The Seeds of Time: Why Classroom Dialogue Needs a Temporal Analysis

Abstract

The process of teaching and learning in school has a natural long-term trajectory and cannot be understood only as a series of discrete educational events. Classroom talk plays an important role in mediating this long-term process, and in this article I argue that more attention should be given to the temporal dimension of classroom dialogue, both empirically and theoretically, if we are to appreciate how children gain an education from their classroom experience. I explore this topic using data from recent applied, interventional research in United Kingdom primary schools and examine how classroom talk is used to represent past shared experience, carry ideas forward from one occasion to another, approach future activities, and achieve learning outcomes. The article ends with a discussion of the theoretical, methodological, and educational implications of making this kind of temporal analysis.

The data examples used in this article are from the project Language, Thinking and ICT in the Primary Curriculum, which was financed by Grant EDU/00169/G from the Nuffield Foundation. The research was carried out by Lyn Dawes, Steve Higgins, Claire Sams, Rupert Wegerif, and myself. The participation in this research of teachers and children in Milton Keynes schools, and the support of Milton Keyne Borough Council and the Nuffield Foundation, are acknowledged with thanks. I am extremely grateful for the constructive comments on earlier drafts of this article provided by Lyn Dawes, Judith Kleine Staarman, Karen Littleton, and Ingvill Rasmussen; and many thanks to Caroline Coffin, Janet Maybin, Karen Littleton, and Ian Wilkinson for providing valuable bibliographic resources and references for exploring the topic of temporality. The reviewers for the Journal of the Learning Sciences also helped the development of this article by providing very clear and useful comments.

Notes

The data examples used in this article are from the project Language, Thinking and ICT in the Primary Curriculum, which was financed by Grant EDU/00169/G from the Nuffield Foundation. The research was carried out by Lyn Dawes, Steve Higgins, Claire Sams, Rupert Wegerif, and myself. The participation in this research of teachers and children in Milton Keynes schools, and the support of Milton Keyne Borough Council and the Nuffield Foundation, are acknowledged with thanks. I am extremely grateful for the constructive comments on earlier drafts of this article provided by Lyn Dawes, Judith Kleine Staarman, Karen Littleton, and Ingvill Rasmussen; and many thanks to Caroline Coffin, Janet Maybin, Karen Littleton, and Ian Wilkinson for providing valuable bibliographic resources and references for exploring the topic of temporality. The reviewers for the Journal of the Learning Sciences also helped the development of this article by providing very clear and useful comments.

¹The transcripts used here were taken from video recordings of a series of lessons (each about 45 min long) that were videorecorded in one teacher's class in a primary school in southeast England. I used a very simple transcription format, in which speech is rendered as grammatical phrases and sentences, to represent the sense that I, as researcher with access to the raw data, made of what was said. Information about nonverbal aspects of communication judged pertinent to the analysis is included in a third column (or in parentheses). My judgement was that the inclusion of additional information at my disposal, such as length of pauses or other prosodic and contextual details, would be distracting to readers and irrelevant to the issues I am addressing.