Dialogic talk affords students opportunities to share ideas and co‐construct knowledge while developing various literacy skills such as perspective taking, text comprehension, and argumentative reasoning. In this study, we examine how seventh‐ and eighth‐grade students in four classrooms discuss a controversial topic about changing a National Football League team's controversial name and analyze their discursive roles using thematic content analysis. We provide dynamic profiles of student speakers, including those who take on primary, secondary, tertiary, and periphery roles within discussions. We also discuss how these roles shift and provide implications for teachers who engage students dialogically around controversial, yet essential, topics.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.