Abstract
During the last five decades, the scientific study of classroom talk has converged in the tradition of classroom dialogue. Empirical research has progressed, showing how dialogic forms of organizing classroom talk would be more conducive to student learning and development than monologic forms. However, two major problems remain unresolved. On the one hand, and despite the research mentioned above, teachers still mostly use a monological teaching method, thus arranging monological ways of organizing classroom discourse. On the other hand, our understanding of the psychological processes that would explain the relationship between the way of organizing classroom talk and learning is still limited. In the present article, we introduce a special section in which we have brought together six papers that sought to extend conceptually and methodologically the limits of the study of classroom talk by explicitly adopting the notion of discursive interactions in the classroom.
A large part of the activity carried out in school classrooms corresponds to verbal interactions between teachers and students or between students. During the last 50 years, the scientific study of such activity has taken diverse forms in its conceptual as well as in its methodological and epistemological dimensions, but progressively converging around the notion of classroom dialogue (cf. Howe & Abedin, 2013; Mercer & Dawes, 2014; van der Veen & van Oers, 2017). On the one hand, the concept of classroom dialogue has been used broadly to refer to the diversity of forms of conversation observed in the classroom, which would be consistent with both the etymology of the word ‘dialogue’ and its everyday use (Howe & Abedin, 2013). On the other hand, the same finding, that conversation is organized in diverse ways, goes hand in hand with the idea that specific ways of organizing classroom dialogue promote student learning and development while others tend to hinder them (Howe, 2021; Howe & Abedin, 2013; Mercer & Dawes, 2014; Mercer & Howe, 2012; van der Veen et al., 2017). Relevant learning is more likely to occur when classroom conversation occurs in such a way that all students have the opportunity to explore (a) their own and other people's (students’ and teachers’) thinking, (b) by exchanging views and (c) confronting each other's ways of understanding and approaching a problem (Bourgeois & Nizet, 1997/2007; Howe, 2021; Johnson & Johnson, 2009; van der Veen et al., 2017). Among them, the learning of various school subjects is described (cf. Forman et al., 2017; Howe & Abedin, 2013; O’Connor et al., 2017; Rojas-Drummond et al., 2017), along with oral communication skills (Mercer et al., 2017; van der Veen et al., 2017), the development of critical, argumentative and epistemic thinking (Hajhosseiny, 2012; Kuhn et al., 2016; Reznitskaya & Gregory, 2013) and the development of students' identities (Böheim et al., 2021; Kumpulainen & Rajala, 2017).
In a way that Segal et al. (2017) call ‘purist dialogic pedagogy’ (p. 2), this exploratory character of classroom conversation has been described as a space of complete openness, in which there are no single correct answers nor any form of authority in knowledge (Wegerif, 2007). Seeking a more realistic way to adopt these dialogic ideals in educational contexts, various authors converge in proposing that classroom dialogue is to be understood as a productive communicational context in which the interplay of multiple perspectives promotes learning (Albornoz et al., 2021; Segal et al., 2017). This communicational context characterized by dialogue would imply the participation of students in the collaborative construction of the meaning of actions and knowledge, as well as in the shared control of key aspects of the development of the class (Cazden, 2001, cited in Albornoz et al., 2021). The teacher practice that would allow orchestrating dialogue in class is typically called dialogic teaching and is opposed to monologic (or traditional) teaching, characterized by a markedly asymmetric power structure between teacher and students, a communicational form characterized by recitation (typically in Initiation-Response-Assessment sequences) and the use of ‘closed’ questions in which students do not experience space for knowledge exploration (van der Veen & van Oers, 2017).
In their now classic systematic review of the literature in this area, Howe and Abedin (2013) concluded that research has been focused on characterizing the forms of classroom conversation rather than on providing evidence about how and why certain forms of organization (dialogic) would be more beneficial than others (monologic). This is especially important because even though several studies have shown the benefits of promoting productive classroom dialogue through dialogic teaching, the sad realization remains that the most common practice is monologic teaching (Albornoz et al., 2021; Böheim et al., 2021; Howe & Abedin, 2013; Mercer & Dawes, 2014; Reznitskaya & Gregory, 2013; Segal et al., 2017; van der Veen & van Oers, 2017).
With the title ‘Classroom dialogue and learning outcomes’, the special issue of the journal Learning and Instruction, edited by van der Veen and van Oers (2017), set out to address this task ‘by providing additional empirical evidence on the relationship between classroom dialogue and children’s learning and development’ (p. 1). Howe (2017), in her commentary on this special issue, valued the contributions of the studies gathered by pointing out that, although we have not yet reached a conclusive moment in the research of how dialogic modes of organizing conversation would promote learning and development in school, we have important elements to think that the dynamics of dialogue occurring in small groups are analogous to forms of classroom dialogue orchestrated by teachers, concerning their effect on learning. In this context, the next step would consist of a detailed explanation of the processes through which certain forms of classroom talk organization achieve their positive effects. This would, in turn, provide better conceptual and practical tools to guide the necessary transformations in the initial training and daily practice of teachers in schools (cf. Böheim et al., 2021; Howe, 2021).
We share Howe’s (2017) confidence that the field of classroom dialogue research continues to make solid progress. However, we think that, if after five decades of research this programme continues to face problems of psychological explanation and educational implementation, it is worth thinking beyond its current limits. Therefore, in the present special section, we seek to contribute to these objectives through a different but complementary intellectual operation to the one proposed by van der Veen and van Oers (2017). Instead of circumscribing the inquiry to the merely empirical dimension, we made an open invitation to broaden and complexify our understanding of classroom talk by deliberately opting for a more descriptive and broader denomination than that of classroom dialogue: discursive interactions in the classroom. We believe this would allow exploring in a non-conventional, and therefore creative, way some of the problems that have become persistent in the field: How does one explain the psychological processes that relate the ways of organizing classroom talk to the processes of learning, development and construction of knowledge? How does this broadening of our conceptualization of the included psychological processes affect our understanding of the teaching activity of orchestrating classroom talk? How can these complex ways of organizing discursive interactions be incorporated into the practice of our schools (especially if we consider that dialogic teaching proposals date back to more than a century ago 1 and are still scarcely implemented)? What clues can we offer for initial teacher education research when we broaden our conceptualization of the orchestration of classroom dialogue (going beyond mere techniques for dialogic teaching)?
The six articles gathered thanks to this call for papers address these questions to varying extents and combine their conceptual, empirical and methodological aspects in different ways.
Larraín et al. (2024) present a case study in the area of dialogical science teaching in elementary school students. Through this approach, they present and develop in depth an exploratory hypothesis about the role of argumentative inner speech as a critical mediating process in the development processes of students’ argumentative thinking that would allow the learning of complex concepts. Adopting a historical-cultural approach, it is shown how the student internalizes forms of discursive interaction in which he initially participated in the conversation in a peer group that sought to solve a problem posed in class. Through the incorporation of the Vygotskian internalization process, Larraín et al. (2024) offer a plausible explanation of the complexity of the participation of the forms of classroom talk, with special emphasis on the temporality of this process.
In direct dialogue with the article by Larraín et al. (2024), Freire and Grau (2024) delve into the study of argumentation and its place in the form taken by discursive interactions in small groups of students, within the framework of a science class at the primary level of education. Through the monitoring of collaborative activities designed by the teacher with the support of the researchers, the authors show that the students participate in various forms of shared regulation, some of them being internally related to the emergence of argumentation and, specifically, counterarguments. The authors emphasize the crucial role of the design and implementation of the collaborative activities posed to the students. Challenging tasks specifically constructed to promote disagreement among participants and elaborate discursively on the difference of viewpoints seems to be essential for discursive interactions to promote high-level knowledge-construction processes in the classroom.
Also seeking to broaden the spectrum of processes that allow us to understand the effect of different forms of classroom talk, Villarroel-Henríquez and Sebastián (2024) defend in a theoretical synthesis article the benefits of characterizing discursive interactions in the classroom beyond the dialogicality-monologicity dimension. Adopting a Vygotskian approach, this article argues that by incorporating the narrative-paradigmatic dimension in the conceptualization of teacher discourse, we complexify and refine our understanding of the processes carried out by the teacher to orchestrate classroom talk. It also opens a perspective for thinking about an authentic development of the teacher in these processes, beyond mere training in techniques (whose learning we know does not occur mechanically).
In a first operationalization of Villarroel-Henríquez and Sebastián’s conceptual proposal (Villarroel-Henríquez and Sebastián, 2024), Villarroel-Henríquez and Bruna-Jofré (2024) explore empirically the interest of extending the framework of analysis of discursive interaction beyond the dialogicality-monologicity dimension. Using a multilevel analysis approach, the authors show how learning outcomes in the area of language in secondary school may not be explained by the now classical dialogicality-monologicity dimension of teaching practice and, instead, may be explained through a combination of this and the narrative-paradigmatic dimension. This broadening of the approach invites us to reflect critically on how to investigate teacher practice and education.
Iglesias-Martínez et al. (2024) critically review a vital moment of initial teacher training: practices in schools. Through an analysis of narratives of primary education teacher trainees, they show how their way of analysing the practices of student teachers is still mainly focused on aspects of content and on strategies and logics typical of what, in a general sense, we could call monological teaching. This coherence between teachers' practice in schools and student teachers' view, even if it implies criticisms of such practice, seems to be a significant obstacle that teacher training must overcome in order to transform the traditional ways of organizing discursive interactions in the classroom.
Videla et al. (2024) focus on teaching practices in the educational context and wonder about the systemic conditions that allow the emergence of the forms of discursive interaction proposed by the national educational system, but which are still not frequent in teachers' practices. Broadening the methodological and conceptual perspective beyond the analysis of specific segments of interaction between teacher and students (a frequent approach in this area of research), the authors show how the skills that an expert teacher deploys in the orchestration of productive dialogue in mathematics classes go far beyond the management of specific techniques. These techniques make sense as part of a permanent interplay between the local and global dynamics of discursive interaction in the classroom.
We believe the research field on the relationship of classroom talk with learning and development appears today as more promising than ever, but its conceptualization (theoretical, methodological and epistemological) is still under development and in dialogue (Howe, 2017; Wegerif et al., 2017). The texts gathered in this special section take a position in this dialogue from a processual and relational understanding of the problem's individual, cultural, social and institutional aspects. We trust that they will contribute heuristically to this debate.