Discourse and Discussion - Research and Resources

In Academic Conversations: Classroom Talk that Fosters Critical Thinking and Content Understandings authors Jeff Zwiers and Marie Crawford address the challenges teachers face when trying to bring thoughtful, respectful, and focused conversations into the classroom. They identify five core communications skills needed to help students hold productive academic conversation across content areas: Elaborating and Clarifying Supporting Ideas with Evidence Building On and/or Challenging Ideas Paraphrasing Synthesizing.

This practical book by Fisher, Frey, and Rothenberg talks about how to implement classroom talk. This article by the authors is a much shorter version of their views on content-area conversations.

The power of hmm ... Bringing life (back) to words in the classroom: Many students need to be shown explicitly how to engage productively in academic discussions. But teachers should be careful not to stifle the genuine exchange of ideas

This practical book by Erik Palmer also talks gives strategies for teaching listening and speaking

Rather than a set of fixed lessons, Visible Thinking is a varied collection of practices, including thinking routines, small sets of questions or a short sequence of steps, as well as the documentation of student thinking. Using this process thinking becomes visible as the students' different viewpoints are expressed, documented, discussed and reflected upon.

This is a follow up to Academic Conversations that expands the first book with updated classroom strategies and practices.

This resource gives practical resources for student-led assessment. Though this book isn't explicitly about discussion, chapter 2 talks about checking for understanding in ways that incorporate discussion, and chapter 4 talks about student work critiques, which can be another way to incorporate discussion.

This article examines interaction in whole-class talk during a literacy lesson in a Grade 5/6 classroom, focusing on the ways students disagreed with each other during discussion of a controversial topic and visual text.

The study examined how children process their reasoning within the context of Grade 2/3 science classrooms and how the process of collectivity emerges from classroom interactions and dialogue between children as they attempt to solve their classroom problems. The study findings suggest that children's reasoning involves active evaluation of theories and evidence through collective problem solving, with consensus being developed through dialogical reasoning.

This reviews research (between 1972 and 2011) on what is currently known about classroom dialogue (how people characterize it and evaluate it in research studies)

This study examines the quality of classroom talk and its relation to academic rigor in reading-comprehension lessons. While this is very reading-specific, they do use an Accountable Talk rubric that might be more widely applicable.

In this article, we investigate contrasting dialogues between two pairs of eight-year-old pupils solving mathematical tasks. The analysis in our video-based study shows that both communication skills and use of tools have a profound impact on third graders’ potential to solve tasks as a joint enterprise.

This article outlines the features of Accountable Talk, which encompasses three broad dimensions: accountability to the learning community, accountability to accepted standards of reasoning, and accountability to knowledge.

This research article is about a study that shows that dialogic teaching enhances engagement and learning. This article has a pretty good framework for dialogic teaching and a summary of previous research.

The overall aim of this article was to examine the extent to which the forms are embedded within current practice in English primary schools. Results revealed that the supposedly productive forms were not always as scarce as sometimes presumed, while also highlighting huge variation in their relative occurrence.

This gives a history of dialogic thinking (through 2008), and then considers Philosophy for Children more specifically.

This is a scholarly piece that argues that it isn't the form that matters, but a dialogic "stance" which promotes inquiry. It has a good literature review and summary of dialogic teaching, but is about a broader theory of teaching than just a focus on verbal conversations.

This paper reports on an ESRC and British Telecom funded study which explored the teaching of collaborative talk in the secondary English classroom. It argues that teachers must utilise and model the talk they promote, and will consider the communicative and interpersonal aspects of this scaffolding process.

This study makes a theoretical contribution to understanding the nature of exploratory talk in the early years and provides insights into the form that scaffolding of exploratory talk can take in authentic learning contexts.

This article focuses specifically on "exploratory talk" and how it leads to better learning.

This critical discourse analysis study identifies and describes power relationships in elementary classrooms that support science engagement by providing students time to think, ask questions, and find their voices to talk about subject matter.

This article uses Piagetian-, Vygotskian-and Bakhtinian-inspired approaches to analyse a short extract of classroom data in which two 12-year-old boys using TinkerPlots software change their understanding of a probability problem.

This reviews the literature (from the 1990s through 2016) on classroom talk, including exploratory talk, collaborative reasoning, accountable talk, collective argumentation, dialogic teaching, and philosophy for children. It's a good overview on the major types of classroom talk.

This paper offers examples demonstrating how embodied modes such as gesture, posture, facial expression, gaze and haptics work in conjunction with speech in children's collaborative construction of knowledge. In other words, what may have been previously conceived as gaps and silences – often interpreted as an absence of language – are in fact instantiations of the work of semiotic modes other than language.

This article examines three commonly used pedagogical methods, namely the Socratic method of inquiry, collaborative problem solving, and debate‐based deliberation, establishing the relationship of each one of these methods with the strategic promotion of argumentative reasoning, as a commonplace objective and means of inquiry‐based educational praxis.

Students often struggle to comprehend complex text. In response, we conducted an initial, year-long study of Quality Talk, a teacher-facilitated, small-group discussion approach designed to enhance students’ basic and high-level comprehension, in two fourth-grade classrooms. Specifically, teachers delivered instructional mini-lessons on discourse elements (e.g., questioning or argumentation) and conducted weekly text-based discussions in their language arts classes.

The purpose of this article is to raise awareness of how the varied form and responsive and response-able use of teacher questions can invite and direct not only more student talk in classrooms but elicit specific and varied features of student talk that enhance comprehension building and provide evidence of student engagement and high-level thinking.

This article uses documentary evidence to review debates on spoken language and learning in the UK over recent decades. It argues that two different models of talk have been at stake: one that wishes to ‘correct’ children’s spoken language and another than encourages children to use talk to learn and represent their worlds. The article suggests that the latter, more democratic, approach is now under attack, but that the teacher can still choose to use learning talk in the classroom.

This discusses how frequently classrooms use rigorous and responsive talk, through the lens of a science classroom.

In this study, the first author taught an electric circuits unit to four upper elementary science classes, exercising a responsive teaching stance. We found that rigorous episodes of whole-class talk were associated with the teacher's use of open-ended questions, follow-up prompts, references to activity or representations, pre-discussion tasks, and asking students to comment on their peers' ideas.

This article focuses on a case study of a teacher who uses rigorous and responsive talk in an elementary science classroom.

This small-scale study explored the established ‘typology of talk’, particularly ‘exploratory talk’, in a classroom search context. The authors found that the most successful pupils were those who engaged in the most exploratory talk. This finding has practical classroom implications: the collaborative nature of search and potential of collaboration and discourse should be exploited in search-based tasks. This study also indicates a rich area for future research.

This research investigates various purposes of teacher discourse moves essential to orchestrate dialogic discourse in secondary science classrooms. Data collected includes classroom observations and teacher interviews of two teachers teaching in an Indian school setting, whose classroom practices subscribed to a dialogic framework.

In this paper, we draw upon a framework for analyzing the discursive interactions of science classrooms to probe the movement between authoritative and dialogic discourse in a Brazilian high school science class. More specifically, it argues the point that such shifts between communicative approaches are an inevitable part of teaching whose purpose is to support meaningful learning of scientific knowledge.

The study examined the change in the nature of the interactions between students in group conversations, in the context of a film unit and a geography unit using Quality Talk. Quality Talk is an interventional approach promoting text comprehension via a critical-reflective thinking approach. The study also sought to determine whether there was a positive intervention effect from the use of Quality Talk, on the students' ability to write from a critical analytical ( CA) stance.

The aim of this study was to contribute to this knowledge gap. We replicated research conducted in the UK as part of the epiSTEMe project, in which curriculum materials supporting dialogic classroom talk were developed and evaluated through a randomised experimental study.

In this article, Pershey makes an argument for why listening and speaking are important in the classroom. Note: This entire journal issue is devoted to listening and speaking, so there may be other interesting articles there as well.

We explored whether using classroom video to help teachers identify curriculum-embedded opportunities for student discourse improved their understanding and facilitation of document-based historical discussions. We observed a relationship between teachers’ capacity to notice curriculum-embedded opportunities for student discourse in classroom videos and their growth in enacting document-based history discussions.

Based on a corpus of classroom video data, the author developed a typology of metadiscourse commonly found in science classroom discourse. The typology comprises six major categories of metadiscourse, namely text connective, knowledge connective, activity connective, attitude marker, epistemology marker, and interpretive marker. In addition, they showed how the analysis on metadiscourse was necessary to complement the gaps from classroom analysis focusing on the interaction and content development aspects of classroom talk, particularly during the opening and reviewing stages of constructing a scientific explanation.

This case study research is informed by Vygotsky's view that talk is essential to organise our thoughts and extend our thinking and that, as Barnes suggested, the teacher needs to use the social situation effectively in the classroom to promote talk for learning. This article focuses on pedagogy and teachers' understandings of how talk works in the classroom, as I sought to illuminate teachers' intuitions and insights and their views of what they find challenging in organising classroom talk.