Responsive and responsible teacher telling: an across time examination of classroom talk during whole group writing workshop minilessons

Abstract

This study of whole class minilesson talk adds to the literature on how teacher talk shapes student involvement with learning. Minilesson talk is commonly associated with monologic, authoritative teacher telling – but there are few empirical studies of minilesson talk. Our systematic examination of the types of talk within and across the 14 minilessons of a Writing Workshop instructional unit found that about three quarters of the time types of talk were interactive (that is, at least one student was interacting with the teacher) and about half the time types of talk involved uptake of student ideas. Data are part of a 2-year ethnographic case study in an urban second-grade classroom community in the US. We coded types of talk according to the Class of Communication Approach (Scott, Mortimer & Aguiar, 2006) utilising the topical episode as unit of analysis. We explicated type of talk patterning across minilesson, subunit and instructional unit levels, noted relations of types of talk patternings to instructional purposes, and generated an understanding of how talk practices functioned in terms of immediate purposes and as part of the instructional unit. Findings show particular types of talk were associated with particular content, and types of talk flowed in purposeful cumulative manner to support instructional purposes. This study is important because it illustrates that teachers can incorporate dialogic elements into an instructional practice that is often conceived as being primarily authoritative.

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