Understanding linkage between teacher talk moves, discourse contexts and students’ talk productivity

ABSTRACT

Purpose

The relationship between teacher talk and students’ talk productivity is explored by two approaches: process-product,interpretive. Most studies used a process-product perspective by not considering the discursive compositions that may considerably modify the relations between a science teacher’s talk interventions and students’ talk productivity. In this study, the linkage between teacher talks, discursive compositions and students’ talk productivity were explored to present a holistic picture of the discourse and cognition relations.

Methods

A science teacher and his 16 6th grade students were the participants. Three aspects of classroom discourse were analysed: teacher talk moves, students cognitive contributions and discourse contexts. For the first two analyses, systematic observations were conducted by coding and quantifying the teacher’s and students’ utterances. For extracting the discursive compositions, an episode-based analysis was conducted..

Results

The teacher ensured the clarity in the classroom talks, maintained metacognitive activity, invited the students to evaluate their classmates’ opinions, challenged the students’ invalid claims, shared her authority for the symmetrical power allocation, and all these were found to be fostering the students’ talk productivity. Low cognitive productivity was observed when the teacher rejected the student responses. Interactive-dialogic verbal exchanges augmented the students’ talk productivity. Once the teacher pooled the ideas by constantly pressing the students to elaborate on them, their cognitive productivity pitched at the conception and abstraction levels. A critical but constructive discursive context was substantially scaffolding for deepening the students’ utterances’ intellectual sophistication.

Conclusions

It is concluded that discourse and cognition relations are more understandable when both analytical and holistic aspects are explored. When productive talk moves are associated with open-ended patterns of interactions, students’ intellectual productivity is fostered. However, it should be questioned whether science teachers hold a noticing to practice the regulators of the context-sensitive productive classroom talks.

KEYWORDS:

• Talk move
• discourse context
• talk productivity
• science teaching
• sociocultural discourse analysis

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1080/02635143.2021.2012648