Giving Children Control: Fourth Graders Initiate and Sustain Discussions After Teacher Read-alouds

Donoahue, Zoe

doi:10.4148/2470-6353.1251

Cited by 6 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 0 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…In this sort of discussion, which is entirely appropriate as a response to a work of literature (Donoahue, 1998), there is no expectation that the class will reach a consensual conclusion. However, there are many other curricular contexts in which the absence of progress toward an agreed conclusion-or at least toward a set of acceptable alternative conclusions -would be seen by most educators as a serious limitation to dialogue.…”

Section: Extending the Contexts And Forms Of Discussionmentioning

confidence: 95%

Dialogue in the Classroom

Wells¹,

Mejía-Arauz²

2006

Journal of the Learning Sciences

371

232

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

There is increasing agreement among those who study classrooms that learning is likely to be most effective when students are actively involved in the dialogic coconstruction of meaning about topics that are of significance to them. This article reports the results of an extended collaborative action research project in which teachers attempted to create the conditions for such dialogue by adopting an inquiry approach to the curriculum. A quantitative comparison between observations made early and late in the teachers' involvement in the project showed a number of significant changes in the characteristics of teacher-whole-class discourse, with a shift toward a more dialogic mode of interaction. Nevertheless, the initiation-response-follow-up (IRF) genre continued to be pervasive. Despite this, when the same observations were examined qualitatively, there was clear evidence of an increase over time in the teachers' adoption of a "dialogic stance." The article concludes with a consideration of the relationship between the choice of discourse formats and the enactment of a dialogic stance.

show abstract

Section: Extending the Contexts And Forms Of Discussionmentioning

confidence: 95%

Dialogue in the Classroom

Wells¹,

Mejía-Arauz²

2006

Journal of the Learning Sciences

371

232

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…In this way, over the six years of the project, a theoretical framework was developed that allowed systematic comparisons to be made between the individual teachers' inquiries and provided a common basis for individual and group presentations of our work at conferences and in publications (e.g. Donoahue, 1998;Hume, 1998;Shechter, 1998;Galbraith et al, 1997;Wells, 1999).…”

Section: Background To the Studymentioning

confidence: 99%

What's the use of 'triadic dialogue'?: an investigation of teacher-student interaction

Nassaji¹

2000

Applied Linguistics

410

302

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

1The fact that the spoken texts of classroom interaction -particularly those involving teacher with whole class -are co-constructed relatively smoothly, despite the number of participants involved, suggests that they are organized in terms of standard strategies, embodied in typical forms of discourse that have evolved for responding to recurring types of rhetorical situation (Miller, 1984;Kamberelis, 1995). That is to say that, like written texts, they can be thought of as being constructed according to one of a set of educational genre specifications. One such rhetorical structure, the ubiquitous 'triadic dialogue' (Lemke, 1990) (also known as the IRE or IRF sequence (Mehan, 1979;Sinclair & Coulthard, 1975), has attracted considerable attention in recent years, and has variously been seen as, on the one hand, essential for the co-construction of cultural knowledge (Heap, 1985;Newman et al., 1989) and, on the other, as antithetical to the educational goal of encouraging students' intellectual-discursive initiative and creativity (Lemke, 1990;Wood, 1992).Drawing on episodes of teacher-whole-class interaction collected during a collaborative action research project, this paper will show, however, that the same basic IRF structure can take a variety of forms and be recruited by teachers for a wide variety of functions, depending on the goal of the activity that the discourse serves to mediate and, in particular, on the use that is made of the followup move. ________________________________________ 2In his seminal writings on the dialogic nature of 'utterance ', Bakhtin (1986) pointed out that all utterances both respond to what has preceded and anticipate a further response. While this is true, it is also the case that, in speech, many utterances tend to be more oriented either to what preceded or to what will follow, as is the case with the relationship that holds between the members of an 'adjacency pair', such as 'question-answer' (Sacks, Schegloff, & Jefferson, 1974). On the other hand, not all conversational 'exchanges' are limited to two 'moves', and many are much longer.There are two main reasons for this.First, as Halliday (1984) has argued, there are two basic exchange-types: a) Demand -Give-inresponse and b) Give (unsolicited) -Accept. However, a third equally basic type is frequently created by the combination of the first two: c) Demand -Give-in-Response -Accept. Where information is the 'commodity' exchanged, this gives rise to the three-move exchange structure:Question -Answer -Acknowledgement (Halliday, 1984 In this structure, however, only one participant typically initiates the exchange -the teacher; and the teacher always has the right to provide the third move, often, as above, by evaluating the student's contribution for its conformity to what he or she considers to be a correct or acceptable response.These differential rights to moves in the exchange have often been discussed in terms of the power differential between teachers and students (e.g. Lemke, 1990), and there is no doubt t...

show abstract

“…On the other hand, there have been a number of reports in recent years that show that students from the early years of schooling onwards are quite capable of participating effectively in various genres of dialogue, if they Downloaded by [Universite De Paris 1] at 19:18 25 October 2012 are given the opportunity, including students learning a second or additional language. A key characteristic of most of these classrooms is the adoption of an inquiry orientation to curriculum, in which students engage in 'hands-on' investigations as part of curriculum units ranging from science (Gallas, 1995;Gibbons, 2002;Palincsar et al, 1998), maths (Cobb, 1995;Lampert et al, 1996), to literature (Davis, 2001;Donoahue, 1998;McMahon et al, 1997).…”

Section: The Need For Inquiry As Orientation To Curriculummentioning

confidence: 97%