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Abstract
Although research has come to recognize the importance of studying classroom-based student–teacher discourse in science, the emphasis remains largely on teachers' abilities to ask questions and provide students with feedback, or on students' abilities to ask questions or engage in argumentative discourse. Consequently, little research has focused on the discourse elements relating to teacher–student discourse interactions. In this article, we argue for a shift of research attention toward describing what the teacher is responding to (Identification of student inquiry), the process of deciding how to respond (Interpretation—Evaluation of student inquiry), and how the teacher is responding (Response to student inquiry). We propose a new methodological approach for studying teacher discourse, which involves a framework we developed while analyzing 1,385 minutes of fifth grade, whole-class science conversations covering a 2-year period and facilitated by an experienced science teacher. Then, as a case in point, we applied our framework to the teacher discourse data of the study, aiming to show that the framework can be a useful tool for examining how a teacher supports students' inquiry.
Acknowledgements
The work reported in this article was partly supported by two research awards from the Cyprus Research Foundation, #ENISX/0603/09 and #ENISX/0505/44. We thank the reviewers and the Editors of IJSE for all their comments, reviews and suggestions for improving this article. We are grateful to Maria Santis for her helpful comments on the previous versions of the article.