Collaborative Reasoning With Varied Text Types: An Analysis of Nine Dialogic Discussions in the Primary Grades

• In Event: Exploring Heterogeneity, Discourse, and Linguistic Awareness in Multilingual Literacy Learning

Abstract

Over the last several decades, forms of reading have expanded far beyond conventional print-based text to include multimodal representational forms rooted in new practices and contexts including a variety of text formats within technologies. This rapidly changing digital landscape has impacts on the ways in which students engage with, and teachers incorporate, other non-print mediums particularly for primary aged students learning how to read. Current instructional frameworks including some state standards call for facility with multimodal texts for literacy learning, yet little research has examined how young readers engage and make meaning with such texts. In addition, though text-based and dialogic discussions have been studied by researchers and have shown evidence of their benefits, questions at the intersections of multimodal texts and text-based and dialogic discussion remain. One type of dialogic discourse, Collaborative Reasoning (CR), has been found to be effective in a number of research studies and supports students in meaning-making through questioning, criticality, and negotiation of big ideas, yet little research has explicitly examined the use of multimodal texts during CR, let alone with specific subgroups of students such as multilingual learners. Using a sociocultural discourse analysis approach combined with descriptive and inferential statistics, this study compares the degree to which lessons are dialogic, the dialogic moves used, and the percentage of overall student talk during nine dialogic discussions focused on three types of text: print-only, print-plus image, and video-only, across three groups of 5th grade students with varying language and literacy profiles (Spanish language proficiency with “minimally developed English”, “somewhat developed English”, and “moderately developed English”). Each group participated in one dialogic discussion per text-type. Lesson transcripts were segmented into single, or multiple sentence clusters comprising contributions from speakers with an individual communicative function, and a coding scheme of dialogic communicative acts was applied to each unit. Overall (rounded to the nearest whole percentage), print-only had the lowest level of lesson dialogicality (61%) (n = 189), compared with print-plus image (75%) (n = 255) and video-only (82%) (362) lessons. One-way Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) was conducted to compare the dialogicality across the three text types which revealed a statistically significant difference in mean scores (F (2, 6) = 24.36, p = 0.0013). Tukey’s Honest Significance Difference Test (HSD) for multiple comparisons demonstrated a statistically significant difference for the mean value of dialogicality between print-plus image and print-only texts (p = 0.0088, 95% C.I = [0.0485, 0.2314]), as well as video-only and print-only texts (p = 0.0012, 95% C.I = [0.1119, 0.2948]). There was no statistically significant difference between print-plus image and video-only texts (p = 0.1648). This study finds a positive statistically significant difference in the degree of dialogicality when discussing multimodal texts as compared to print-only, and highlights how multilingual students showcase their rich and sophisticated linguistic repertoires through the use of various dialogic moves during text-based discussions with multimodal texts.

Author

• Kristin Keane, Stanford University