El discurso expositivo en el aula. ¿Realmente comprenden los alumnos lo que sus profesores creen?

Resumen

En este artículo exploramos las formas de pensar y actuar de un grupo de profesores principiantes. Concretamente, estudiamos qué relación se establece entre lo que los profesores piensan, lo que explican en las aulas y lo que comprenden sus alumnos. A partir del estudio de su discurso expositivo hemos comprobado qué ideas tienen 5 profesores principiantes sobre la comprensión de sus explicaciones y si estas opiniones se corresponden con lo que realmente estaba ocurriendo en el aula. Después de estudiar los datos obtenidos podemos concluir que, en nuestro caso, la relación que se establece en relación con estas cuestiones es practicamente inexistente.

Abstract

The paper explores the way a group of beginner teachers think and act. Specifically, it studies the nature of the relationship between (i) teachers' beliefs on students' understanding, (ii) what they do in the classroom, and (iii) what pupils understand. On the basis of the content of teachers' expository discourse, we analysed five beginner teachers' ideas on students' comprehension of their classroom explanations, and whether these explanations corresponded to what actually took place in the classroom. From the data, it is concluded that the relation between these issues is practically nonexistent.

Extended Summary

The paper views teaching as a complex cognitive process. It puts forth the notion that there is a relationship between teachers' beliefs on students' understanding, how they act in the classroom, and students' performance. Thus, the aim of the study was to study the relationship between these factors by analysing the expository discourse of 5 beginner teachers attending a postgraduate course on educational skills.

To study the characteristics of teacher's expository discourse, a class imparted by each participant was recorded and transcribed. The contents were analysed following the procedure developed by Sánchez, Rosales, Cañedo & Conde (1994). This method enables us to determine how teachers construct or elaborate previous knowledge, how they introduce and develop new ideas, and how they evaluate students' understanding of information. Teachers were also interviewed and their opinions on which ideas they thought students had understood were analysed. Moreover, they were asked to set a hypothetical exam. Finally, students' comprehension was evaluate through two measures: a) the number of main ideas they recalled, and b) the accuracy of pupils' self-questions according to the different levels of importance of the ideas exposed.

Results show there is no relationship between the beginner teachers' classroom explanations, what they thought the students' had understood, and what students' actually understood. Although certain coherence was found between teachers' explanations, what they would have asked in an test, and what they thought the students' had understood, surprisingly no relationship was found between teachers' opinions of students' comprehension and what the latter had really understood. For example, teachers thought that students had understood the main ideas in their discourse, but students could recall less than half of these.

Our conclusions, at least for the present group of beginner teachers, is that they did no possess a clear idea of how comprehension processes work in the classroom. This has lead us to think that only on a few occasion beginner teachers actually know where their students are with respect to what they are explaining, and therefore rarely succeed in building a common knowledge with their students.

Palabras clave:

• Discurso
• comprensión
• conocimientos de los profesores principiantes

Keywords:

• Discourse
• comprehension
• beginner teachers' knowledge