How Chinese students participate in classroom dialogue with the advancement of new curriculum reform

1

ABSTRACT

This study aimed to show how high school students in China participate in classroom dialogue since the advancement of the new curriculum reforms. A coding instrument was developed, which accounted for apparent forms of participation and its quality (i.e., accuracy and cognitive level). There were 289 students involved and a total of 108 lessons were systematically observed. The findings revealed that teachers’ initiating and then students’ contributing was the main form of participation in whole-class dialogues. Much of the dialogues were related to course content and reviews of previously learned knowledge, while was concerned with students’ personal thoughts to a lesser extent. Students were likely to analyse problems and provide explanations, while generalization, speculation and uptakes were identified less frequently in their contributions. A specific account of participatory behaviours in dialogue of high school students in China was provided. With achievements and insufficiencies spotted, the findings should help in making improvements to the reforms in the future.

KEYWORDS:

• Classroom dialogue
• participatory forms
• participation quality
• observation instrument
• chinese new curriculum reforms

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1. In the manuscript, the meaning of “talk” is equivalent to “dialogue”. The two terms both emphasize the interactive process and verbal communications between teacher and students. The mixture of usages also appears in a number of published works, such as the studies by Mercer, Hennessy, and Warwick (2019)and Howe et al. (2019).

2. Figures merely illustrate the categories in which different groups of students show significantly different performances.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [grant number 61907017].

Notes on contributors

Yu Song

Yu Song acts as an associate professor in the School of Education, South China Normal University. She serves as the director of Artificial intelligence and Classroom Teaching Research Center, SCNU. Her research interests are in classroom dialogue and technology-mediated teaching and learning.