Initiation, Response, Follow-up and Beyond: Analyzing Dialogue Around Difficulty in a Tutorial Setting

Abstract

With the advent of Common Core-based assessments, and resulting concerns about academic achievement, more and more students may require the level of instructional intensity tutoring affords. The extent of knowledge regarding the discourse that occurs within the tutoring context is, however, limited. As a result, it is difficult to envision and implement a protocol that incorporates responsive tutor/tutee interaction. This article describes an analysis of discourse patterns that occur as a tutor responded to student difficulty. The study is framed using Bakhtin’s concept of dialogue—the ways in which interactions are influenced by the joint speaker/listener identity that is characteristic of interlocutors—and the way this played out in a dialogic instructional context. Excerpts from eight previous tutoring studies served as a foundation for the present research. The primary data source for the analysis was start-to-finish audio-recordings of 40 hours of instruction with two fourth grade readers. After preliminary open coding, overarching categories such as questioning, providing information, and demonstrating strategy use—and more detailed codes within these categories—were applied to the transcripts. Major findings demonstrated that: (a) the tutor’s moves were varied and balanced and differed somewhat from child to child, (b) some interactional sequences appeared more effective than others depending on the topic and child, and (c) interactions in this setting differed in important ways from those found in the research literature. I argue here that the dialogic characteristics of tutor/tutee interactions served the children involved and should serve as the basis for additional tutoring protocols.

Conceptual Framework on Language Teacher Cognition (LTC) in Classroom Interactions and The Facilitation of Students’ Speaking Skill at Sekolah Agama Rakyat (SAR) Schools

“…To compensate for the limited communication at the third round, some authors have suggested that the third-turn in this triadic IRF sequence, if carefully modified, could promote genuine interaction (Zaswita, 2022;Jaeger, 2019). Mortimer and Machado (2000) proposed that if the teacher's restricted evaluative feedback at the F-Move is extended by probing different styles of 'Follow-up' questions, it could elicit new thoughts and responses from the students, as they will be forced to participate in negotiated, genuine linguistic interactions.…”

An analytical instrument for coding and assessing argumentative dialogues in science teaching contexts

“…The need of grasping the interactional nature of the moves led Wells and Arauz (2006) to dividing the categories of questions, responses, and follow‐ups into specific types according to their interactional nature, function, and content. In a similar vein, Jaeger (2019) analyzed feedback moves based on their content, distinguishing between the categories of “moving on”, “question,” “information,” and “teach,” each including several dialogic moves (for instance, “question” comprehends requests of paraphrases, clarifications, or specification). Similarly, van Zee and Minstrell (1997) introduced a more complex analytical criterion, classifying teachers' questions based on the different interactional goals that they are used to pursue in a classroom—such as inviting the evaluation of alternatives or clarifying the meaning.…”

Mosaic Nature of Dialogue in Academic Tutoring

“…e.g. Fąka, 2007;Garlacz-Sobczyk, 2010;Jaeger, 2019). In listing the features of such a dialogue, one should start with the reflection made by J.…”