Dialogic/Authoritative Discourse and Modelling in a High School Teaching Sequence on Optics

Abstract

In this paper we aim to establish a link between two theoretical frames: modelling and its use in the design and analysis of scientific teaching sequences, and the communicative approaches as they alternate in classroom activities. In this case study, we follow the interactions between the teacher and a pair of students during an entire teaching sequence in Optics (grade 11). We focus on the way the teacher managed the dialogicity and the modelling processes in the classroom discourse. A qualitative analysis shows some difficulties in such an achievement, and their consequences on students’ meaning making.

Acknowledgement

This work was supported by CNPq and CAPES (Brazil), CNRS and INRP (France). The authors wish to express their gratitude to the reviewers and to Prof. Andrée Tiberghien (CNRS), Prof. Maria‐Pilar Jimenez‐Aleixandre (University of Santiago de Compostela) and to Prof. Robin Millar (University of York).

Notes

1. In the transcripts of the activities to be analyzed here, we numbered the turns of talk from the beginning of the activity. In the second column we indicated the speaker (T for the teacher, Nl for a student we could not identify, Cl for the whole class); in the third we indicated the transcription of the talk produced by the participants, and if necessary, the person addressed in the talk (if no indication is given, the addressee is the whole class); in the last column we gave indication of non verbal actions. In order to make the transcription simple, we adopted a simplified code for transcribing the oral language: we kept the full stop (.), the question mark (?) and the exclamation mark (!), without the usual parentheses, to indicate a stress in the intonation, or a shift in the tone indicating a question or an exclamation (these notations are thus inferences of researchers); a slash (/) indicates a small pause; when the pauses lasted longer, an approximate duration was indicated between parentheses (for example (2s)); brackets ([ ]) indicate simultaneous talk.