Patterns of oral Choice and Evaluation across secondary content areas

ABSTRACT

Our study focuses on Choice and Evaluation, two of Mohan's knowledge structures to uncover how teachers and students across content areas developed disciplinary knowledge through classroom talk. Participants included in-service teachers and their students in rural and urban secondary schools in the Eastern and Western US. Through Choice and Evaluation, we examined opportunities for students across four disciplines to build up their knowledge of content matter or field. Findings revealed that teachers of math and science built students’ field knowledge through classroom exploration, eliciting Evaluation in dialogic patterns involving Choice, while social studies and language arts teachers helped students implicitly use Choice/Evaluation through projects based on their previous experiences. The essential role of student background knowledge in enabling participation across different types of oral exchanges is shown. This study uncovers tendencies across classrooms and makes linguistically informed suggestions for teachers in the disciplines.

KEYWORDS:

• Teacher education
• classroom discourse
• language across content

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. All names used here are pseudonyms and do not necessarily reflect the cultural or ethnic heritage of those individuals.