Promoting Academic Talk in Schools

Global Practices and Perspectives

Robyn Gillies, Robyn M. Gillies, Robyn Gillies, Robyn M. Gillies

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780367584740
• eBook ISBN: 9781351395212
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Promoting Academic Talk in Schools brings together a rich array of recent research to explore how academic talk helps transform student experience across a variety of learning environments. Drawing on conceptual frameworks and evidence-based strategies, each chapter analyses the implications for practice in both formal and informal classroom settings.

The book covers topics from collaborative and productive talk to increasing student participation and parent-student talk outside of the classroom. With contributions from academics in Australia, the UK, the USA, and Spain, it provides a comprehensive Western perspective of academic talk in schools.

Promoting Academic Talk in Schools offers both theoretical perspectives and practical implications, making it an ideal resource for both researchers and postgraduate students in this burgeoning field.

1 Academic talk in schools

An introduction

Robyn M. Gillies

Interest in promoting academic talk and its capacity to promote cognitive development and educational attainment have gathered momentum over the last three decades as research has emerged that has demonstrates the key role social interaction plays in the joint construction of knowledge, understanding, and learning and how such interaction has the capacity to benefit students’ learning (Palincsar & Brown, 1984; Webb, 1991; Wegerif, Littleton, Dawes, Mercer, & Rowe, 2004). Although constructivist approaches to learning advocate the importance of social interaction in the development of students’ reasoning, problem-solving, and learning (Mercer, 2008; Palincsar, Marcum, Fitzgerald, & Sherwood, 2017; Wegerif, 2013), it is only in recent years that research has demonstrated how students learn from interacting with others and how teachers can utilise this information to construct both formal and informal experiences in and outside classrooms and across different educational settings to ensure the benefits attributed to such experiences can be developed and sustained.

Sadly, though, recent research on classroom dialogue across the last 40 years confirms that little has been learned from this research as teachers continue to act as transmitters of knowledge rather than engaging students in meaningful discussions about topics under consideration, while students, in turn, only engage in high-quality discourse when they are required to provide reasons and justifications for their conclusions (Howe & Abedin, 2013; Meloth & Deering, 1999). This is regrettable, Alexander (2008) argues, because the consequences of this type of exchange where talk is essentially teacher directed and cognitively unchallenging are threefold. First, students may not learn as effectively as they could; secondly, students’ potential to engage in dialogic interactions where they interrogate others’ perspectives and demonstrate their capacities to engage in talk-based dialogic exchanges may be inhibited or less developed; and, finally, teachers may develop misunderstandings about students’ learning, leading to them losing sight of the diagnostic element that is essential if their teaching is to be targeted to students’ needs.

Dialogic interactions between teachers and students and between students and students are critically important for student learning. Mercer and Littleton (2007) proposed that such interaction can be facilitated by the type of questions teachers ask. For example, questions can be used to: (a) test children’s facts and recall of specific information; (b) encourage students to articulate their thoughts, reasons, and understandings and share them with the wider class; (c) model different ways of using language that students’ can appropriate for themselves; and (d) provide opportunities for students to engage in sustained interactions that enable them to expound on their current understandings and clarify any misconceptions they may have.

Another form of dialogic interaction can occur through collaborative argumentation where two or more individuals engage in an interchange of statements, questions, or replies. Chinn and Clark (2013) noted that this type of interaction not only occurs when participants disagree with positions taken and are seeking to explore and resolve these differences, but it can also occur when they are working together to develop reasons to support a position they agree with or to gather evidence to develop and refine a position. Because of the dialectical nature of the interaction that occurs during collaborative argumentation, the authors also maintain that this type of interaction can be labelled “dialectical argumentation” (p. 315).

Collaborative reasoning is another form of dialogical argumentation (Anderson et al., 2001) n which participants discuss contrasting perspectives on an issue and make their own positions known by thinking out loud or voicing their thinking. In the interaction that occurs, participants learn to listen to what others have to say, consider their own perspective, and develop more sophisticated understandings of the topic under discussion. Hearing others critique one’s own and others’ thought processes promotes metacognitive thinking and the ability to engage in reasoned argumentation (Clark et al., 2003). Reznitskaya et al. (2009), in a review of empirical evidence from different studies that used collaborative reasoning in elementary classes, noted, “Dialogic interactions appeared to not only influence students’ learning within the social context, but also helped students to internalize argument skills and to successfully transfer them to new contexts, tasks, and communicative modes” (p. 43). In short, the authors argued, students learn to develop argument schema by participating in dialogic interactions with others. Moreover, elementary school students are developmentally ready to learn about argumentation and that the teaching of this type of discourse should not be delayed until later years.

Gillies and Khan (2009) reported that teaching students to ask and answer questions is critically important if they are to engage in reasoned argumentation, problem-solving, and learning. In a study that involved two cohorts of teachers, the cooperative learning plus questioning condition (n = 14 teachers) and the cooperative learning condition (n = 11 teachers) and two groups of students (3–4 students per group) from each teacher’s class, the authors found the teachers in the cooperative learning and questioning condition not only used more challenging and scaffolding behaviours than their peers in the cooperative learning condition only but also that the students in their classes provided more elaborations, reasons, and justifications for their responses than the children in the cooperative condition only. The study demonstrated that when teachers are taught to use different questioning strategies designed to challenge children’s cognitive and metacognitive thinking, they use more mediating behaviours (i.e., language that challenges and scaffolds children’s learning) than teachers who have not been taught these skills. Moreover, the children in the cooperative learning plus questioning condition provided more help, reasons, and justifications in their responses to each other than their untrained peers. Gillies and Khan reported that it appears when students are taught explicitly and implicitly how to ask questions designed to challenge each other’s thinking, this training sensitises them to the importance of providing responses that are detailed and more helpful to each other.

The dialogic classroom

In the dialogic classroom, Alexander (2008) reports teachers and students address learning tasks together, listen to what others have to say, share ideas, consider alternative propositions, and build on their own and others’ ideas to pursue cogent lines of inquiry. Teachers in this context, Alexander (2010) argues, ask questions that challenge students’ thinking, are anchored in the content of the lesson, build on previous knowledge, and ensure that there is a balance between the social and cognitive aspects of talk. Additionally, teachers provide feedback to students that is relevant to their needs and leads thinking forward as well as encouraging contributions that are extended rather than minimal. Under these circumstances, students tend to engage in longer teacher-student interactions; provide responses that are more detailed, explanatory, speculative, expository, and reflective; building on their own and others’ contributions to try and reach common understandings and a degree of consensus about topics they are discussing.

Others who have investigated the role of different types of talk in classrooms include Scott, Mortimer, and Aguiar (2006), who examined the types of talk used in teaching science. Building on the importance of dialogic teaching proposed by Alexander (2008) and the role of inquiry learning in science (Osborne, 2002), where students are encouraged to work collaboratively on discovery-based tasks so talk is critically important to solving the problem at hand, Scott et al. (2006) developed a communicative framework that can be used to analyse the types of talk that typically occur between teachers and students. Using this framework, Scott et al. reported that talk tends to fall on a dimension from dialogic to authoritative, where in the former, the teacher attempts to gather students’ ideas, often with the intention of helping students to see how different ideas relate to one another or encourage the students to engage with a new scientific idea to develop an explanation for a problem they are investigating. On the other hand, authoritative discourse is characterised by the teacher presenting the scientific canon or when the focus is on the scientific point of view with little or no discussion. In short, this type of discourse is closed to others’ points of view, and there is no exploration of different perspectives or discussion of how students’ different ideas may be developed or linked to explain phenomena.

Scott, Mortimer, and Ametella (2011) argue that making links between students’ prior knowledge and understandings and what they are currently learning is a fundamental aspect of teaching and learning conceptual scientific knowledge. Helping students make connections between ideas in the ongoing meaning making of classroom teaching and learning is achieved through the utilisation of a number of specific pedagogical tools and strategies that will help support knowledge building, promote continuity of the scientific story, and encourage emotional engagement of students that fosters motivation and student agency. Strategies that are specific to these three foci include being able to learn the social language of school science or ways of being able to use everyday language to explain scientific concepts, being able to integrate and differentiate everyday ways of explaining science, and coming to recognise how scientific concepts are inter-related. Other additional strategies include making links among different modes of representation, including the phenomenological, theoretical, and symbolic, and acknowledging and validating students’ ideas that are linked to substantive content as a way of encouraging emotional engagement with the task at hand. In this sense, pedagogical link making is essentially a dialogic process that involves the bringing together of ideas to make links between new and existing ideas to build knowledge, make connections between teaching and learning experiences separated by time, and foster the development of positive student attitudes and beliefs towards science.

Dialogic talk in the dialogic classroom

Ruthven et al. (2017) reported on the implementation of the Effecting Principled Improvement in STEM Education (episteme) project, which undertook pedagogical research aimed at improving student engagement and learning in science and mathematics in Year 7 through the introduction of dialogical teaching practices on the topics under discussion. The emphasis was on promoting mathematico-scientific reasoning. The episteme pedagogical framework was informed by the importance of: (a) topic-related problem-solving where the emphasis was on student thinking related to key concepts; (b) cooperative group work where students discussed topic-related tasks; (c) linking student experiences and interests to the topics under discussion; and (d) recognising the teacher’s role in helping shape events and ideas. The teacher’s role can be very demanding in that it requires the teachers to learn how to “identify and interanimate the thinking behind different pupil responses, and steer progression in reasoning without closing down discussion” (p. 25).

The episteme intervention consisted of a short introductory module designed to prepare classes for this dialogic teaching approach and two curricula topics each in science and mathematics that employed the episteme approach. Before the implementation of the intervention, teachers participated in two days of professional learning designed to assist them to translate the notion of dialogic activity into practical action. The data that were collected from the 25 participating schools (12 intervention schools and 13 control schools) included topic proficiency tests (based on the national guidelines on curriculum and assessment), a module opinion questionnaire, a subject attitude questionnaire, and classroom observations of dialogic teaching practices. The results showed that the teachers in the intervention group (no data were collected from the control teachers) did demonstrate dialogic teaching practices across the period of implementation of the episteme intervention, although the frequency levels were higher for different science and mathematics modules. Interestingly, the episteme intervention had differential effects (relative to controls) on student learning according to module, with effect sizes ranging from a small negative (−0.20) to a small positive (+0.17), although the difference between the two mathematics modules was not significant. Furthermore, student attitudes towards the subject they were studying did not differ significantly between the intervention and control groups, and neither were there significant differences in student opinion about their classroom experience between the intervention and control groups. Possible limitations on the study included constraints in time and resources, which inhibited the capacity of the authors to respond to emergent issues, and classroom observations of teaching practices only occurred with the intervention group.

Larrain, Howe, and Freire (2017) also investigated the role of dialogic teaching and, specifically, the use of argumentation in science classrooms through the use of curriculum materials that support dialogic practices. The study replicated research conducted in the UK as part of the episteme project (discussed previously) in which curriculum materials that support dialogic classroom talk were developed and evaluated. The study involved 220 Year 5 students from 18 classrooms spread across 18 different schools in Chile with random allocation of classes to the episteme intervention (11 classes) and the control group (7 classes). All teachers participated in a professional learning day workshop in which the intervention group was provided with information on key aspects of the use of argumentation in science and the rationale behind the study, whereas the control group had opportunities to strengthen their knowledge of the science unit on forces that all the teachers had agreed to teach.

The forces lessons that were developed for this study were based on well-structured problem-solving situations designed to activate students’ wider experiences and stimulate scientific inquiries. All lessons were also designed to promote discussion and exploratory talk both in whole-class and small-group activities as a way of enabling students to test their ideas and predict solutions to the problem-solving tasks they were trying to resolve. The teacher’s role was to help the students share their deliberations with the whole class, challenge and scaffold their thinking, and discuss students’ responses to help them reach agreement.

The results showed that the intervention group achieved higher learning gains both immediately following the conclusion of the science unit on forces and on follow-up delayed tests. In testing the difference in argumentation skills, the authors reported that whereas students in the intervention group maintained their level of argumentation skills, the student in the control groups received lower scores on the delayed post-test, although the control group engaged in significantly more whole-class argumentative dialogue than the intervention group. However, whole-class argumentation did not predict performance on immediate post-test results in either the intervention or control groups, although whole-class argumentation dialogue had a strong and positive effect on the delayed content knowledge test in the intervention group.

Newman (2017) reported on the use of meta-talk within the context of an intervention study that investigated the development of secondary students’ collaborative talk in classrooms where teachers were encouraged to engage in dialogic discussions. In this study, students were taught the importance of being actively involved in discussions, listening with an open mind to the ideas of others, and learning to manage both the goals of the discussion and the challenges that it posed as they participated in a series of small-group discussions about different vignettes taken from two popular television shows.

In each of the 10 lessons, the students analysed a transcript or video of a collaborative dialogue before engaging in and reflecting on their participation in a thematically linked task. The transcripts and videos were specifically selected because of their potential to provoke meta-talk about the processes of collaborative talk. In fact, the results showed that as students focused more on the interpersonal processes of collaborative talk, they learned to make their thinking explicit and in so doing developed a clearer understanding of meta-talk as not only a process for more effectively managing the discussions but also as a way of reflecting on how they participated, sought to develop understanding, and managed the collaborative dialogue. Newman argues that by participating in collaborative discussions, students not only learn to engage in more meta-talk, but they also learn to co-regulate their interactions with their peers, which in turn, appears to support metacognition and self-regulatory processes.

Given the potential of dialogic talk to promote cognitive development and educational attainment in students, the purpose of this book is to coalesce research that is being conducted internationally that not only demonstrates that students benefit from interacting with others but, also, how teachers can promote teacher-student and student-student interactions in both formal and informal classroom settings so students are actively engaged in constructing knowledge and learning from these experiences. It does this by bringing together a number of international researchers to profile new pedagogical developments in teacher-student and student-student academic talk and how these practices have been implemented in different classroom settings. This book has four objectives:

1. It provides an overview of the research and theoretical perspectives that underpin developments in promoting academic talk in schools;
2. It elaborates on how academic talk can be promoted in both formal and informal classroom settings;
3. It discusses the different linguistic tools and strategies that can be used to promote teacher-student and student-student discourse in formal and informal classroom settings;
4. It provides specific examples of strategies teachers can use to promote academic talk.

Current developments in academic talk

The chapter, Promoting Academic Talk through Collaborative Reasoning, by Tzu-Jung Lin and colleagues, discusses how Collabor...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Notes on contributors
• 1 Academic talk in schools: an introduction
• 2 Promoting academic talk through Collaborative Reasoning
• 3 Investigating productive academic talk as third graders interact with one another: a project-based science/engineering curriculum and mobile devices
• 4 Promoting productive student participation across multiple classroom participation settings
• 5 Turning talk around: time for children to talk and teachers to listen in primary mathematics
• 6 Promoting dialogic discussion in mathematics and science classrooms
• 7 Using cooperative learning in reading to promote academic talk with students aged 12 to 16 years old
• 8 Enhancing parent-child language interaction in the pre-school years
• 9 Supporting teacher learning and use of inquiry dialogue with the argumentation rating tool
• 10 Dialogic talk in the cooperative classroom
• 11 Dialogue as instruction: purposeful and response-able writing workshop minilesson talk in a second-grade classroom
• Index