Abstract
Despite the fact that Singaporean students consistently perform well in literacy tests such as the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study, employers have reported that Singaporean employees in general lack confidence in articulating their views in the workplace. This may be attributed to the practice of teacher-fronted and monologic classroom discourse, which does not allow opportunities for teachers and students to construct knowledge and understanding together during curriculum time. The article reports on one classroom-based research conducted on a Secondary Three (age 15) class in one Singaporean government school. The purpose of this article is to show how classroom talk could be made more dialogic, through an intervention, to enhance students’ talk opportunities and to build up literacy skills. The article argues that over time, the habitual practice of a dialogic form of teacher-student talk would help to open up the space of learning for students. To do that, it would be necessary to begin with raising teachers’ awareness of the benefits of dialogic talk.
Introduction
With ever-improving examination scores and standing in international league tables, Singapore’s education system has remained consistently at or near the top of most major world education ranking systems in the last decade. For example, in the 2011 Progress in International Reading Literacy Study test, Singapore ranked fourth out of 45 participating countries, with a score of 567, which was above the international average of 500 (Ministry of Education, 2012). Similarly, in a study by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, Singaporean students emerged top among East Asian countries in problem solving (Vasagar, 2012). Despite the overall success story of Singapore’s standing in these international league tables, research still shows that literacy practices in some Singaporean classrooms are at odds with modes of teaching that are generally thought conducive to generating creative and critical thinking (Albright and Kramer-Dahl, 2009; Kramer-Dahl, 2008).
In a large-scale longitudinal study involving the pedagogical practices in more than 200 primary and secondary schools in Singapore, Hogan (2014) found that much of the classroom talk was still essentially restricted to the teacher conveying procedural information or asking questions that required a one or two word response from the students. Rarely were learners engaged in open, exploratory talk with each other or with the teacher such that they could experience deeper levels of thinking and negotiation of meaning in any particular topic. In Vaish’s (2008) study on the interactional patterns in 51 classrooms in Singapore, it was found that the whole class lecture, the Initiation-Response-Evaluate (henceforth, IRE) discourse pattern (Mehan, 1979) and individual seatwork dominate both the primary and secondary levels. The result was that there was an extremely small percentage of time spent on whole class elicitation and discussion in which students were engaged in extended talk with teachers over particular topics. Hogan (2014) goes on to say that as far as international assessments are concerned, the teacher-fronted mode of instruction, which strongly emphasizes the mastery of specific procedures, has been highly effective in helping Singaporean students to generate outstanding results. However, the recent report that Singaporean employees lack confidence in persuading or articulating their views ‘on their feet’ (Khew, 2014: B17) at work highlighted the fact that the dominant monologic classroom discourse, characterized by the lack of extended discussion and the co-construction of knowledge between teacher and students, may not be sufficient to produce the active contributor capable of creative and critical thinking, effective communication and teamwork desired for the 21st century workforce.
In light of the critical need to prepare young people for the complex demands of globalization and 21st century knowledge economies, the Ministry of Education has stepped up efforts to promote quality teaching and learning in the form of ‘classroom interaction’ and ‘opportunities for expression’ through innovative and effective teaching approaches and strategies (Ministry of Education, 2009). The strong agenda to equip Singaporean students with the 21st century competencies and skills is reflected in the learning outcomes of the latest subject syllabi, where teachers and students are expected to be actively involved in the process of co-constructing knowledge and communicating ideas. The current English Language Syllabus (Curriculum Planning and Development Division, 2010), for example, emphasizes students’ development of the metacognitive processes involved in delivering effective presentations and representations. One possibility would be to provide quality talk opportunities through dialogic teaching, based on the belief that, when students actively participate in classroom dialogue in extended and varied ways, they will be able to practise new ways of using language as a pedagogical tool for constructing knowledge (Nystrand et al., 1997; Wegerif and Mercer, 1997). It is with the intention of presenting learners with the possibility of meaningful language learning of this kind that this article reports on an intervention study to implement dialogic teaching in a teacher-centred Secondary English Language classroom in Singapore.
Socio-constructivism and Dialogic Teaching
The theoretical framework underlying this study is socio-constructivism, which focuses on how knowledge is constructed in the social context of the classroom through language and other semiotic means (Vygotsky, 1978). Central to this is the idea that learning occurs between people on an interpsychological plane and then inside the learner on an intrapsychological plane through the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD). For a child to acquire competence in language use, Vygotsky posits that a more knowledgeable expert has to provide the novice learner with access to the strategies and tools through instruction, explanation and modelling, in order for the latter to achieve independent performance.
Vygotsky’s influence has led to an increasing body of research that supports the view that learners’ talk in collaborative interaction with others, particularly teachers, in the context of the classroom is the key to learning (Alexander, 2004, 2008; Gibbons, 2006; Mercer and Littleton, 2007; Roskos et al., 2011; van Zee and Minstrell, 1997; Zwiers, 2011). Among these research studies, Alexander’s work on dialogic teaching (2004; 2008) provides a critical argument for sustaining the active and purposeful participation of pupils in classroom talk, in order to achieve the best educational results. The essence of dialogic teaching lies in the cumulative quality of talk between teacher and students, which contributes to the cohesive, temporal organization of pupils’ learning and consists of a broad repertoire of strategies and techniques. In particular, Alexander identifies two dialogic talk moves as having the ‘greatest cognitive potential’ (2004: 31) for supporting students’ communication.
Discussion which involves the class, teacher-group or pupil-pupil in the exchange of ideas with a view to sharing information and solving problems.
Dialogue which involves the class, groups, or individual pairs of students in the use of structured questioning and discussion.
Both talk moves involve strategies such as narration, explanation, evaluation, argumentation and justification to build on students’ knowledge and ideas to develop coherent thinking. Embedded in the concept of dialogue is the meditational role of the knowledgeable other through the use of the conscious modelling of collaborative, responsive and reciprocal talk moves, as the following studies have shown.
In their work on the use of dialogic teaching to guide children’s development of meaningful trajectory in two primary science classrooms in the United Kingdom, Mercer et al., (2009) provide pedagogical talk moves to help teachers link everyday understanding of a scientific phenomenon with the language for Science thinking. The talking points (either as interactive/dialogic or interactive/authoritative) ‘provide a focus for discussion, by offering a range of ideas about a topic which the children can consider together’ (2009: 364).
To support teachers in creating dialogic discussions in their classes, Caughlan et al., (2003) in their work with teachers in the United States, helped them develop strategies to shift from teacher-centred to student-centred discourse patterns so that there could be more questions, talk and ownership by students. The collaboration made the teachers have greater control over classroom and curricular decisions, which Caughlan et al., assert would be critical in supporting future classroom changes. Sewell’s (2011) study, conducted in four New Zealand primary classrooms, illustrates how developing a community of learners where dialogic talk contributes to children’s ability to think began with a change in teachers’ pedagogical beliefs for classroom practices. Their classes showed the evidence of cumulative talk, when students took turns to build on each other’s contributions as well as that of exploratory talk, when the teacher and children engaged critically and constructively with each other’s reasoning.
Overall, these studies show that as students were given more opportunities to share their views through dialogue, they appeared to be more motivated and engaged in class, and also demonstrated conceptual understanding in their learning. Given the consistent findings on the beneficial effects of dialogic talk on students’ learning in the New Zealand and United Kingdom settings and the lack of similar research in Singaporean classrooms, this article then attempts to answer the following research questions:
What kind of knowledge construction was evident in an English language class of one Singaporean government Secondary school?
Did the intervention result in an increased level of dialogicity in teacher-student talk? If so, how?
Methodology
A qualitative approach in the tradition of classroom-based research (Van Lier, 1988; Allwright and Bailey, 2004) was used to collect data for the study, which comprised non-participant observations, interviews and intervention. Using excerpts from video recordings of classroom lessons, comparisons were made between the nature of teacher-student talk before and during the intervention.
The Participants
The participants consisted of 39 students from a Secondary Three class (age 15) in a government secondary school and their teacher, Jenny (a pseudonym), who had been teaching at the school for eight years and was the Level Head in the English Language Department.
Procedure
There were 13 classroom observations (nine pre-intervention and four intervention lessons) and two interviews with the teacher over a period of about two months in 2010. The pre-intervention observations provided an initial overview of classroom talk patterns in the data, which focused on teacher’s co-construction of talk opportunities or lack thereof, so that recommendations for dialogicity could be made in the intervention (see the discussion of Tables 3 and 4 later in this article).
Each lesson was approximately 70 minutes long and teacher interview 30 minutes. Both recordings of the classroom observations and teacher interviews were transcribed verbatim. As an observer, I also took field notes to complement the classroom observations and make links to insightful findings in the teacher interviews. Due to the constraints of space, only analyses of the classroom discourse are discussed in the article.
Data Analysis
The Singapore Coding Scheme for classroom discourse developed by Luke et al., (2005) was used to analyse teacher-student talk evident in the English Language class before and during the intervention. The coding scheme was designed for research into teachers’ pedagogical and instructional practices in the context of intellectual development and knowledge work in classrooms in Singapore. It has been tested, adjusted, and finalized collaboratively by a team of Principal Investigators, Co-Principal Investigators, collaborators, research associates and research assistants as part of the data collection for the CORE 1 project from 2004 to 2006. Informed by Bernstein’s theory of classification and framing of knowledge (1980), the instrument comprises a priori codes representing features of classroom processes and interactions, which include instructional activities, artefacts, different types of teacher-student talk, classroom interaction and student agency.
Findings
Table 1 shows the percentage of the types of activity structure, such as whole class lecture, group work, or IRE sequence, in all nine lessons before intervention, which was calculated using the length of each activity structure in the nine lessons divided by the duration of all nine lessons.
Types of Activity Structure and Percentage of Occurrence before Intervention.
As shown in Table 1, the dominant form of classroom discourse was teacher-fronted whole class lecture (65%), during which students were preoccupied with taking down notes from Jenny’s slides onto their handouts. While there was frequent small group work such as composing an essay in which students talked amongst themselves, the IRE sequence (1.68%) in which the teacher and students were engaged in co-construction of meaning was tellingly low.
Table 2 further examines the functions of the different types of teacher talk for assessing the knowledge construction that occurred during the respective activity structures.
Type of Teacher Talk 1 before Intervention.
In Table 2, teacher talk time, which constituted 94.7% of the overall lesson time, mostly centred on curriculum-related matters, focusing on the procedural knowledge of organizing texts and text types (76.2%). Organizational talk, which refers to the framing of class activities, featured as the second highest percentage of occurrence (8.31%), followed by regulatory talk (4.28%), which involves the discipline of students, and test or exam-related talk (5.29%), which refers to the explicit reference to exams or test requirements. Exploratory talk (0.371%), which functions to develop students’ level of understanding, was fourth in percentage of occurrence, whilst informal talk not related to curriculum matters constituted 0.223% of overall lesson time.
Analyses of Excerpts before Intervention
Excerpts 1 and 2 further illustrate the nature of teacher-talk depicted in Table 2.
In Excerpt 1, Jenny’s aim was to get the class to recall the specific organization and structure of an incident report. She highlighted the distinctive structures of each paragraph by getting the class to identify the ‘what’, ‘where’, ‘when’ and ‘why’ aspects of an incident report. As she systematically covered the language features of the text type in her PowerPoint slides, the class was reminded to note down the procedural details relevant to the scaffolding checklist in their handouts. What is noticeable is that the IRE sequences were short and tightly controlled (lines 4 to 14), since turn-taking had been entirely managed by Jenny.
Excerpt 2 features a post-writing lesson on text types for personal response, in which Jenny selected the work of some students to go through as a class as a way of demonstrating to the class ways to improve their writing.
In the excerpt, Jenny told F1 that her conclusion was ‘not acceptable’ (line 7) as her arguments for the school rules she was advocating were not logical and would cause her to lose marks in the exam (lines 2 and 3). Although M1’s writing was ‘OK’ (line 8), she found his concluding statement ‘sweeping’. She then abruptly finished her review with the comments ‘I’ve no idea what he’s trying to say’ (lines 12 and 13) and ‘So, what is the new rule you are trying to maintain?’ (lines 13 and 14). As can be seen, Jenny neither explained what exactly was wrong nor provided an alternative suggestion to connect students’ disjointed ideas together for better coherence. For instance, she could have asked M1 to comment on or clarify his intentions, as well as invite the rest of the class to contribute their thoughts. Instead, Jenny told the students her answer straightaway (lines 11 and 12).
Answer to Research Question 1
What kind of knowledge construction was evident in an English language class of one Singaporean government Secondary school?
The analyses of the activity structures and type of teacher-talk show that the dominant pattern of classroom interaction consisted of whole class lecture, with instances of IRE sequences in which Jenny tested students’ understanding and recall of information. This was seen in Excerpt 1, where she organized her teaching around the procedural knowledge of structuring the text type for an incident report for the purpose of getting students to reproduce the same text structure, which contrasted with the aim of the EL syllabus to incorporate higher-level work with language and texts (Kramer-Dahl, 2008). More importantly, the consistent use of IRE sequence to test students’ recall of information did not foster active mental participation on the part of the learners because, in their passive role, they were not challenged to participate in discussions, either with the teacher or with each other (Mercer and Littleton, 2007). The resulting consequence is that they did not have sufficient opportunity to practise literacy skills for engaging in the construction of meaning from texts. The notion of personal voice and identity did not seem to be recognized in the writing of the students’ personal response essays, as it was observed that Jenny did not pause and ask students to explain how they had derived their ideas in Excerpt 2. Teacher-talk came across as non-supportive, since Jenny largely referred to students’ problems more than solutions. Overall, it appears that the knowledge construction in the class centred on the transmission of procedural knowledge of writing text types for meeting exam requirements, which is far from the intent of dialogic teaching, which is to treat students as active agents in the construction of their own knowledge (Van Zee and Minstrell, 1997).
The Intervention
Following the outcome of the initial classroom discourse analyses, Jenny and I planned an intervention task to increase dialogicity in teacher-student talk. To facilitate common understanding towards the intervention, we met over four planning meetings where I first shared the construct of dialogic talk and its rationale from Wegerif and Mercer’s (1997) work as well as Zwiers and Crawford’s (2011) types of talk frames. Initially, Jenny saw me only as a researcher whose role was to evaluate her teaching; but after rapport had been established through frequent dialoguing, in which I foregrounded myself as a critical friend, we managed to co-construct the following three learning objectives in the writing of a speech:
Teacher’s use of extended turns in the IRE structure to allow students longer talk time
Teacher’s invitation for students to elaborate on ideas with relevant examples, descriptions or explanations
Teacher’s building of knowledge from one student to another using questioning, responding, discussing and/or providing feedback
Table 3 shows the percentage of the types of activity structure in the four intervention lessons, which was calculated from the total length of each activity structure in all four lessons divided by the duration of all four lessons.
Types of Activity Structure and Percentage of Occurrence during Intervention.
Compared with Table 1, whole class lecture decreased from 65.0% to 47.3%. The IRE sequence, however, increased significantly from 1.68%, before the intervention, to 12.6%, which suggests that there were more turns of talk between teacher and students in the intervention lessons. In addition, there was some amount of small group work (12.7%) related to generation and organization of ideas, although students had to do more individual seatwork (24.7%) such as individual reading and taking down of notes from teacher’s slides. Table 4 shows the functions of teacher talk observed during the intervention.
Type of Teacher Talk during Intervention.
This time, teacher-talk time constituted 88.9% of the overall lesson time compared to that before the intervention (94.7%), which implied that there had been more student-talk time in the intervention lessons. Similar to pre-intervention lessons, the highest proportion of teacher-talk focused on the procedural knowledge of organizing texts and text types (68.8%). This time however, exploratory talk time increased significantly to 8.02% compared to that before the intervention (0.371%). Organizational talk still featured as the second highest percentage of teacher talk time (8.20%), followed by regulatory talk (0.285%) and informal talk (0.262%).
Analyses of Excerpts at Intervention
Excerpts 3 and 4 further illustrate the activity structures and nature of teacher talk depicted in Tables 3 and 4 respectively.
Here, Jenny introduced the rhetorical features of speeches. Although she largely maintained the control of the floor, she engaged the class in exploratory talk when she probed them to answer questions at lines 5 (‘Why do you think he wants to do that?’), 7 (‘What do you mean by that?) and 9 (‘Why should you end in a different way?’). This was an indication of knowledge building through making a connection with sources outside the text. Her questions then led a few students to respond accordingly at lines 6, 8, 10, 11 and 14. Although her question at line 15 (‘And do you answer it?’) was considered a display question, the traditional IRE sequence had indeed been extended with slightly more turns of student talk.
Excerpt 4 was based on one group discussion on the writing of a speech to convince their principal of the educational benefits of participating in an overseas educational trip during the school holidays. Out of the two destinations given, students had to argue for one and against the other.
M1 began the group discussion by stating to his classmates the task, which was to build up their argument on the pros of choosing one destination over the cons of the alternative destination (lines 1 and 2; 5 and 6). At line 8, Jenny’s question (‘Does anyone of you know anything about Perth?’) produced further opportunities for the group members to contribute to the discussion. She then prompted them to consider the second option (line 10), and probed them to think deeper about their choice at line 12 (‘Why Hanoi when all your friends want to go to Perth?’). This engaged the other three students in exploratory talk in which they clarified their thoughts by talking about the advantages of the choice as well as the disadvantages of the alternative choice (lines 13 to 19). Finally, to steer the discussion towards a productive outcome, Jenny redirected the discussion to the objective of the task, which was to argue for one destination and against the other (lines 20 and 21).
Answer to Research Question 2
Did the intervention result in an increased level of dialogicity in teacher-student talk? If so, how?
As in the pre-intervention lessons, whole class lecture featured predominately in the classroom interactions. However, the increase of exploratory talk time (8.02%) implies that students were given more opportunities to build on information that had been shared. For example, she used effective questioning to build in the element of reciprocity, as shown in Excerpt 3 and 4. In particular, she took a step back to give students autonomy to exchange ideas, stepping in whenever necessary to probe for clarity. Not only did this help to engage students in exploratory talk, but it also strengthened their thinking skills related to examining ideas and considering alternative viewpoints. Most importantly, she provided explicit guidance in the students’ negotiation process. Thus, based on the evidence of collaborative and reciprocal meaning-making between teacher and students (Nystrand, et al., 1997), it was clear that the intervention had led to a higher level of dialogicity to some degree in teacher-student talk.
Conclusion
The article reports on an intervention study to extend student talk through dialogic teaching. Analyses of classroom interactions before the intervention show that the knowledge construction in class was one that emphasized the reproduction of the procedural knowledge of structuring particular text types. There was no attempt on the teacher’s part to generate or create knowledge about texts and text types in a way that allowed students to build personal meaning into the texts. Instead, she arbitrated textual meaning narrowly with clear predictable responses required of students, making her exchange with students one that was devoid of their voices. What is reported here thus resonates with findings by Kramer-Dahl (2008), and Vaish (2008) that there has been a lack of teacher-student interaction for the negotiation of meaning in some English language classrooms in Singapore.
Following that, analyses of classroom interactions in the intervention lessons show that by getting students to elaborate on a point with explanation or evidence and to build knowledge from one student to another through effective teacher questioning in exploratory talk, teacher-student talk time was extended when students were given opportunities to negotiate meaning in learning. The findings thus support Caughlan et al.’s (2003) and Sewell’s (2011) studies that when teachers adopt student-centred discourse patterns, students would demonstrate a stronger sense of ownership of and engagement with learning.
One limitation of this study is that the findings are contextualized within one mainstream Singaporean government school and may not represent the profiles of students and teachers in other types of schools, nor the school-wide pedagogies practiced in these settings. Although the findings are not generalizable to the national education landscape, they suggest that dialogic teaching could achieve the aims of the 2010 English Language Syllabus, thus supporting the use of speaking skills and strategies to ‘actively and purposefully collaborate with others, and to contribute to meaning-making through offering constructive feedback and alternative viewpoints’ (Curriculum Planning and Development Division, 2010: 47). Another limitation pertains to the lack of cumulative questioning (Alexander, 2008), which entails the use of structured and sequenced questioning and discussion to create shared meaning, in the intervention lessons. Nevertheless, the analyses of teacher-student talk did show an increased level of dialogicity when students were engaged with a deeper level of reasoning. This generated sense of engagement through talk would subsequently help students organize their thoughts in writing (Zwiers, 2011).
Beyond the scope of this article is the discussion of the complex relationships between teachers’ beliefs and their actual classroom practices (Burns and Richards, 2009; Freeman, 2002). Nevertheless, it is pertinent to highlight two issues related to changing the communication culture in the Singaporean classroom. First, the socicocultural environment of Singapore’s institutional and classroom contexts would have a bearing on the pervasive implementation of dialogic teaching, since contextual factors have been known to impact the extent to which teachers are able to implement instruction compatible with their cognitions (Borg, 2006). Thus, to support teachers’ implementation of dialogic teaching in place of the entrenched teacher-fronted classroom discourse, school leaders would need to first address their concerns such as the lack of curriculum time to conduct dialogic teaching.
Second, teacher learning, from the perspective of sociocultural approaches to language teacher education, is facilitated by social participation within a community of practice (Johnson, 2009; Richards, 2008) where teachers theorize their own beliefs and practices and co-construct knowledge that informs their teaching. Thus, pre-service and in-service training that introduce teachers to the benefits of dialogic teaching (see Rojas-Drummond and Mercer, 2004), would also have to scaffold opportunities for teachers to make sense of this pedagogy in group conversations. For example, by using video recordings of lessons and classroom transcripts, teachers could share their experiences of how dialogic teaching works in their classrooms or discuss the obstacles of its implementation and possible solutions. It would be important for teachers to experience the same kind of joint participation and exploratory talk they are endeavouring to develop in such learning communities so that they would be in a better position to engage/involve students in dialogic discussions.
Finally, it should be noted that all talk moves, including instruction, rote and recitation, have their pedagogic functions in the classroom (Wells and Arauz, 2006). Using them effectively at the right occasions will depend on a teacher’s strategic use of interactive and dialogic approaches at different stages of a lesson.
Footnotes
Appendix A
Appendix B
Acknowledgements
I am especially indebted to Dr Christopher Ward for his input on the initial draft of this article and its subsequent revisions.
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.