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Determining the Mechanics of Classroom Discourse in Vygotskian Sense: Teacher Discursive Moves Reconsidered

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Abstract

This study identified the accumulated distributions of the enacted discursive moves during classroom inquiry to demonstrate how a science teacher reacted to the existence of two mutually exclusive social languages: everyday social languages of the students vs. social languages of school science. The participants were a science teacher and 26 sixth-grade students. The major data source was the video recording that was analysed through systematic observation in two phases: coding and counting. It was concluded that challenging moves (playing the devil’s advocate role, asking for alternative explanations) were dispersed homogeneously throughout the streaming of the implementation. Challenging moves therefore served both dialogical and monological discursive purposes. Communicating moves (probing, embodying, requesting clarification) appeared mostly in the initial cycles of the negotiations, thus, serving  dialogical purposes. The monitoring moves (ask about mind change, framing), the evaluating, judging and critiquing moves (reflective discourse) and presenting logical exposition moves (direct lecturing, narratives, verbal cloze) served more monological discursive purposes and appeared mostly in the latest cycles of the negotiations. The results are discussed in light of current research-based framings of classroom discourse. The outcomes of the study imply that science teachers should be engaged in longitudinal professional development programs in which, through self-reflection, they may develop a pedagogical-discursive lens to monitor their discursive moves’ wide-ranging genres and accumulated distributions for coping with two mutually exclusive social languages.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Elementary Education, Faculty of Education, Istanbul Aydin University, Beşyol Mah. İnönü Cad. No: 38 Sefaköy-Küçükçekmece, Istanbul, Turkey

    Y. Soysal

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  1. Y. Soysal
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Correspondence to Y. Soysal.

Teacher Discursive Moves Coding Catalogue

Teacher Discursive Moves Coding Catalogue

Higher-order categories

Sample analytical codes

Teacher gives information and evaluates student-led ideas

Direct lecturing, logical expositions, verbal cloze, comprehension checks, cut-off, affirmation-cum-direct instruction

Teacher pools, summarises and consolidates student-led ideas

Summarises the finding from a particular experiment, recap on the activities of the previous lesson, selective summary, selection and modification of pupil’s responses

Teacher clarifies, elaborates, reformulates, embodies and probes student-led ideas

Asking for clarification, bring student knowledge into public view, pumping, expanding contexts of understanding

Teacher prompts students for monitoring selected and ignored student-led responses

Prompt articulation of a focal issue by a student or a students’ sayings, opinions, ideas, arguments, focus attention on a particular student response, driving towards the focal point, prompt students for monitoring what is happening in the discourse, encourage students to monitor their understanding of a classmate’s thinking, backgrounding: prompt students for monitoring what was happening in the discourse, processes, procedures, foregrounding: prompt students for monitoring what will be happening in the discourse, processes, procedures

Teacher conducts reflective discourse

Reflective-toss: throws the responsibility for thinking back to the student and other members of the class. Toss back: in place of an evaluation, teacher asks for students to comment on a student’s response, engage students in deciding, comparing, evaluating, judging, assessing methods, examples, instances, demonstrations, arguments, opinions defined by teacher or students, prompt students for evaluating proposed methods, results, findings, outcome, saying for themselves and others

Teacher models aspects of processes of science and reveals different modes of communication

Modelling and rehearsing aspects of processes, procedures, operations of science, modelling how a person controls the variables in an experiment, models how a person attain multivariable thinking, modelling how a person make reliable and valid measurements, stimulating multimodal thinking (e.g. verbal, visual, symbolic, logical-mathematical), using talk, diagrams, visual images, symbols, formulas and calculations

Teacher challenges student-led ideas and seeks for justified reasoning

Prompts for debating: is the discursive mode in which participants with different ideas challenge and respond to each other usually through a series of questions and answers. Prompt for negotiating: is contrasted with debating in that participants who were engaged in challenged-response dialogues finally negotiate new meaning to resolve a conflict or solve a problem, providing alternative points of views to challenge students’ arguments. Plays devil’s advocate: pointing out counter-arguments, pointing out contradictions, pointing out flaws in the argument, checks the presence or absence of student-led evidences, prompts for justifications, prompts for evidences, emphasises justification

Teacher creates an intellectually and emotionally comfortable classroom negotiation context

Responding with neutral restatements of the preceding student utterances, keeping neutrality, invoking silence to foster student thinking

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Soysal, Y. Determining the Mechanics of Classroom Discourse in Vygotskian Sense: Teacher Discursive Moves Reconsidered. Res Sci Educ 50, 1639–1663 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11165-018-9747-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11165-018-9747-2

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