and subsequently treat students' answers is critical to whether the classroom dialogue will support conceptual development (e.g., Alexander, 2006; Mercer & Littleton, 2007).
This paper presents material from a six-month project in a suburban Darwin school that had a primary aim of improving the literacy of a small group of underachieving Year 5 students. To do this, we used an action research cycle, using video to record the lessons and to help us plan, observe and reflect. All students were reading well below age level demonstrating various ineffective reading strategies, and exhibiting a kind of "disengaged compliance", happy to decode simple texts, but reluctant to attend to meaning or to engage with discussions about the text. The students' behaviour also suggested that they constructed the task of reading in a way that was fundamentally different from their more successful peers, with a focus on "ritualised decoding" rather than sense-making. Drawing on Wertsch's (1984) concept of "situation definition", we therefore aimed to find ways to use dialogue to mediate a qualitative shift in the students' approach to reading. Our interpretations of the classroom dialogue were aided by the notion of "critical moments", or discourse units where the exchange either supports or hinders the student's developing understandings (Myhill, 2005).
In this paper we will present some examples of classroom interactions which illustrate critical moments in the lessons, and the difficulties inherent in helping students develop a new situation definition of a task. The research contributes to our understanding of the challenges that teachers face in using classroom dialogue to mediate qualitative changes in children's underlying ways of conceptualising what they are doing in school, particularly in the area of literacy.
References
Alexander, R. (2006). Towards dialogic teaching: rethinking classroom talk. Cambridge: Dialogos.
Mercer and Littleton, K. (2007). Dialogue and the Development of Children's Thinking. London: Routledge.
Myhill, D. (2005). Scaffolds or straitjackets? Critical moments in classroom discourse. Educational Review, 57(1), 55-69.
Wertsch, J. V. (1984). The Zone of proximal development: some conceptual issues. In B. Rogoff & J. V. Wertsch (Eds.), Children's learning in the "zone of proximal development" (pp. 7-18). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
This paper presents material from a six-month project in a suburban Darwin school that had a primary aim of improving the literacy of a small group of underachieving Year 5 students. To do this, we used an action research cycle, using video to record the lessons and to help us plan, observe and reflect. All students were reading well below age level demonstrating various ineffective reading strategies, and exhibiting a kind of "disengaged compliance", happy to decode simple texts, but reluctant to attend to meaning or to engage with discussions about the text. The students' behaviour also suggested that they constructed the task of reading in a way that was fundamentally different from their more successful peers, with a focus on "ritualised decoding" rather than sense-making. Drawing on Wertsch's (1984) concept of "situation definition", we therefore aimed to find ways to use dialogue to mediate a qualitative shift in the students' approach to reading. Our interpretations of the classroom dialogue were aided by the notion of "critical moments", or discourse units where the exchange either supports or hinders the student's developing understandings (Myhill, 2005).
In this paper we will present some examples of classroom interactions which illustrate critical moments in the lessons, and the difficulties inherent in helping students develop a new situation definition of a task. The research contributes to our understanding of the challenges that teachers face in using classroom dialogue to mediate qualitative changes in children's underlying ways of conceptualising what they are doing in school, particularly in the area of literacy.
References
Alexander, R. (2006). Towards dialogic teaching: rethinking classroom talk. Cambridge: Dialogos.
Mercer and Littleton, K. (2007). Dialogue and the Development of Children's Thinking. London: Routledge.
Myhill, D. (2005). Scaffolds or straitjackets? Critical moments in classroom discourse. Educational Review, 57(1), 55-69.
Wertsch, J. V. (1984). The Zone of proximal development: some conceptual issues. In B. Rogoff & J. V. Wertsch (Eds.), Children's learning in the "zone of proximal development" (pp. 7-18). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.