Differences between a teacher educator’s and prospective classroom teacher’s talk-based strategies for fostering academically productive classroom talk

ABSTRACT

The current study presents complex comparative classroom discourse analyses for understanding teacher educators’ and candidate teachers’ talk-based strategies for potentially fostering academically productive classroom talk. Two participants’ in-class teaching videos regarding talk move and interactional pattern typologies, as well as communicative approach orientations, were analysed. A multifaceted, comparative analysis was conducted to portray how and to what extent teacher educators and their students as candidate teachers enact different in-class practices surrounded by talk-based strategies in promoting intellectual activity. A systematic observation approach followed, including theory-laden and data-driven coding and quantifying the three interrelated aspects of the classroom talk for presumably promoting intellectual productivity. The educator used the talk moves more effectively than the candidate teacher to create an argumentative classroom setting, encouraging the students to comment on and enrich each other’s claims, encouraging the students to present reasonable arguments, and engaging the students in the metacognitive activity. The educator was also able to sustain more open-ended chains of interactions in addition to the interactive-dialogical communicative approach orientation compared to the candidate teacher. The qualitative and quantitative differences are discussed, and educational implications are presented, especially in teacher noticing.

KEYWORDS:

• Candidate teacher
• teacher educator
• talk move
• patterns of interaction
• communicative approach
• talk productivity

Introduction

The present study aims to investigate a candidate classroom teacher’s and her educator’s talk-based strategies to decide whether there were quantitative and qualitative nuances between them regarding the potentiality of the observed teacher-led talk for fostering the students’ academically productive classroom talk (APCT). The current study tries to develop an argument or pedagogical thinking tool to compare an experienced, research-oriented speaker (the teacher educator) and a novice and less experienced speaker (the candidate teacher) regarding their talk attempts and the potentiality of the attempts triggering the APCT. The current study takes a sociocultural theory perspective based on Vygotskian arguments (Vygotsky, 1978, 1981, 1987) regarding teaching and learning in the classroom through a language-based instructional tool such as the APCT. It is accepted herein that learning or sense-making is developed in two planes of classroom discourse (Vygotsky, 1978, 1981, 1987). In the intermental plane, the learning community, for instance, incorporates teachers and students, rehearse, argue, discuss, and legitimate alternative thinking and talking styles (Soysal, 2020). In this social plane of classroom talk, alternative or even competing viewpoints are declared, discussed, and legitimated for a mutually inclusive conceptual, epistemological, ontological, or axiological agreement. However, learning-driven development theorists (John-Steiner & Mahn, 1996; Mercer, 1995, 2000; Mercer, Hennessy, & Warwick, 2019; Vygotsky, 1978, 1981, 1987) assert that one step is also needed for a meaningful learning progression: the transformation of socially shared activities into internalised or individualised or privatised mental schemes as processes. Therefore, in the intramental plane, individuals intentionally select, adapt, or eliminate the talk-based contents through a metacognitive activity by making inferences about the distance between their existing and altered mental schemes for individual-based internalisations (John-Steiner & Mahn, 1996). In this manner, the APCT, as a language-based teaching and learning tool, connects the intermental and intramental planes, external or internal, individual and social (John-Steiner & Mahn, 1996). Thus, in the present study, the talk-based attempts of the participants were not seen as merely linguistic entities for communication in the classroom discourse; instead, these were considered as a sense-making tool as an embedded element of verbal exchanges during the constructing social languages of the participants favouring different thinking and talking systems about a phenomenon (Soysal & Radmard, 2018). In other words, the language is seen in the present study as a social carrier in connecting the intermental and intramental planes of development for the transformation of elementary mental functions into higher-order psychological processes through specific classroom talk pedagogies, such as the APCT (Soysal, 2020).

Lee and Kim (2016) stated that classroom talk is a fundamental tool to initiate, expand, and maintain conceptual discussions in a lesson. This claim is valid, especially in higher education (Soysal & Soysal, 2022a). Even though lesson design and instructional materials are core components, which are developed based on the curricular objectives by identifying big ideas of a topic to be taught, the teacher’s talk is also considerably determining how those pre-elements of instructional design work in the classroom (Soysal & Radmard, 2020). Lee and Kim (2016) indicated that orchestrating an academically productive classroom talk may not be a simple issue for prospective teachers or their educators. During a lesson, candidate teachers and their educators must manage incidents simultaneously (Herbst & Chazan, 2012). Due to the lack of in-class experience, candidate teachers may not use talk attempts to trigger and maintain intellectually productive verbal exchanges (Henning, McKeny, Foley, & Balong, 2014). Previous research stressed that one of the most explanatory factors predicting the talk quality of candidate teachers or teacher educators is inviting them to make data-based reflective comments on teaching practices (Soysal & Radmard, 2020). In the absence of explicit attributions to the features of the APCT, prospective teachers mostly tended to use their intuitive teaching theories to manage classroom talk (Edwards-Groves & Hoare, 2012). Lee and Kim (2016) and Soysal and Soysal (2022a) concluded that identifying the parameters of candidate teachers’ and their educators’ APCT has been uncharted territory.

Therefore, a communicative tool should be enhanced to clarify the qualitative and quantitative indicators of effective talk for the first-hand use of the teacher candidates and their educators. In this manner, Lefstein, Vedder-Weiss, and Segal (2020) concluded that the predominant focus of research and practical efforts in the ongoing education of (prospective) teachers revolves around highly structured training activities. Lefstein, Vedder-Weiss, and Segal (2020) and Zeichner (2005) advocate for a heightened emphasis on the informal but research-based dialogues ingrained in teachers’ everyday tasks, such as sustaining the APCT in the classroom, serving as avenues through which they glean insights into the essence of teaching and refine their job performances in terms of the APCT. Drawing upon existing theories and studies on teachers’ workplace conversations and learning, Lefstein, Vedder-Weiss, and Segal (2020) propose (a) an assertion that our field should dedicate more deliberate and organised attention to teacher on-the-job discourse; (b) the provision of a cohesive conceptual framework for “pedagogically productive” teacher conversations; and (c) the illumination of critical avenues for research and the challenges associated with the realisation of, for instance, APCT in the classroom. Therefore, the current study proposes a thinking tool for a comparative and communicative analysis of candidates’ and their educators’ classroom discourse attempts for the APCT.

Edwards-Groves (2018) indicated the crucial role of effective talk in the productive preparation of candidate classroom teachers (CCTs). The CCTs should be able to harness the power of their in-class talks to increase the students’ potential intellectual outcomes (Edwards-Groves, 2018). In doing so, both CCTs and their trainers must understand how talk works and impacts student learning in substantially nuanced ways (Edwards-Groves, 2018). However, due to the lack of scholarly knowledge, the CCTs have difficulty capturing their instructional roles for fostering academically productive classroom dialoguing and philosophising (Edwards-Groves, 2018). Some educators proposed that CCTs develop meta-awareness regarding certain aspects of classroom talk to sustain academically productive verbal exchanges (e.g. Soysal & Soysal, 2022a). Even though it has been gaining importance to train CCTs as good designers and implementers of the APCT, Edwards-Groves (2018) stressed that in the faculty of education, it is a rare practice to focus on the generative norms of the classroom talk to guide CCTs to enact the APCT. Edwards-Groves (2018) recommended that teacher educators press CCTs to develop a version of pedagogic noticing about how dialogue can be organised or orchestrated for the students’ intellectual activity. The CCTs should hold a version of overt pedagogic consciousness (Soysal & Radmard, 2020) regarding designing and operating APCT in their practicum course as a fundamental professional development paves for the CCTs (Edwards-Groves, 2018). Based on these, the current study sees prospective teachers as reflective practitioners who can utilise research-based thinking and communicating tools developed herein for re-considering their, for instance, talk-based strategies regarding launching and maintaining the APCT in the classroom. In this manner, Schön (1983, 1987) defines a reflective practitioner is an individual who actively engages in a thoughtful and deliberate process of self-examination and critical analysis of their professional practice. Prospective teachers as reflective practitioners extend beyond their routine tasks and involve a continuous exploration of experiences, decisions, and outcomes in the professional context. Prospective teachers as reflective practitioners seek to deepen their understanding, enhance their skills, and improve their effectiveness by systematically reflecting on their actions and the underlying assumptions that guide them. Ultimately, the journey of a reflective practitioner involves an ongoing commitment to self-examination, a willingness to learn from successes and challenges, and a dedication to continuous improvement. For this pedagogically oriented self-examination, prospective teachers will need to utilise communicative thinking tools, one of which is proposed and tested in the present study for making explicit attributions to and reflections on their works, such as fostering the APCT in the classroom.

In the current study, an explicit and pedagogically oriented thinking tool is developed to discern the CCTs’ and their educators’ talk moves, patterns of interaction, and communicative approaches that can be considered to predict the degree of the student-led intellectual productivity (Khong, Saito, & Gillies, 2019; Mercer, Hennessy, & Warwick, 2019). A comparative, systematic analysis of the talk attempts of a candidate teacher (the CT) and her educator was presented to determine to what extent their in-class talk initiations are differentiated in launching the APCT. This can be justified in terms of different aspects of classroom discourse theories. First, a tangible linkage exists between teacher talk and teaching efficacy (Edwards-Groves & Hoare, 2012; Soysal & Soysal, 2022a). Second, the problem of enhancing the CCTs’ talk-based strategies for ensuring the APCT has been a global concern (Howe & Abedin, 2013). Third, beyond the first and second justification, Love (2009) indicated that CCTs’ in-class talk for enhancing the APCT is seen as a taken-for-granted (a default practice) or an under-examined field of inquiry. Expectedly, few courses are dedicated to training the CCTs to guide them in acquiring instructional ways of dialogic teaching for fostering their future students’ APCT (Soysal & Soysal, 2022a). Consequently, the current study presents a holistic picture or methodological thinking tool by comparing two different parties’ talk-based teaching actions to develop an argument for reform-based teacher preparation programmes. The current study would move the field forward because documenting a phenomenon to be explained is the first step in theory building (Borsboom, van der Maas, Dalege, Kievit, & Haig, 2021).

Conceptual tools considered in the present study

Theory-laden and research-based norms of the APCT

The status of the APCT has been gaining pedagogical attention and popularity in many countries’ education systems, mainly including the United States, Hong Kong, Israel, Greece, Australia, Türkiye, China, and Canada. For example, in the United States context, where most studies were conducted, Nussbaum, Dove, and Putney (2023) used Michaels and O’Connor’s (2015) work on the APCT. They suggested incorporating critical questions as a vital subset of productive talk moves to enhance rigour and purpose in classroom argumentation, recognising the importance of various talk moves for constructing arguments, fostering active listening, and sustaining discussions. They concluded that there was a concrete association between the APCT and cognition alignments, such as well-supported or justified argument construction of the participants. In a Hong Kong study, Tao and Chen (2023) presented state-of-the-art coding schemes and analytic indicators of dialogic teaching as an associative element of the APCT. In most of the empirical studies they reviewed, it was found that the APCT is a core indicator of dialogic in-class teaching activities, and based on this, they demonstrated the advantages of dialogic teaching in enhancing classroom interactions, stimulating active participation in discussions among students, and fostering the development of students’ learning capacities and academic accomplishments. In Australia, Gillies (2019) concluded that the APCT should be seen as a discursively oriented tool to foster critical and creative problem-solving skills, contributing to heightened cognitive understanding. In Israel, for example, Bouton and Asterhan (2023) found a relationship between the APCT and student-led participant structures in classroom talks. They first reported distinct features in the network (e.g. participation in classroom talks) models of low-achieving and high-achieving students. More straightforward talk moves, diminished connectivity, and repetitive loops mark the network model for low-achieving students. Conversely, the network model for high-achieving students displays greater interconnectedness, with the most vital connections forming around codes indicative of reasoned argumentation and a critical stance. This patterning summarises that the APCT may be seen as a highly demanding task for especially low-achieving students. In addition, Gutentag, Orner, and Asterhan (2022) reported that the use of the APCT was less prevalent in remote online classes during the pandemic in the Israeli context. They concluded that the APCT was notably linked to more interactive instructional formats, such as whole-classroom discussions, peer group work, and questioning, but not with traditional frontal teaching and individual task completion. They also showed that the teachers exhibiting higher levels of teaching self-efficacy, autonomous orientations, and empathy tended to promote the APCT more in online remote teaching, and the student’s experiences with APCT in online remote learning were associated with heightened learning motivation and engagement even in the pandemic conditions. In the Turkish context, there was only one study conducted by Soysal and Soysal (2022b) where the different norms of the APCT were investigated. They reported nine distinct types of teacher questions fostering the APCT among the students. Among these, six types – specifically, communicating, monitoring-framing, critiquing, legitimating, evidencing, and modelling – were explicitly associated with indicators of the ACPT. On the other hand, the remaining three question types – observe-compare-predict, concluding and naming, and maintaining – contributed to the variance in productive classroom talk questions but were not directly linked to its indicators. The critiquing, legitimating, and modelling questions, which were expected to enhance talk productivity, were infrequently posed. Instead, the predominant trend in classroom discourse involved a prevalence of communicating questions (Soysal, 2020).

The literature on the APCT was systematically reviewed to establish its norms/indicators. In the present study, a theory-laden framework was developed by exploring the related literature to characterise the foundations of the APCT. The most recent reviews and research studies on the APCT (e.g. Khong, Saito, & Gillies, 2019; Mercer, Hennessy, & Warwick, 2019; Soysal, 2019; Soysal & Soysal, 2022a) were mainly synthesised. Four indicators of the APCT were synthesised based on the previous research: (i) talk should be clear and intelligible, (ii) talk should contain critiques, (iii) talk should include accountability and justification, and (iv) talk should incorporate intense discursively oriented metacognitive activity.

The first norm of the APCT is about the eliciting talk (Farrelly & Sinwongsuwat, 2021), where students are requested to probe, clarify, or revoice their statements to sustain the in-class communicative rationality. This norm implies the necessity of healthy and unfolding communication between the members of classroom discourse. To exceed the boundaries of an in-class discussion, all individuals must first capture the background meanings of others’ opinions.

The second norm is about challenging moments in the classroom discourse. Pupils are more engaged in classroom discussions when an argument, case, opinion, or explanation system is conceptually, epistemologically, ontologically, or axiologically contrary to their existing mental models (Hammer & Manz, 2019). This implies a version of in-class problem-solving incorporating an ill-structured or well-structured version of the conceptual dilemma to be resolved. The problem-solving process can be launched by the teacher’s discrepant questions, demonstrations, or given cases: “can people commit crimes for a greater or universal purpose, such as saving a human life?”. Reznitskaya (2012) and Reznitskaya and Gregory (2013) stressed within the framework of dialogic teaching as an associative element of the APCT that the collaborative engagement of both teachers and students involves a shared exploration of a topic, with shared responsibility and control over crucial aspects of classroom discourse. Reznitskaya (2012) and Reznitskaya and Gregory (2013) contended that teachers can employ various responsive dialogic teaching strategies to elicit “critical but constructive” discussions (e.g. Reznitskaya & Glina, 2013) from students within an APCT atmosphere, encompassing maintaining the intellectual rigour in the classroom inquiry, expanding, and intensifying thought processes by locating challenging perspectives as alternative explanation styles for a given topic. When students are confronted with a conflicting case, they will use intuitive, emotional, or rational reasoning to deal with the contradiction. This, expectedly, will result in placing alternative points of view in the classroom’s public plane (intermental). Then, the class members must negotiate, defend, or dispute alternative thinking and talking systems. However, the class members should be accountable for idea sharing, defending, or rebutting. This is more about the third norm of the APCT by which the students should, at least, be accountable for the three aspects of classroom discourse: accountable to other minds, accountable to disciplinary norms of logical reasoning, and accountable to cumulative science knowledge (Alexander, 2010).

For a version of the versatile accountable talk, evidence-based reasoning is vital. The students should support their claims with observational/experiential data. However, presenting data may not ensure an ideal justification. In addition, the students have to explain why a piece of data at hand supports their claim’s credibility. Beyond evidence-based reasoning, the students must present ample and appropriate data to support their claims. For presenting relevant data, there must be a reasoning process on the data at hand; in other words, by logical-disciplinary reasoning, the students must transform data into evidence (Cavagnetto, Hand, & Premo, 2020). This means that the students must explain why, in which contexts, and to what extent the data at hand supports their claims. This is the data coordination with the claim to produce an argument or reasoned discourse (Cavagnetto, Hand, & Premo, 2020).

The APCT contains another dimension, metadiscourse: talk about the talk or discursively oriented cognition about cognition (Tang, 2017). Students should be engaged in a version of metacognitive activity in which they monitor both structural (expected) and emergent (unexpected) qualities of classroom discourse. The students should be involved in a classroom discourse where the flow of their cognitive activity should be synchronised with the teacher’s pedagogic-cognitive streaming. This contends that the students must monitor or be aware of what contents are discussed, focused on, featured, or eliminated in a specific moment of the classroom conversation.

How can the APCT be made visible in the classroom discourse?

In the present study, one of the biggest concerns was determining how to make the APCT visible in the participants’ utterances. In doing so, three qualities of the classroom discourse (talk moves, patterns of interaction, communicative approaches) were functionalised to compare the CTs’ and the teacher educators’ talk attempts in grounding the norms of the APCT mentioned above.

Teacher talk moves

The impact of teacher talk moves on students’ learning outcomes is a crucial aspect of educational research. How teachers engage in verbal interactions, pose questions, provide explanations, and guide discussions significantly influences students’ learning experiences and achievements. It is well known that skilful use of specific talk moves such as challenging, legitimating, and evaluating can stimulate critical thinking, deepen understanding, and promote active engagement (Davies & Esling, 2020; Soysal, 2023a; Soysal & Soysal, 2022a). It was found that probing and clarifying talk moves improve understanding, as students receive the necessary information and clarification to grasp new material (Edmondson & Choudhry, 2018). Teacher talk moves can be used for modelling and demonstration by which students acquire a visual or practical understanding, supporting skill development and concept comprehension (Buma & Nyamupangedengu, 2020). It was systematically explored that teacher-eld talk moves can be used for feedback and guidance by which students can correct errors, refine their approaches, and gain insights for improvement (Soysal, 2023b). It was directly observed that teacher discourse moves are crucially needed for the facilitation of specific versions of classroom discourse where students may foster collaborative learning, diverse perspectives, and the development of communication skills (Wang, Tao, & Chen, 2024). With their talk moves, teachers may create the ethos of mutual respect by establishing an environment conducive to open communication where students feel more comfortable engaging in discussions, contributing to a positive and inclusive learning atmosphere (Soysal, 2023a; Boyd & Rubin, 2006). Previous research showed that teacher talk moves are perfect tools for scaffolding, where there is a gradual reduction of support as students gain proficiency. Teacher-led talk-based scaffolding facilitates independent learning by providing appropriate levels of assistance (Hu, Chiu, Yelland, & Liang, 2023). Lastly, it was found that teacher-led talk moves can be used as a discursive vehicle to promote self-reflection on learning experiences. For instance, it was found that meta-discourse or meta-talk moves can deepen understanding and metacognitive development as students assess their learning (Soysal & Soysal, 2023). All these studies confirm that the teacher-led talk moves can be used as an explicit indicator of the APCT.

In the current study, it is hypothesised that the participants’ talk move types may have paramount importance in deciding to what extent their talk attempts have the potential to trigger the APCT (Michaels & O’Connor, 2015). Talk moves can be monologically or dialogically oriented, are mostly displayed as questions, and incorporate interactional and identity-related features and intellectual consequences on the side of students (Michaels & O’Connor, 2015). Talk moves can initiate in-class discussions, review and summarise contents, arouse students’ interest, or assess mastery of concepts (Kayima & Jakobsen, 2020). Teachers’ analytical talk move types can be systematically observed to estimate their potential to boost the APCT (Soysal & Soysal, 2022a). The previous research on classroom discourse showed that a teacher’s specific talk moves might have more potential and instrumentality for triggering the APCT than other talk moves (e.g. Soysal, 2019). The current study presents a systematic matching between the participants’ talk move types and the potentiality of the APCT deduced from the talk move types of the participants.

Interactional patterns

Teachers’ talk-based attempts’ potential for triggering the APCT can be estimated by considering the triadic dialogue named Initiate-Response-Evaluation (IRE), which was proposed to fragment a teacher-student dialogue (Mehan, 1979; Sinclair & Coulthard, 1975). The teacher starts the conversation (Initiate), then a student responds (R), and finally, the teacher determines whether the response is acceptable (E). The existence of intense IRE-based interactional patterns in the classroom implies less cognitive activity on the side of students since they would not have speaking time to analyse and legitimate their peers’ claims that are mainly evaluated by the primary knower (the teacher) of the classroom (Chin, 2006). On the other hand, a teacher may prefer to change the third move in the triadic dialogue. The classical third move can replace a follow-up or constructive feedback (IRF; F: follow-up question or feedback). A follow-up question may be functionalised differently, mainly used for elaborating or clarifying a student’s response. When this is the instructional case, the student’s cognitive productivity can be boosted (Chin, 2007). For instance, the IRFRFRFRF … RF sequence displays a classroom dialogue where the students’ ideas are not simply verified/falsified but are deepened by continuous elicitations. In the presence of a cycle displayed as IRFRFRFRF … For instance, in RF, students will have the chance to comment on their peers’ claims, showing one of the highest standards of the APCT (Chin, 2007). When a student criticises one another’s claim’s plausibility, s/he has to establish some logical criteria to achieve the evaluation. Both aspects of the interactional patterns were systematically observed to make inferences regarding the participants’ talk-based potentiality for stimulating the APCT.

Communicative approaches

Mortimer and Scott (2003) proposed four classes of communicative approaches in the secondary science education context.

Non-interactive-monological: No verbal interaction sequence occurs between the teacher and students. The teacher highlights a single form of explanation.

Interactive-monological: There are verbal interactions between the teacher and students, but the teacher emphasises a single form of explanation.

Noninteractive-dialogical: No verbal interaction sequence occurs between the teacher and students. The teacher highlights multiple explanations about the topic and presents them to the student’s evaluation.

Interactive-dialogical: There is a series of verbal interactions between the teacher and students, and the teacher highlights more than one form of explanation about the topic and presents it for the students’ evaluation.

Two background dimensions can be considered to make inferences about the APCT in the above-listed four classes of the communicative approach. First is the existence of the social interaction between the teacher and students. The model displays the social-verbal interaction as “interactive” or “non-interactive”. However, the social-verbal exchanges of ideas may not be a complete indicator of the APCT. In addition, alternative or competing ways of understanding and explaining a natural/social phenomenon are required to make a communicative activity more generative regarding academic outcomes (Ford, 2012). Mortimer and Scott (2003) added two other dimensions: monologic (authoritative) and dialogic (multivoicedness). Mortimer and Scott (2003) stressed that the four dimensions should be placed in the classroom discourse for two instructional aims that are substantially related to the APCT. First, the teachers must provide a place for the students’ voices that can differ from the school science content the teacher wants to teach. Second, the teacher must introduce the school science content as a different thinking system. Therefore, the teacher should be open to alternative viewpoints as proposed mainly by the students (dialogical dimension) and act responsibly for the curricular contents requiring academic rigour in the verbal exchanges (monological dimension). There should be a harmony/rhythm of classroom discourse where dialogic and monologic classes of the communicative approach should be placed in the appropriate time and context of the discussions to foster the APCT (Soysal, 2020).

This discourse-based thinking tool, communicative approaches, has effectively illustrated students’ engagement in classroom talks and discussions. For instance, Soysal (2023b) explored teachers’ error-handling strategies in four classes of communicative approaches and reported that these strategies can be classified into monologic, declarative, and dialectical dimensions of classroom discourse. This confirms that when the teachers used four classes of communicative approaches in a balanced and harmonic manner, there was more dialogic space for adaptive error handling that may have opened the paves for the APCT in the classroom. In addition, Yildirim, Uçak, and Genç (2023) compared the occurrences of communicative approaches when elementary and middle school students engaged in discussions about socio-scientific issues and canonical science knowledge. They concluded that three participatory teachers enacted more interactive-dialogic discourses for socioscientific issues compared to conventional science subjects. Teaching socioscientific issues through open-ended communicative approaches such as interactive-dialogic enhanced the students’ engagement, encouraging active participation, comfort in expressing opinions, and justification of viewpoints. Yildirim, Uçak, and Genç (2023) reported that this approach allowed the teachers to gain insights into their students’ perspectives, fostering an equitable contribution role in the classroom. In an interventional study conducted by Kıryak, Çalık, and Özmen (2024), the results demonstrated noteworthy enhancements in students’ scientific vocabulary and communicative interactions. Kıryak, Çalık, and Özmen (2024) contended that open and balanced chains of communicative interactions improved the students’ vocabulary use and integration capacity within a specific science topic such as cell division. These and other studies (e.g. Lehesvuori, Lehtinen, Hämäläinen, Maunuksela, & Koskinen, 2023; Soysal & Yilmaz-Tuzun, 2021) on the effectiveness of four classes of communicative approaches show that open-ended and balanced communicative approaches may enhance students’ productive disciplinary engagement in school science as a core indicator of the APCT. Based on the above-summarised studies, three research questions are addressed in the present study:

How did the talk moves employed by the CT and the educator differ in their presumed ability to stimulate APCT?

Were there distinct orientations in the patterns of interaction employed by the CT and the teacher educator to foster APCT?

In what differentiating ways did the CT and teacher educator facilitate communicative approach types to enhance the talk-based environment for triggering APCT?

Methods

Research design, context, and participant selection

The current study was conducted as a multiple case study, including a diversification strategy (Heale & Twycross, 2018) (e.g. how different teachers create different teaching conditions in which talk-based strategies are varied to increase or decrease the visibility of the APCT). Two diversification strategies were considered herein: (i) having ample and appropriate in-class observations, (ii) having lessons that were conducted in varying teaching settings in terms of, for instance, contents to be taught, classroom size, students’ developmental levels, students’ demographics, etc. to explore the lesson-specific or lesson-transcendental visibilities of the APCT in the sense of diversifying talk-based strategies of the participants.

The use of an opportunistic approach in participant selection (Saunders & Townsend, 2018) for this study was driven by the necessity to capture a substantial amount of classroom talk for an in-depth analysis of talk-based strategies. The primary criterion guiding the selection process was the level of engagement in classroom discourse between the teacher and students. The decision to employ an opportunistic approach was influenced by the recognition that a higher volume of classroom talk would provide a richer and more comprehensive verbal data corpus, facilitating a more robust comparative analysis. In other words, the study aimed to explore and understand talk-based strategies for the APCT, and a prerequisite for this exploration was the availability of a sufficient amount of relevant verbal data. By focusing on the participants with a higher frequency of classroom talk, the researchers ensured an ample pool of conversational interactions to analyse. This methodological choice enhanced the validity and reliability of the study by maximising the potential for identifying patterns, nuances, and variations in talk-based strategies employed by the participants. In summary, the opportunistic approach to the participant selection was a deliberate and justified choice based on the imperative of securing an adequate verbal data corpus for a meaningful and thorough comparative analysis of talk-based strategies within the classroom setting regarding the APCT. The CT (female, 23 years old) was selected from a larger group consisting of 16 members who were enrolled in the practicum course that was conducted during the 2021–2022 academic year in the spring semester with a collaboration of a foundation-supported university located in the Marmara Region, Türkiye, and a state primary school of a cosmopolitan city.

During the practicum course, the prospective teachers had video-stimulated pedagogical feedback opportunities to enhance their instructional strategies. After lesson planning via concept mapping and designing with the collaboration of the participant educator who held academic proficiency in classroom discourse, science education, and teacher development (male; 34 years old; 5 years of intense experience of teaching at the university level, four years of intense experience on the professional development of in-service teachers, and specialised particularly in argumentative classroom discourse via argument-based inquiry), the prospective teachers structured pedagogical scene staging for a version of the learner-centred teaching even though there were some practice-based gaps between the teaching planning and in-class implementations of them.

This study was a naturalistic multi-case inquiry with less chance of generalising findings to a broader population. In this small-scale prototype study, the purpose was not to compose transcendental and overarching generalisations about a comparative analysis regarding the different discourse-based insights of the APCT. However, it should be noted that researchers can always generalise their findings in a naturalistic inquiry like the present one. To explain, in a qualitative inquiry, not the researcher but the external readers or consumers of research products may transfer the outcomes of a study to their contexts (Creswell & Poth, 2018). To achieve this, the data collection, analysis, interpretation reporting, and context of the study should be crystal clear to possible external readers who will be able to transfer or generalise the thinking tools, methods, and findings to their contexts (Creswell & Poth, 2018). Based on this qualitatively oriented methodical logic, the researchers provided in-depth information about various aspects (e.g. participant selection, data gathering strategies, data analysis steps, etc.) of this naturalistic inquiry to open the paves for the presumable external reader-based generalisations.

Then, the teacher educator gathered and examined audio-visual data from the group’s in-class implementations to provide after-lesson pedagogic feedback to the prospective teachers. The feedback sessions were conducted as focused group interviews where theory-laden (e.g. theories of teaching, learning, and cognitive development) and verbalised data-driven interpretations of the video-based records were carried out by the participant educator and 16 prospective teachers. Specific video records were selected from a pool to examine since most prospective teachers operated fewer talk strategies or permitted less dialogic space for verbal exchanges in the lessons. Therefore, after an initial checking of a number of the video records of the prospective teachers’ in-class implementations, one candidate teacher’s lessons were selected for systematic analysis since there were countless verbal interactions and idea exchanges.

Data collection

The primary data source of the current study was composed of video recording. However, some initial methodological precautions were taken to gather crystallised data. As mentioned, the participant educator provided video-stimulated pedagogic feedback to the participant CT. The participants (the educator and the CT) were in the same classroom in some lessons. The CT initiated the lesson, and if needed, the educator was involved in the lesson and maintained the classroom talks to model, for instance, how the streaming of the talk can be regulated based upon the student-led information embedded in their responses or how the students’ invalid or incomplete claims can be used generatively to boost the conceptual deepness of the lessons. The CT was, therefore, pedagogically supported in the initial lessons (n = 4, 153 mins). Then, the CT conducted the lessons independently during the nine consecutive lessons (368 mins). The initial collaborations facilitated the CT since she seemed more volunteered, motivated, and mentally/emotionally prepared to display her capacity to launch and sustain classroom conversations. As a note, the educator was accustomed to being filmed in the lessons; however, it was not valid for the CT. Therefore, initial warm-up sessions were instrumental in eliminating the deviating incidents in the presence of intense video recording with the cameras in different classroom places.

The video records were taken from the participants’ classrooms nine times (752 minutes). The initial four lessons were video-recorded at the third-grade level, and the remaining was at the fourth-grade level. The participants conducted the lessons in the same classroom since student characteristics could fluctuate in a teacher’s talk-based attempts to foster the APCT. At the 3^rd and 4th grade levels, the participants considered different aspects of the same curricular content. All lessons included three phases: designing, acting, and reflecting (detailed below). The practicum group constructed concept maps based on the design phase’s curricular objectives. Then, sub-ideas and core ideas of the lessons were developed. Based on them, the lesson plans were designed as instructional scripts by which the candidate teachers presented their hypothetical pedagogical scene staging based on the topics/concepts to be taught. For instance, the candidate teachers considered the 3^rd and 4^th graders’ existing or prior conceptions, alternatives or misconceptions, or invalid understanding of a social or natural phenomenon. In the acting phase, the candidate teachers’ primary concern and the triggering point was to make the students’ understanding public and maintain a learner-centred lesson. The candidate teachers were continuously guided to find instructional ways of elaborating the students’ utterances. The candidate teachers mainly adapted three intertwined cycles in starting, maintaining, and finalising the lessons: engaging students in social negotiations of meanings where a cognitive conflict perspective tried to be taken; taking an interactional stance or creating a dialogic space for competing theories proposed by the students, prompting the students to have a mutually agreeable and justifiable argument regarding the concept under discussion. The following contents were considered in the observed lessons.

Life Knowledge Lesson: life in the school, life in nature, etc., (3rd grade), Mathematics Lesson: natural numbers, mathematical data collection and interpretation, addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, geometric objects and shapes, weighing, measuring time, liquids, area, etc. (3rd & 4th grades),

Primary Science Lesson: planets, five senses, force and motion, substances, light, and sound as energy, living things, electric vehicles (3rd & 4th grades), Social Knowledge Lesson: individual and society, culture and heritage, people, places and environments, science, technology and society, production, distribution, and consumption, active citizenship (4th grade).

For ethical considerations, school management, parents of the students, and all teaching staff employed in the school were informed by the consent forms, including the requirements and actions of the video-recording processes and the purpose and profits of the current research.

Data analysis

Five steps of data analysis described below were followed.

Determining the unit of analysis: Hennessy, Howe, Mercer, and Vrikki (2020) suggested identifying the granularity of verbal data analysis. In the current study, two types of the unit of analysis were considered. A sentence-based unit of analysis was used for the talk move and patterns of interaction analyses. Each analytical instructional move of the participants was externalised as a sentence, phrase, or question and coded. An episode-based analysis was adapted to identify the orientations in the communicative approaches. Within a lesson, there were two initiations of the conversations. First, the participants used a nuclear initiation to trigger the lessons by indicating the generic aim of the lesson (e.g. “Yes, today, we will be discussing an exciting topic! Justice and equality! Similarities and differences of them!”). Then, the teachers used bound initiations to branch the content indicated in the initial moments of the classroom discourse by the nuclear initiation. Each teacher-led attempt to re-initiate the discussion to elaborate the conversations was accepted as a bound initiation. Thus, these moments ended a sub-topical episode and marked the start of the next sub-topical episode. The complete transcription of a lesson was chunked, and each chunking was homogenous in terms of the content or sub-content under consideration. Conceptual transitions between the sub-topical episodes indicated determining the episodes’ communicative approach orientation.

Systematic analysis of the talk moves: This step aimed to categorise which types of talk moves were enacted by the participants. In science and mathematics education literature, there are instrumental and generic teacher talk move coding catalogues (e.g. Bansal, 2018). These were reviewed and adapted for the current study. Classroom discourse analysts should be able to use the existing tools by appropriating them for specific research-based aims (Mercer, Hennessy, & Warwick, 2019). Thus, the nature and structure of the verbal data collected in the current study and talk move coding catalogues developed in previous studies were synthesised to develop a dynamic catalogue (see Table 1) that best fits the present study.

Table 1. Talk move coding catalogue.

Category	Code	Description and example utterance	Associations with the norms of the APCT
Transferring and evaluating (TRE)	Soft evaluation	The teacher provides implicit hints to imply an answer’s acceptability or rejection.	No research-based association with a version or norm of the APCT.
	Explicit affirmation	The teacher directly accepts the student’s response.
	Explicit rejection	The teacher immediately and directly rejects the student’s response.
	Affirmation-cum-direct instruction	The teacher accepts and confirms the student’s response and expands it by uttering more information.
	Logical expositions	The teacher provides knowledge pieces based on the school science social languages.
	Verbal cloze	The teacher stops his/her uttering and asks students to complete the incomplete sentence.
Process skills (PROS)	Observation	The teacher requests students to observe an in-class occurrence regarding the subject under consideration.	No research-based association with a version or norm of the APCT.
	Projection	The teacher asks the students to make inferences regarding the subject under consideration.
	Comparison	The teacher guides the students to make comparisons of two ideas, objects, cases, etc.
Communicating (COM)	Probing	The teacher requests the students to deliver more information regarding a provided response.	Research-based association with a norm of the APCT (e.g. Norm-1: talk should be clear and intelligible) (e.g. Alexander, 2006; Michaels et al., 2008)
	Clarifying	The teacher asks students to make their utterances more apprehensible.
	Re-voicing	The teacher guides the students to reformulate their responses to make them more understandable.
	Concretizing	The teacher presses the students to give tangible examples to make their responses clear and intelligible.
Monitoring (MON)	Metadiscourse	The teacher guides the students to re-ponder the concepts or procedures.	Research-based association with a norm of the APCT (e.g. Norm-4: talk should incorporate intense discursively oriented metacognitive activity) (e.g. Soysal, 2021; Tang, 2017)
	Focusing	The teacher gathers the students’ attention to a specific response.
	Engaging (on the fly)	The teacher creates an on-moment noticing for the students.
	Engaging (prospective)	The teacher declares about the near future of the classroom discourse flow.
	Engaging (retrospective)	The teacher reminds the history of classroom discussions to the students.
	Summarizing	The teacher sums up the critical points of the students’ responses for their use.
	Selecting	The teacher features a specific student-led response while eliminating others.
	Mind change	The teacher forces the students to ponder whether they have changed their initial ideas.
Negotiating (NEGO)	Critiquing	The teacher invites the students to judge a response given by another student.	Research-based association with a norm of the APCT (e.g. Norm-3: talk should include accountability and justification) (e.g. Conner et al., 2014a; 2014b; Reznitskaya & Gregory, 2013)
	Commenting on	The teacher guides the students to comment on an idea the teacher proposes.
	Interpreting	The teacher asks the students to make sense of and evaluate a case given by the teacher.
Discrepant (DISC)	Cognitive conflict	The teacher poses discrepant questions, cases, ideas etc., to create a disequilibrium in the students’ existing mental schemes.	Research-based association with a norm of the APCT (e.g. Norm-2: talk should contain critiques) (e.g. Jadallah et al., 2011; Soysal & Yilmaz-Tuzun, 2021)
	Praising	The teacher praises the students for presenting a counterargument or rebuttal based on a previously given student-led response.
	Inconsistency	The teacher identifies the internal or external inconsistency between two responses that occurred at two different time frames of classroom talks.
Justification (JUS)	Evidencing	The teacher demands concrete evidence from the students to support their baseless claims.	Research-based association with a norm of the APCT (e.g. Norm-3: talk should include accountability and justification) (e.g. Conner et al., 2014a; 2014b; Reznitskaya & Gregory, 2013)
	Appropriating	The teacher requests the students to provide relevant evidence to support their claims.
	Frequency	The teacher guides the students to provide more than a piece of evidence to justify their claims.
	Praising evidencing	The teacher praises the students providing ample and relevant evidence for supporting their claims.
Concluding (CONC)	Labelling	The teacher asks the students to provide summarising recaps of the considered ideas in the lesson.	No research-based association with a version or norm of the APCT.
	Conclusive remarks	The teacher requests the students to draw inferences by considering salient arguments that emerged in the classroom talks.
Organising (ORG)	Re-positioning	The teacher asks the students to re-locate their bodies to see and respond to their friends.	No research-based association with a version or norm of the APCT.
	Active listening	The teacher promotes a classroom environment where students must listen and attend to their classmates’ articulations.
	Comfortable	The teacher maintains intellectual classroom settings where the students are free to utter their intuitive or subjective ideas.
	Maladaptive	The teacher develops a classroom management strategy to deal with maladaptive student behaviour.

As seen in Table 1, the developed catalogue consists of nine higher categories characterised by several sub-indicators. Three researchers trained themselves to assign codes for each talk move of the participants. The participants’ initial three lessons were analysed together with three coders. The remaining six lessons were analysed independently by each coder. Intercoder reliabilities were reported three times (Cohen’s kappa: first = 0.61; second = 0.73; third: 0.89). There were particular problems in assigning codes within the DISC and NEGO categories, and persuasive discussions between the coders mostly resolved these.

Identifying the patterns of interaction: In this step, a sentence-based analysis was conducted. Based on the previous research on identifying the patterns of interaction in the classroom discourse, three possibilities within a typical triadic dialogue were considered to assign a code for the third move preferences of the participants.

IRE: initiate-response-evaluate

IREx: initiate-response-follow up an explanation

IRF: initiate-response-follow up questioning

Two experts in the classroom discourse analysis determined the streaming of the interaction pattern observed in the participants’ lessons. Intercoder reliability was checked twice (Cohen’s kappa: first = 0.99; second = 0.99).

Orientations of the communicative approaches: Mortimer and Scott (2003) developed an analytical framework to discern a sub-topical episode’s communicative orientation from another. Four classes of communicative approaches can occur within a classroom discourse: non-interactive-monological, interactive-monological, non-interactive-dialogical, and interactive-dialogical. Each sub-topical episode was first scanned to determine whether verbal exchanges were made between the teacher and students. If not, the episode was coded as non-interactive-authoritative. Second, based on the flow, nature, and structure of the verbal exchanges, the epistemic orientation of the sub-topical episode was determined. Multivoicedness and univocality were explored in the dialogues. If the participants dominated a single point of view even in the presence of alternative student-led propositions, the sub-topical episode was coded as interactive-authoritative. On the other hand, if the participants welcomed the student-led views even though they were invalid for the context of the sub-topical episode or incorporated a misunderstanding, the communicative orientation of the sub-topical episode was coded as interactive-dialogic. Three researchers with research-based classroom discourse experience determined the sub-topical episodes’ communicative orientations. For three times, inter-coder reliability was checked (Cohen’s kappa: first = 0.78; second = 0.98; third: 1.0).

Quantifying, comparing, and hypothesising: The last data analysis phase was quantifying and comparing the talk patterns in the participants’ lessons. Each observed talk move, interactional pattern, and communicative orientation type were quantified to identify the participants’ talk-based attempts’ potentiality in triggering the APCT. Based on the quantified data, theory-based and data-driven hypotheses were developed regarding where participants’ classrooms were more dedicated to the APCT. For instance, as seen in Table 1, based on the outcomes of the previous studies on the APCT, the observed talk moves were re-categorised to decide whether they have the potential to foster an aspect of the APCT.

Trustworthiness

A member-checking strategy, accepted as the most critical strategy for establishing credibility (Hayashi, Abib, & Hoppen, 2019), was carried out. The researcher solicited the participants’ comments on the plausibility of the findings and interpretations. The member-checking process, implemented as a short focus group interview (40 minutes), was considered a secondary or complementary/compensatory data source (Hayashi, Abib, & Hoppen, 2019). In the member-checking interview, which was stimulated by the video records, the possible reasons for the participants’ quantitative/qualitative differences/similarities between the talk-based attempts of the participants to boost the APCT were grasped from their lens. During the member-checking interviews, the participants were stimulated to ponder the differences/similarities regarding their talk-based strategies in promoting the APCT. A two-page preliminary result report was presented to the participants to capture their experience-based perceptions of the conclusions and interpretations deduced by the researcher. The participants presented different interpretations to augment the accuracy of the account the researcher introduced. The participants were permitted to decide how well the ongoing verbal data analysis and representation of the norms of the APCT within their talk-based tactics included their experiences in the lessons they conducted. The researcher was at the school site that permitted taking field jottings and memos. The researcher continuously searched for field-based decisions on what was salient to the study. Third, the researcher had a peer review process in which external audits who were familiar with the research or the phenomenon explored (e.g. classroom discourse analysis, the APCT) (Hayashi, Abib, & Hoppen, 2019). This was to ensure higher interrater reliability during the coding processes. The external audits played the devil’s advocate role in keeping the researcher honest by asking critical, constructive questions for more credible data analysis and hypothesising.

Findings

As seen in Figure 1, the participants who operated the talk moves with the same diversity enacted nine types of talk moves. Figure 1 also shows that there may be significant differences between the educators’ and the CTs’ talk move typologies in quantity. First, transferring and evaluating moves (TRE, see Table 1) were primarily observed in the CT’s classroom (n = 17.8%). The higher frequency of the TRE moves implies a more teacher-governed classroom atmosphere.

Figure 1. The differences between the enacted talk moves.

As seen in Table 2 (e.g. turn-13, turn-15), even though the CT enacted mostly implicit or soft evaluations of the student’s responses or tended to avoid the direct rejections or affirmations (Figure 2, f_evaluate = 2.8%), she presented abstract ideas (e.g. see Table 2, turn-27) by delivering school science knowledge to the students (see Figure 2, f_explain = 15%). On the other hand, in the educator’s classroom, there were very few (n = 1.2%) talk attempts to check or evaluate the students’ responses. This implies that the epistemic authority was the CT in the lessons. Of course, as quantified, there were intense talk initiations on the side of the students in the CT’s lessons (n = 58.8%). However, the primary knower of the presented ideas was mostly the CT (e.g. Table 2, the intensity of the explicit affirmations of the student responses).

Figure 2. The differences between the observed patterns of interaction.

Table 2. An elaborated excerpt from a lesson of the candidate teacher (main theme: conscious consumer).

Turn	Speaker	Sequence*	Utterance	Talk move type
1	T	IN	During the day, for example, I can look at some people’s behaviours and say that this person is conscious or unconscious. What could be the reason for this? Do you feel this way sometimes too?	Opening questions
2	All	R	No …	–
3	T	IR	For example, what comes to mind when you think of consciousness?	Opening question
4	S1	R	A smart and knowledgeable person.	–
5	T	FQ/I	Does anyone agree with your friend’s opinion?	Negotiating (commenting on)
6	S11	R	No …	–
7	T	FQ/I	Why?	Communicating (probing)
8	S11	R	Conscious people have flaws too!	–
9	T	FQ/I	Don’t you think a conscious person would be more sparing?	Communicating (probing)
10	S3	R	Yes … Right.	–
11	T	FQ/I	Why do you agree with me?	Communicating (probing)
12	S3	R	Because conscious implies thrifty.	–
13	T	E/I	Yes. What else?	Explicit affirmation
14	S9	R	A person who does not waste money.	–
15	T	E/I	Pretty good example. Anything else?	Explicit affirmation
16	S21	R	For example, let’s say I have a computer.	–
17	T	–	Please, but I can’t hear your friend! (The teacher was shouting)	Organising (maladaptive)
18	S21	R	For example, let’s say I have a computer. Then I want another one even though I don’t need it.	–
19	T	FQ/E/I	So, she spends money inconsistently. Good. And you?	Communicating (re-voicing)/Explicit affirmation
20	S3	R	For example, the unconscious consumer… For example, he buys something in the first place he sees it. But the other is searching. For example, the conscious consumer asks someone else.	–
21	T	E/I	OK! What else?	Explicit affirmation
22	S12	R	The conscious consumer makes purchases according to his plan and the list.	–
23	T	E/EX/I	For example, I always create a list when I go shopping! Yes, you?	Explicit affirmation/Logical expositions
24	S15	R	For me, the conscious consumer first makes a list. List of “needs” and “wants”. Ranks in order of importance. And the conscious consumer knows where to buy the cheapest and best quality.	–
25	T	E/I	OK. You are quite right. Anything else?	Explicit affirmation
26	S8	R	For example, the unconscious first consider their wishes. For example, s/he does not know his/her needs. For example, if s/he sees something beautiful, s/he immediately buys it. But s/he doesn’t need it.	–
27	T	E/EX/I	Super answer! For example, sometimes it can be like this: something is on sale. But I don’t need it. But I still buy. Why, because it’s on sale. So, do I need it? No! Now you can answer.	Explicit affirmation/Affirmation-cum-direct instruction
28	S4	R	For example, conscious consumers shop according to their budget.	–
29	T	E/EX/I	Yes. The budget is also very important. For example, I can calculate first and then spend. Yes, you?	Explicit affirmation/Logical expositions
30	T	IB	All right. For example, suppose I am a conscious consumer. What should I pay attention to in a product I will buy as a conscious consumer?	Re-opening question

*T: Teacher; S1: The first student uttering a response; I: Initiation; I_N: Nuclear initiation; I_N: Nuclear re-initiation; I_B: Bound initiation; R: Response; E: Evaluation; E_X: Explanation; FQ: Follow-up questioning.

The students also had more speaking time in the educator’s lessons. However, the negotiating (NEGO) moves were more apparent in the educators’ lessons (n = 14.3%) compared to the CTs’ lessons (n = 1.2%). The educator seemed to create argumentative discourse to prompt the students to explore and comment on their peers’ claims (see Table 3, e.g. turn-9, turn-19, and turn-21). More epistemic authority was allocated in the educators’ lessons compared to the CTs’ lessons. This implies that there was more potentiality in the educator’s classroom than in the CT’s lessons in launching the APCT. In other words, the reasoning in the students’ talks was more visible in the educator’s lessons (see Table 3, e.g. turn-4: the S11’s response, turn-8: the S3’s response, or turn-18: the S7’s response).

Table 3. An elaborated excerpt from a lesson of the teacher educator (main theme: justice and equality).

Turn	Speaker	Sequence*	Utterance	Talk move type
1	T	IN	What do we see here now? Who wants to summarise this for me?	Opening demonstration
2	S18	R	Now they are not equal. We can give them another box or two to make them even. But it wouldn’t be fair because we cannot give equal boxes to all.	–
3	T	FQ/I	But then it is unfair. We don’t give everyone an equal number of boxes. What do you think of this idea?	Discrepant (cognitive conflict)
4	S11	R	No, you misunderstood it. This is special discrimination. You misunderstood. If you give the same number of boxes to a child human, a baby human, and an adult human, they will not be able to watch the football match. You need to understand that equality and justice are not the same.	–
5	T	FQ/I	Then let’s only give place to women and children on the municipal buses, not to men. Just let them sit. Isn’t that special discrimination?	Discrepant (cognitive conflict)
6	S11	R	No. It’s not like that.	–
7	T	FQ/I	Then I misunderstood you. Which part of what you said did I misunderstand?	Communicating (clarifying)
8	S3	R	What I mean is about respect. A child cannot see through the wall without buying more than one box. Then he will not be respected. This is special discrimination.	–
9	T	FQ/I	I understand you very well, but I’m very curious what your friends think about our discussion right now?	Negotiating (critiquing)
10	S4	R	Also, in the photo, you just showed. For example, an elephant was asked to climb a tree. A monkey was also asked to climb a tree. There is no equality here. Equality of opportunity …	–
11	T	FQ/I	Could you please rehearse the equality of______?	Monitoring (focusing)
12	S4	R	Equality of opportunity …	–
13	T	FQ/I	Has anyone heard of such a concept before?	Monitoring (focusing)
14	S4	R	So, everyone should be equal according to their situation. In other words, the same opportunities are given to those tall and those short. But these possibilities do not reflect their conditions.	–
15	T	(IB)/FQ/I	Alice, then a question for you! I am curious about Alice’s answer first. Actually, I’m curious about all of your answers. But first I would like to hear Alice’s answer. Which do you think is more important: equality or justice?	Process skills (comparison)
	S9	R	Of course, justice is more important than equality. Both are important, but I think justice is more important.	–
16	T	FQ/I	Can anyone explain to me which one is more important and why?	Justification (evidencing)
Long-lasting silence (more than 5 secs)
17	T	IB	Let me help you. For example, let’s think like this. Let’s at least try. What can’t be without which?	Process skills (projection)
18	S7	R	Like this, let’s put people without arms, eyes, or ears to an exam with the same questions and equal duration. There is equality here. Same questions, same time. It would not be fair, though.	–
19	T	FQ/I	Your friend gave a rather interesting example.//What would you say if I told you to consider this example and evaluate his answer?	Monitoring (focusing)//Negotiating (critiquing)
20	S15	R	For example, there is equality in this picture. But this is unjust equality.	–
21	T	FQ/I	Do you think there is such a concept as unjust equality? Do you think we can build a just world without equality?	Negotiating (critiquing)

*T: Teacher; S1: The first student uttering a response; I: Initiation; I_N: Nuclear initiation; I_N: Nuclear re-initiation; I_B: Bound initiation; R: Response; E: Evaluation; E_X: Explanation; FQ: Follow-up questioning.

Both participants seemed to enact the process skills (PROS) moves similarly. About one-tenth of the participants’ observed talk moves (Figure 1) were devoted to encouraging the students to operate a version of the basic process skills such as compare, observe, predict, etc. There was no significant quantitative difference regarding the PROS moves between the participants. Additionally, as illustrated in Table 1, the PROS moves theoretically lack a direct connection to the norms of the APCT.

The communicating moves (COM) were mainly used more frequently in the lessons of the CT (55.3%) (Table 2) than the educator (38.7%). This shows more eliciting and clarifying talks in the CT’s classroom. The educator held more experience than the CT regarding the students’ background meanings, such as preconceptions, misconceptions, or invalid or incomplete claims. Thus, the educator might display fewer COM moves than the CT since he already knows the students’ mental schemes about a topic under consideration. Consequently, the CT could use the COM moves effectively to deepen the discussions as a fundamental way of the APCT.

None of the observed talk moves of the CT were examples of the MON moves. However, in the educators’ lessons, at least one-tenth of the talk moves (Figure 1) were dedicated to triggering a version of the students’ metacognitive activity. The monitoring moves (MON) are primarily related to a specific norm of the APCT, as a talk should incorporate intense discursively oriented metacognitive activity. The MON moves functionalised to promote the students’ conscious awareness of the classroom incidents, either cognitive/conceptual or behavioural (e.g. see Table 3; turn-11, turn-13, and turn-19). When considering the concrete link between metacognitive activity and conversational productivity, there would be less room for the CT students to engage in the APCT due to the absence of the MON moves.

Both participants adapted a different event perspective in the lessons, evident in their DISC moves. However, there were more intellectually demanding or cognitively conflicting moves in the educator’s lessons (Figure 1, 14.7%) than in the lessons of the CT (4.3%). Conceptual inconsistencies were mainly captured and represented in the students’ evaluations in the educator’s lessons as a paramount norm of the APCT (e.g. see Table 3; turn-3, turn-5). In addition, there was a delayed conceptual agreement in the educator’s lessons since he seemed to press the students to think and talk in new ways regarding the phenomenon under consideration (e.g. see Table 3; turn-5). However, in the CT’s lessons, the conceptual agreements were reached rapidly without intensively enacted DISC moves.

In both participants’ lessons, ample, one-shot student-led claims were invalid or incomplete to a certain extent. Thus, the participants had to operate talk-based strategies to force the students to develop evidence-based propositions (Table 1, the JUS moves). Even though there were ample instances of the student-led baseless claims in the CT’s lessons (e.g. Table 2, turn-8: the S11’s claim), she did not prefer to press the students for delivering justified reasoning (n = 0.9%), which was more apparent in the classroom of the educator (n = 9%) (e.g. Table 3, turn-16). Consequently, there were fewer signs of the APCT in the CT’s lessons to encourage the students to generate reasonable arguments.

The organisational moves were only observed in the CT’s classroom, where she tried to deal with conceptual and managerial issues (n = 10.5%). As observed, the CT invited the students to listen actively to each member’s verbalisations. In addition, the CT tried to handle the students’ maladaptive behaviours, such as mostly raising hands before idea sharing, as the students tended to raise their hands even though one of their friends was speaking (e.g. see Table 2, turn-17). The CT seemed to perceive such behaviour as a managerial issue since the students seemed to wait impatiently for their talk instead of taking their classmates’ ideas seriously through active listening. Even though the same or similar student-led, slightly maladaptive behaviours happened in the educator’s classroom, he did not attempt to use any strategy to cope with them.

Figure 2 presents the observed patterns of interaction tendencies of the participants. As seen, the participants tended to abstain from affirming or confirming the students’ responses based on the canonical science knowledge. However, there were substantial differences in preferring the follow-up explanations between the participants as the CT seemed to engage in direct lecturing by delivering logical expositions to the students (e.g. see Table 2, turn-23, turn-27, and turn-29). In other words, after pooling several student responses, the CT felt herself to make summaries by mainly featuring the school science content.

The participants enacted the follow-up questions intensively (n_educator = 98.8%; n_candidate = 82.2%). As systematically observed, the participants’ follow-up questions were mainly contingent upon the contents of the students’ responses. However, the current study claimed that the typologies of the follow-up questions, not their quantities, seemed to be more determining the possibility of the visibility of the APCT. As hypothetically and theoretically accepted, five of the observed talk move typologies (i.e. the COM, MON, NEGO, DISC, and JUS) seemed more related to the norms of the APCT (see Table 1 for the related literature). The quantitative distribution of these five talk moves differed considerably between the participants’ lessons. First and foremost, the educator allocated 87% (see Figure 1: [COM% + MON% + NEGO% + DISC% + JUS%] = 87.0) of his talk moves for triggering a version of the APCT. The CT also devoted 61.6% of her talk moves to initiating an aspect of the APCT. Secondly, and more importantly, the COM moves dominated the CT’s talk move typology distribution (n_COM = 55.3%). This contends that only 6.3% of the talk moves of the CT were dedicated to the MON, NEGO, DISC, or JUS attempts that are more connected to the norms of the APCT. It should be stated that we did not compare the CONC category among participants for two reasons. Firstly, talk moves in this category were notably infrequent in the participants’ lessons (refer to Figure 1). Additionally, these talk moves are not explicitly connected to the norms and indicators of the APCT (refer to Table 1).

Figure 3 represents the communicative approaches adopted by the participants. More sub-topical episodes were in the CT’s lessons regarding the noninteractive-authoritative dimension. She took a monologic orientation since there was no verbal interaction between her and the students, as she attributed to a single point of view that was presented by direct lecturing sessions displayed by the TRE moves (see Figure 1). Most of the communicative approaches observed by the participants were accumulated in the interactive-authoritative zone (see Figure 3). Both participants’ verbal exchanges with the students were primarily centralised in the lessons. However, for the educator, a more homogenous distribution of the dialogic (multiple voices or explanation systems) and monologic (single voices, canonical science knowledge) sub-topical episodes was observed (n_IA = 58.8%; n_ID = 40.4%). This implies that the educator tried to manage the lessons by considering the students’ alternative voices in addition to the normative school science social languages. In other words, the educator tried to sustain a version of harmony/rhythm of classroom talks, one of the most salient norms of the APCT. It can be assumed that this might happen under the specific talk moves enacted by the educator, such as the NEGO, DISC, or JUS, that were most frequent in the educator’s lessons compared to the CT.

Figure 3. The differences between the occurred communicative approaches.

On the other hand, the distribution of the dialogic (non-authoritative) and monologic (authoritative) sub-topical episodes was in lack of harmony in the CT’s lessons (n_IA = 75.7%; n_ID = 14.7%), where monologicness was the featured characteristic of her lessons. Thus, it can be assumed that there might be less dialogic space in the lessons conducted by the CT, which might decrease the possibility of the occurrence of the APCT in her lessons. As seen in Figure 2, the CT tended to prefer delivering logical expositions (e.g. see Table 2, turn-23; turn-27, and turn-29) reflecting a version of the school science social languages’ contents to the students in addition to displaying an increased number of the TRE talk moves that might be resulted in a lower-order probability of the APCT.

Discussion

The current study concludes that there may be significant differences between a teacher CT’s and her educator’s talk-based attempts to encourage the APCT potentially. It was observed herein that there might be structural (the talk move typology) and contextual differences (the patterns of interaction and communicative approaches) between the participants to increase the possibility of the APCT.

University-based lessons and practicum courses causing talk-based gaps

One of the most critical questions that should be asked based on the present study’s general outcomes is why there are differences between the qualities of the participants’ talks, presumably encouraging the APCT. Beyond, the current study interrogates that even though the teacher educator was a better implementer of the APCT, he could not share and transfer his skills with the candidate teacher, who was observed as a less skilful implementer of the APCT. This dichotomy is concretised in the present study since even though there was close pedagogic contact and civic relations with the prospective teacher, the educator seemed to have hurdles in introducing and sharing his talk-based capacity for promoting the APCT. In the current study, the teacher educator had countless opportunities to observe and criticise his in-class talk-based implementations. However, this was not a case of attributions to in-class talk-based implementations in the CT’s preparation programme, as she had little or no opportunity to make informed pedagogic decisions about her talk attempts’ potential influences on the occurrence of the APCT. The contents and designs of the university-based pedagogically oriented courses and practicum processes can explain these conflicts.

First and foremost, Ell and Grudnoff (2013), Anthony, Hunter, and Hunter (2015), and Aitken, Sinnema, and Meyer (2013) stressed that teacher candidates should be trained to be inquiring professionals who can reflect upon their in-class talk-based attempts through critical and data-based evaluations. These can be handled in university-based courses, especially micro-teaching and practicum courses, to promote talk-based strategies of CCTs regarding the APCT. The current study shows the need to provide rigorous, analytical, and data-based pedagogically oriented talk-based feedback to candidate teachers since they may not hold an “a priori” professional teacher noticing (Rabin, 2020) regarding their talk-based attempts’ quality and capacity in triggering the APCT. In this context, Anthony, Hunter, and Hunter (2015) discussed that especially candidate teachers need to examine their lessons. Their pedagogic examinations must include talk moves by attaching the evidence from the research to the in-class learning rehearsals to reduce the gap between their planning of the school tasks and teaching/learning experiences. However, in the Turkish teacher training context, the practicum course in which the candidate teachers are mainly observed and take superficial pedagogic feedback on their preliminary naturalistic performances has been mostly underestimated (Gunel & Tanriverdi, 2014). The present study concretises the same problem since, in the absence of a rigorous and explicit exploration of the classroom discourse’s instrumentality in terms of presumably fostering the APCT, a critical and constructive reflective practitioner is synonymous with the candidate teacher in the new era of teacher preparation (Tiainen, Korkeamäki, & Dreher, 2018), cannot be trained.

In the Turkish context, the micro-teaching perspective (Erdemir & Yeşilçınar, 2021) can be considered an appropriate tool to promote CCTs’ instructional noticing and vision regarding accurate implementation of the APCT in the classroom. However, even though the micro-teaching perspective has been accepted as a superior tool before practicum as a simulation in initial teacher education to encourage candidate teachers to engage in reflective practices (Fischetti, Ledger, Lynch, & Donnelly, 2022), the micro-teaching lesson in the Turkish context has only a two-hour place where there would be no dialogical spaces between the candidate and educator to consider and discuss in-depth talk-based issues hindering, for instance, APCT. It is well known that the micro-teaching perspective can be used as a reflective journey for CCTs (Karakaş & Yükselir, 2021). Moreover, reflective practicum experiences for candidate classroom teachers are crucial for their professional development and growth (Brantley-Dias, Puvirajah, & Dias, 2021). These experiences provide opportunities for CCTs to apply theoretical knowledge in real classroom settings, learn from practical challenges, and refine their teaching skills. These require considerably specific implementations designed and regulated by school-based and university-based mentors for training CCTs as reflective practitioners in terms of better implementers of the APCT (Brantley-Dias, Puvirajah, & Dias, 2021). For instance, observation and analysis can be the starting point where CCTs are provided opportunities to observe experienced teachers or teacher educators.

However, for carefully designed and intentionally implemented observation and analysis of CCTs, school-based and university-based mentors should be better implementers of specific talk-based pedagogical strategies such as the APCT. In other words, there should be an internal pedagogical consistency between the school-based and university-based mentors’ approaches to classroom talks in promoting the APCT. This is a crucial aspect of preservice teacher training to establish convincing and consistent lines of arguments generated in faculty-based and school-based contexts to present the theory and practice of the APCT in a complementary, compensatory, and consistent manner (Cochran-Smith et al., 2015). However, this might not be the case for the present study. To justify, as systematically observed, the CT displayed more teacher-steered talk-based attempts with the students than the educator’s talk-based strategies for fostering the APCT. For instance, the TRE moves (see Table 2) were used mainly by the CT, in addition to the higher preference for a close-ended third move (e.g. evaluate, explain; see Figure 2) or more authoritative communicative approaches (see Figure 3). Indeed, within the triad of the practicum course (the CT, the school-based mentor teacher, and the university-based supervisor), the CT had opportunities to learn about reform-based pedagogy from authentic classroom-based experiences. During the member checking interview, the CT frequently indicated that the school-based mentor teacher had a traditional teaching orientation, such as teaching-by-telling.

My mentor (school-based) is a very good person. He provided us with opportunities to do activities in his classroom. However, whenever I question a fact with students in the classroom, he always asks, “Well, where will this discussion lead?” He is right, and sometimes, when I deal with very open-ended topics with my students, the lesson can end without concluding results. Nevertheless, he does not discuss any subject with the students. There is even a special video program; through it, the lessons become more visual, but this time, it is the video, not the teacher, who teaches the topic. However, the university told us we needed to discuss and deepen the students’ ideas. But I guess this class might not be the place for it.

Cochran-Smith et al. (2015) stressed that with rare exceptions, the educative field experiences of candidate teachers do not have a social constructivist character to create open-ended learning opportunities. As observed in the current study, a more teacher-steered (monologically oriented) character of the CT’s talk-based attempts might be due to the pedagogic inconsistency between the school-based mentor teacher and the educator. Within the triad of the practicum course, one of the most damaging aspects can be the inconsistencies regarding the pedagogical-epistemological belief systems and practices between the school-based mentor teacher and university-based supervisor. As the CT was bombarded with countless classroom events in the lessons she managed, there might be uncertainty (Cochran-Smith et al., 2015) on her side when deciding which version of the instructional scene staging should be adapted and featured. As seen in the above-inserted quote from the CT, she defined a persistent tension between the mentors’ pedagogical beliefs and practices of in-class teaching. Overall, the CT concluded that the classroom in which she tried to maintain discussion-based lessons was not a proper place to reach an instructional aim that was injected into the faculty of education. Teacher educators contend that persistent tensions between a teacher education programme and cooperative schools may cause conceptual and practical conflicts that may disrupt candidate teachers’ learning about how to teach (Moussay, Flavier, Zimmermann, & Méard, 2011). The current study implies that at the classroom talk level, the mentioned conflict between the faculty and school may inhibit the CT from gaining basic skills of orchestrating the classroom conversation for the sake of the APCT.

As a conclusion based on the above-stated points, it may be implied that the practicum courses should go beyond just training prospective teachers, and these can be seen as a site to invite school-based mentor teachers to engage in re-consider their existing pedagogical knowledge base and practices (Parker, Zenkov, & Glaser, 2021). School-based mentor teachers may have various and countless experiences with teaching; however, it may not ensure incorporating the APCT as a modernistic or state-of-the-art approach for dialogical teaching in their instructional agenda. It is well known that faculty-school collaborations have unique aims by playing a vital role in training prospective teachers and undertaking the professional development processes of school-based teacher mentors (Parker, Zenkov, & Glaser, 2021). These collaborations bridge the gap between theoretical knowledge gained in university programmes and the practical skills needed in real classroom settings to provide internally consistent training support to CCTs (Nesje & Lejonberg, 2022). Therefore, not the practicum courses but the practicum processes should be seen as an opportunistic professional training and development outlet for all stakeholders, such as school-based mentor teachers who may re-consider, improve, or, if needed, revise or change their existing talk-based and dialogically oriented pedagogical-epistemological beliefs and practices, regarding, for instance, the APCT.

Integrated subject matter and pedagogical knowledge for grounding the norms of the APCT in the classroom

As systematically observed, the educator used the DISC and NEGO moves to make the students’ misconceptions public and discussable in the social plane in the lessons. In contrast, the CT rarely used these moves compared to the educator. One of the possible reasons for the rare uses of the DISC moves by the CT could be the subject matter knowledge as an indicator of years of experience of teacher educators (Cochran-Smith, Grudnoff, Orland-Barak, & Smith, 2020). As systematically observed and exemplified herein, the educator seemed to be able to use the student-led information (e.g. the thematic contents of the utterances led by the students during discussions) more generatively to open the paves for the academic rigour in the lessons as an indicator of the APCT (see Table 3, e.g. turn-3 or turn-5). Therefore, it can be inferred that it was not only about the integrated subject matter knowledge but also the educator’s sophisticated pedagogical content knowledge in promoting classroom discourse regarding the norms of the APCT. It is well established that the knowledge and cognition of a teacher regarding students’ pre-understanding and existing mental schemes is a fundamental component of his/her pedagogical content knowledge (Kind, 2009). Therefore, the teacher educator might be able to use the norms of the APCT compared to the candidate teacher since he already developed a sophisticated and integrated pedagogical content knowledge as a result of years of experience incorporating talk-based pedagogical-discursive tactics how and in what ways he deals with the alternative or even unrelated students responses, which may decontextualize (Scott, Mortimer, & Aguiar, 2006) the flow of classroom discourse that may deviate the occurrences of the APCT. Based on his integrated pedagogical content knowledge, in terms of effectively using the norms of the APCT, the teacher educator seemed to recontextualize (Scott, Mortimer, & Aguiar, 2006) the discussion flow in the lessons by coping with students’ pre-understanding to persuade them there may be alternative explanation systems (or thinking and talking styles) for the phenomenon under consideration in the lessons as a core indicator of the APCTs (Michaels & O’Connor, 2015).

In other words, the educator seemed to have a more holistic and integrated subject matter knowledge as an associative element of his pedagogical content knowledge to detect and deal with the errors or alternatives embedded in the students’ responses. Beyond the pedagogic terms, the educator seemed to hold a version of the knowledge base about the students’ understanding, prior knowledge, conceptions, misconceptions, etc., regarding the topic under consideration (Cochran-Smith et al., 2015). Thus, although the participants were taught the same contents in the lessons, the educator could detect and handle the students’ alternative, invalid or incomplete understanding through the DISC moves. Indeed, timely and contextually appropriate DISC moves seemed to create a classroom setting for philosophising ideas (e.g. see Table 3; from turn-3 to turn-10) as the greatest reasoning opportunities for the students and as an indicator of the APCT.

We were quite well prepared for the subject with our teacher (university-based supervisor). He even appreciated my concept maps. However, this is not the case during the lesson. The students gave quite different answers. There were periods of meaningful discussion, but allow me to provide more detailed responses; I might have overlooked certain aspects. But there were moments when I asked challenging questions. For instance, when faced with questions about justice and equality, the class responded with a brief moment of silence. I think these were challenging questions.

In the member check interview, the CT emphasised the need for integrated subject matter knowledge to launch the rigorous discussions in the presence of the DISC moves. In this manner, Cochran-Smith et al. (2015) indicated the centrality of the subject matter knowledge of prospective classroom teachers to design and implement a lesson effectively. An integrated and pedagogically arranged or transformed subject matter knowledge has been seen as one of the most fundamental teacher candidate characteristics, indicative of planning and conducting a lesson precisely as defined (Ruys, Van Keer, & Aelterman, 2011).

As mentioned above, the experience of the educator in making sharpened nuances compared to the candidate teacher in terms of establishing the norms of the APCT in the classroom was visible regarding other talk moves such as MON and ORG, which were the core indicators of the crystallised pedagogical content knowledge (König & Kramer, 2016). To be clear, the current study shows that there were also significant differences between the MON and ORG moves enacted by the participants (see Figure 1). Based on the patterns found within the interactional chains and communicative approaches observed in the participants’ lessons, they wanted to control the classroom dialogues by organising the students’ actions. As observed, some classroom management problems were in the participants’ lessons. However, their handling strategies as the indicators of pedagogical content knowledge resulting from years of experience, primarily visible in their talk moves, such as the MON and ORG, differed. To manage the classroom talks’ streaming, the educator seemed to prefer the MON moves, whereas the CT preferred the ORG moves (see Figure 1). As the previous research showed (e.g. Soysal, 2021), with the MON moves, the educator seemed to create a classroom setting where the students could track their actions. As exemplified herein, the MON moves were used mainly by the educator to engage the students for a version of the metacognitive monitoring activity where the students asked themselves a specific question: “What are we thinking and talking about right now?” (Soysal, 2021) (e.g. see Table 3, turn-11, turn-13, and turn-19). This might create a specific classroom environment where the educator’s and students’ minds are synchronised (Soysal, 2021). The paralleled or synchronised minds within the classroom discourse may increase students’ productive disciplinary engagement; thus, in the lessons of the educator, there might be fewer maladaptive student actions. In the lessons of the CT, the MON moves seemed to be replaced with the ORG moves (see Figure 1 for a comparison) that the CT mainly used for actualising the conventional classroom management tactics. To explain, even though classroom management tactics are accepted constitutive elements of excellent teaching and a tool for expanding students’ learning outcomes, new teachers may have serious problems and difficulties managing classroom events (Flower, McKenna, & Haring, 2017). Therefore, the CT might feel herself organising the classroom talks by mainly using the ORG moves instead of the MON moves, which are more related to the APCT’s visibility than the ORG moves.

Teacher ownership and power relations as hindering factors for the realization of the APCT

The rare uses of the NEGO and DISC moves can also be explained by considering the relations between the CT, the school-based mentor teacher, and the university-based supervisor. Based on the field jottings of the researcher, it can be asserted that in the practicum course, the prospective classroom teachers were welcomed and valued by the school administration and school-based mentor teachers. However, as explicitly observed and jotted down, the prospective teachers were still the aliens of the classrooms since the classroom did not belong to them. In other words, the classroom site was a territory of others (the school-based mentor teacher) who held the most profound experiences with the students and ownership of the classroom events or history. The current study observed that the CT had social ties with the students; however, she seemed to abstain from creating a negative error climate with her DISC moves. In the history of the class, there was a comfortable flow in the lessons where the rigorous negotiation of ideas for socially co-constructing the meaning as a mutual and intellectual agreement between the class members was not the primary instructional aim. Thus, the CT might abstain from rebutting the students’ invalid ideas. By the DISC moves, the CT might be of the idea that she might create an error climate that may be negative (Tulis, Steuer, & Dresel, 2018) since the classroom school-based mentor teacher might not attain a previously established negotiation enculturation. A positive error climate that allows for open communication about different solutions (requiring the NEGO moves, open-ended patterns of interaction, and multivoicedness in the communicative approach) and sharing error knowledge (requiring the DISC moves) requires building certain classroom norms and ground rules that the CT might not know how to build (Steuer, Rosentritt-Brunn, & Dresel, 2013). The above-described classroom context might prevent the CT from comfortably displaying some talk moves, such as the NEGO and particularly the DISC, which might reduce the possibility of the APCT in the lessons conducted by the CT.

Alternative or competing instructional strategies (Cochran-Smith et al., 2015) were recommended to the CT by the university-based supervisor and the educator. These were tried to be actualised by the CT in the lessons where the students were primarily engaged in knowledge transmission modes of teaching by the school-based mentor teacher. Therefore, expectedly, the students might hold subject-centred epistemic and pedagogic orientations to knowledge, how to learn, and how they are taught. Around this contradiction, the CT had to decide whether she should press the students for collaborative thinking or interthinking in the presence of academic rigour through the NEGO and DISC moves. As an important note, the university-based supervisor acted comfortably and flexibly, explicitly forcing the students to review and criticise their peers’ opinions. Beyond, as closely and explicitly observed, in the lessons, the students rebelled that the educator asked very hard or contradictory questions; they also reported that a lesson including intense challenge questions was intellectually and emotionally disturbing. Initiating and maintaining discrepant event perspective (Osborne, 2019) (requiring the DISC moves, open-ended chains of interaction, and dialogicness in the communicative approaches) and accountability in the classroom talks (requiring the NEGO moves, student-student interactional patterns, and multivocality regarding the communicative approaches) were more attainable for the educator since there might be more symmetrical power relations between the educator and the school-based teacher mentor. However, this was not the case for the CT, who had two-fold accountability. The school-based mentor teacher and university-based supervisor evaluated and graded her in-class performances. Thus, there might be less chance on the CT side to force the students to answer the challenge questions or press the students to comment on their peers’ ideas critically but constructively.

Previous studies showed that (e.g. Nokes, Bullough, Egan, Birrell, & Hansen, 2008) the power issues or traditional hierarchy of power between the practicum triad can considerably govern the enactments of the candidate teachers. It is recommended that more collective collegial formats of learning to teach may destroy the traditional hierarchy of power between the mentors (university-based or school-based) and prospective teachers (Alger & Kopcha, 2011). Re-arranging the epistemic and social authority between the mentors and prospective teachers creates a more democratic ambiance where more robust opportunities for teacher learning are ensured (Smith & Avetisian, 2011).

Concluding remarks and educational implications

This study concludes that there may be more significant differences between teacher educators’ and candidate teachers’ talk-based strategies in fostering the APCT. More importantly, the current study shows that despite a long-lasting social and intellectual interaction between the educator and CT in university teaching, the CT lacked experience using more effective talk strategies to promote the APCT. This study implies an instructional problem in preparing candidate teachers to be better conductors of the generic talk strategies for promoting intellectual productivity. In other words, it is seen that the talk-based strategies are hidden aspects of the teacher preparation programmes. Even though the lesson design and implementation are central processes of teacher training, it should be noted that the teacher’s talk-based strategies surround the lesson design and its instructional materials. When supposing the lesson design, implementation of the design, and feedback on the instructional performance are the walls of the teacher preparation process, in that case, talk-based strategies are the bricks of that wall.

It is therefore strictly recommended that we, teacher educators, find ways to communicate the talk-based strategies for fostering the APCT with the candidate teachers. Pedagogic noticing in the context of operating the talk-based strategies for fostering the APCT is related to what candidate teachers see when they look at the conversations in their classroom or another teacher’s classroom and how much they interpret talk-based events in terms of effective instruction (Sherin & Jacobs, 2011). When a candidate teacher looks at conversations in a classroom from the outside is faced with a bombardment of pedagogical data. Classroom teacher training programmes, therefore, should be designed to encourage candidate teachers to select, analyse, and interpret essential and unimportant incidents related to the functional talk-based strategies for augmenting the APCT (Sherin & Jacobs, 2011). The new pedagogical world seems to stop calling the teacher “teacher” and tends to call the teacher “researcher-teacher” or “reflective practitioner”. Candidate teachers, therefore, must be involved in a teacher preparation programme in which they transform themselves to act like classroom discourse analysts who will be able to be aware of relevant talk-based strategies for fostering the APCT. In the present study, the educator had the advantage of knowing himself pedagogically regarding the concrete linkage between arranging classroom talks and intellectual productivity. Thus, there is a plan to reconsider and redesign teacher preparation programmes where candidate teachers may develop a specific research-oriented pedagogy by studying the self.

Limitations and further research

This qualitative inquiry had some limitations. First, there were no multiple comparisons between prospective teachers and teacher educators in the current study. To be clear, there would be different comparative discursive patterns if there were higher numbers of CCTs and teacher educators. In addition, content structures might influence and sharpen the differences and communalities between the candidate teacher and the educator since their mental schemes regarding subject matter knowledge considered in the observed lessons might have more significant influences on the flow of verbal interactions and, therefore, the occurrences of the indicators of the APCT. This study was designed as a prototype trial for establishing the norms of a comparative analysis of diverse aspects or indicators of the APCT between a candidate teacher and a teacher educator. Increasing the number of participants and diversifying their instructional contexts where participants display their discourse strategies for encouraging students’ APCT would give more nuanced, fine-grained, and profound insights about the divergencies and convergencies between them to make more comprehensive teacher training interventions to sustain the promotion of the APCT. In addition, for justified methodological purposes, in the current study, a purposive opportunistic participant selection was conducted to have ample crystal-clear data for a sharpened constant comparison between two participants. Significantly, the teacher educator observed herein systematically already held profound conceptual understanding and practical gains and experiences regarding several aspects of classroom discourse in different levels of instruction that might augment the size of the gap between the educator and candidate classroom teacher in terms of actualising the norms of the APCT. Therefore, further research should incorporate teacher educators and CCTs from diverse perspectives to test and expand the methodological thinking tool developed and proposed in the present study to inject additional insights and dimensions of the APCT into the teacher training curriculum in the context of higher education. This inclusion and re-consideration would move the field forward in generating more generalisable and overarching research outcomes about various dimensions of the APCT in the context of higher education by removing the limitations of the present study.

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Yilmaz Soysal

Yilmaz Soysal graduated from Elementary School Science Teaching Department of Abant İzzet Baysal University in 2010. He gained her MA in elementary science teacher education and has pursued her PhD in Middle East Technical University in the Elementary Education Department. His research area consists of science argumentation, discourse theory, social constructivism, teacher pedagogies, teacher education, educational psychology and higher education. He worked as fellowship in FP7 projects that were supported by European Commission. He has been working as an associate professor at the department of elementary education in İstanbul Aydin University.

Somayyeh Soysal

Dr. Somayyeh Soysal graduated from Educational Management and Planning Department of Tebriz Azad University in 2006. She pursued her MA in the same department and university in 2008. She went to Turkey by a well-known scholarship to do her graduate studies. During 2009-2013 years, she got her PhD degree from Ankara University. Her dissertation topic was internalisation policies of Turkey in higher education. In 2003, she was appointed as an assistant professor in the department of elementary education at İstanbul Aydin University. Her research fields include educational policies, economics of education, higher education policies and professional development of teachers. Since 2013, she has been working as an associate professor in the department of elementary education at İstanbul Aydin University.