Towards Dialogue: A Linguistic Ethnographic Study of Classroom Interaction and Change
Lead Research Organisation:
University College London
Department Name: Learning Curriculum and Communication
Abstract
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Organisations
People |
ORCID iD |
| Adam Lefstein (Principal Investigator) |
Publications
Adam Lefstein (Author)
(2010)
Dialogue in classrooms - questioning conventional wisdom
Adam Lefstein (Author)
(2009)
Concluding remarks
Adam Lefstein (Author)
(2010)
Video-based teacher professional development : opening the black box of social learning processes
Ellis, Sue; McCartney, Elspeth; Bourne, Jill
(2011)
Applied Linguistics and Primary School Teaching: Developing a Language Curriculum
Lefstein A
(2011)
Professional vision and the politics of teacher learning
in Teaching and Teacher Education
Lefstein A
(2015)
From moves to sequences: expanding the unit of analysis in the study of classroom discourse
in British Educational Research Journal
Lefstein A
(2013)
Beyond a unitary conception of pedagogic pace: quantitative measurement and ethnographic experience
in British Educational Research Journal
Lefstein A
(2011)
Applied Linguistics and Primary School Teaching
| Description | Continuity and change in classroom interaction Evidence of change: teachers posed a greater proportion of open to closed questions over the course of the project. However, this was the only notable linear change over time, which suggests that this development was a relatively superficial add-on, rather than an indicator of deeper pedagogical changes. Factors that shape shifts in classroom discourse patterns: These include lesson topic; pedagogic activity; teacher and pupil motives and worldviews; and wider educational and institutional frameworks. Discourse features indicative of more dialogic teaching clustered around certain pedagogic activities, such as review of group work, feedback on pupil writing and text-based discussions (e.g. in the latter activity pupils held the floor 43% longer than average, and teachers posed almost twice as many probe questions than average). Similarly, in Year 6, testing constrained engagement in dialogue: the proportion of closed questions was highest during active preparations for the SATs tests (38%), and lowest after the tests (13%). Relatively dialogic episodes were also associated with extra-curricular topics (with a low degree of institutional framing), with imported discourse genres, with ambiguous and/or transgressed interactional norms, and with situations in which pupils possessed adequate linguistic, cultural and academic resources to participate. The politics of teacher professional learning Teachers' professional vision "improved" over the course of the workshops, as expected on the basis of prior research. However, and more importantly, close analysis of the workshops showed that social concerns such as allocating blame, managing power relations and saving face were no less salient for participants than the official topics of discussion in the workshops. This finding led to a productive critique of accepted theory and methods for researching video-based teacher professional development, which adopt an apolitical approach to teacher professional vision, and analyse teachers' utterances without consideration of social context. Frameworks for analysis of classroom discourse By triangulating analyses of classroom interaction from multiple sources - ethnography, computer assisted systematic discourse analysis, surveys, micro-analysis and data mining for sequential structures - we were able to probe the advantages and limits of each. This process uncovered a number of anomalous findings, which help to problematise accepted coding schemes, scales and interpretations. For example, accepted, objective measures of lesson "pace" were inversely related to the pace of the observed lessons, as experienced by participant-observers. We developed methods for combining quantitative, ethnographic, and micro-analytic methods in order to partially address the limitations of each. Dialogic pedagogy Inherent to dialogic pedagogy are tensions between metacommunicative, epistemic, substantive and interpersonal dimensions. These tensions increase teaching complexity and pose dilemmas for teachers. Confronting these dilemmas is usually not a matter of choosing between dialogue or monologue, but between competing dialogic concerns. |
| Sectors | Financial Services and Management Consultancy |
| Description | Analysing classroom culture through systematic multi-modal analysis of pupil engagement |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Primary Audience | |
| Results and Impact | Video data analysis seminar at the Centre for Multimodal Research, Institute of Education University of London |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | |
| Description | Classroom discourse genres : playing X-factor in a literacy lesson |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Primary Audience | |
| Results and Impact | Data analysis workshop & discussion as part of Key Concepts and Methods in Ethnography, Language & Communication three-day workshop at Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious & Ethnic Diversity, Göttingen, Germany, 2/3/2010. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | |
| Description | Classroom interaction and dialogue : processes of continuity and change |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Primary Audience | |
| Results and Impact | Lecture at the University of Exeter Graduate School of Education Seminar, 21/06/2011. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | |
| Description | Dialogic teaching of "low ability" pupils : a tale of three classrooms |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Primary Audience | |
| Results and Impact | Lecture at Language Education seminar, at the School of Education, Tel-Aviv University, Israel, 1/12/2011. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | |
| Description | Dialogic teaching of "low ability" pupils : a tale of three classrooms |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Primary Audience | |
| Results and Impact | Lecture at the School of Education and Social Work seminar, University of Sussex, 5/3/2012 |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2012 |
| Description | Genre and cognate concepts |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Primary Audience | |
| Results and Impact | Lecture and data analysis workshop in Key Concepts and Methods in Ethnography, Language and Communication Summer School, King's College London, 21/7/2010. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | |
| Description | Interim findings from the towards dialogue project |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Primary Audience | |
| Results and Impact | Presentation to senior management of Children's Services Department |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2011 |
| Description | Linguistic ethnography in action : initial, illustrative analysis of a literacy lesson |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Primary Audience | |
| Results and Impact | Workshop on data analysis, part of an Ethnography, Language and Communication Researcher Development Initiative event |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | |
| URL | http://elc.ioe.ac.uk/ |
| Description | Problems and possibilities in the move from design to data - notes from the towards dialogue project |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Primary Audience | |
| Results and Impact | Paper presented at the Research Workshop in Language and Literacy, King's College London, 10/3/2009. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | |
| Description | Questioning and dialogue in the classroom |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Primary Audience | |
| Results and Impact | Staff development seminar, Jewish Free School, London, 24/5/2010. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | |
| Description | Teacher learning from 'best practice' representations |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Primary Audience | |
| Results and Impact | Presentation (in Hebrew) at "Policy for improving practice - learning from the English experience" seminar for delegation from Avnei Rosha, the Israeli Institute for Educational Leadership at the Institute of Education, University of London, 13/2/2009. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2011 |
| Description | Teacher professional development - an international perspective |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Primary Audience | |
| Results and Impact | Presentation (in Hebrew) to policy-maker working group on teacher development, Van Leer Institute, Jerusalem, 22/12/2010. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2010 |
| Description | Teacher professional development with and without video |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Primary Audience | |
| Results and Impact | Lecture and Workshop (in Hebrew) as part of Media as a Resource for Learning, Study day for School Inspectorate, Tel-Aviv District, Ministry of Education, Israel, 6/3/2011. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2011 |
| Description | The interaction of academic and everyday discourse genres : x-factor in a literacy lesson |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Primary Audience | |
| Results and Impact | Lecture and research training workshop for Doctoral Fellows programme, Mandel School for Educational Leadership, 12/2/2012. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2012 |
| Description | Video representations of teaching |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Primary Audience | |
| Results and Impact | Presentation and discussion at the Video data analysis seminar, Centre for Multimodal Research, Institute of Education University of London, 11/2/2009. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | |