Connecting Learning Talk and Relations to Student Reasoning and Questioning

• In Event: The Dreams, Possibilities, and Necessity of Student Classroom Talk Within Public Education

Abstract

This paper focuses on connecting learning talk (as represented in connect topical episodes) as an example of exploratory dialogic talk and robust student inquiry. In connect learning talk students share connections to text to further illuminate, and deepen understanding of, the text being examined. The text serves as anchor for student-proposed connections that are characterized by elaborated specificity (Brown & Aull, 2016). Conversational uptake on these student-proposed connections cultivates joint purposes, validates student intentions for the task at hand, and contributes to making engagement with different perspectives and opinions an explicitly valued classroom practice (Aukerman, 2007; Author-on-Paper2; Nystrand et al, 1997). Connecting learning talk is an example of the sought-after but too-often-not-present elaborated student interactions in our classrooms.
We explicate and contextualize student connect learning talk in two literature-based elementary classroom contexts: an English language learning pull-out classroom of six 10- and 11-year-olds, and a urban mainstream primary classroom of twenty-four 7-and 8-year-olds. We employ sociocultural discourse analysis methodology in both classroom contexts. Sociocultural discourse analysis (Author-on-Paper1) acknowledges the iterative, reflexive, and accretive process of teaching and learning across time and tasks. Our explications of student connect learning talk extend previous analyses of classroom talk in these two classrooms.
In the Language Learning classroom, data were two purposefully selected literature-based lessons (outlier lessons based on amount of student talk). We employed statistical discourse analysis (Author-on-Paper-2) to unpack functions of, and relations among, teacher and student reasoning word usage across multiple discourse features across multiple analyses at multiple levels and timescales. Findings revealed
1) Teacher and students patterned uses of reasoning words and that teacher and students were more likely to use reasoning words during connect learning episodes: that is, during textual classroom talk that related text and/or experiences to the focal text to help make sense of it.
2) Ways classroom oracy practices (e.g. types and functions of questions, convergent or divergent uptake, and use of reasoning words) worked together purposefully and cumulatively (Alexander, 2008; Burbules, 1993) within and across lessons to activate, support and deepen connecting and reasoning.
In the urban mainstream second grade classroom, data were 14 whole class minilessons during an intact writing workshop instruction unit (three hours). We explicated all connect learning talk episodes for teacher and student reasoning word usage and related these finding to previous topical episode analysis of classes of communicative approach within and across all minilessons (along dialogic-authoritative and interactive-noninteractive dimensions, see Scott et al, 2006). Findings revealed:
1) Patterning for teacher and student use of reasoning words.
2) How classroom oracy practices worked together purposefully and cumulatively within and across minilessons to activate, support and deepen connecting and reasoning but their degree of dialogicality and their clustered usage of reasoning words was also related to timing and timing within lesson and instructional unit.
This paper homes in on how students bid for, and teacher sustains, animates and makes socially significant connect learning talk; and how student learning talk is in service of robust student inquiry.

Authors

• Maureen P. Boyd, University at Buffalo - SUNY

• Ming Ming Chiu, The Education University of Hong Kong

• Kelly Schucker, University at Buffalo - SUNY