Abstract
In most secondary school classrooms, teachers are still authoritative, central-figures. They talk and teach while students listen and passively receive what the teacher says. Regarding writing, the situation is similar. Students write only to the teacher, the person who grades their papers. In this environment, classroom dynamics are monologic and learning is limited to individuals. To establish a more constructivist learning environment, this study explored electronic spaces as alternatives to classroom dialogue and writing. This paper observed two 10th grade English classrooms (51 students) whoparticipated in an exploration of Lord of the Flies using an electronic discussion board through which they collaboratively constructed knowledge. In short, the discussion board facilitated both student-centered dialogues and an authentic writing environment, which promoted a dynamic learning community and healthy writer’s identity for the students. Three salient features of the discussion board activity will be explored to support this claim: a) the students’ use of questions and hypothetical/conditional sentences, b) the students’ interaction patterns, and c) the dialogic/progressive patterns of co-construction of knowledge on the discussion board.
Highlights
In many ways, today’s classrooms in secondary schools are characterized by monologues
On the discussion board, instead of writing individual essays about the novel to their teacher, they were engaged in a dialogue through writing, and they built their knowledge through interacting with others
Among a total of 215 messages on the Lord of the Flies discussion board, there were: 57 (27.4%) messages containing questions; 38 (18.3%) hypothetical/ conditional sentences; 6 (2.9%) messages contained both question and hypothetical/conditional sentences; and 9 (4.3%) messages were comprised of question-type sentences, which did not include a question mark, but in terms of their contents, should be considered as questions
Summary
Today’s classrooms in secondary schools are characterized by monologues. All the buzz-words, such as student-centered classrooms, collaborative learning, and constructivist learning environments, still feel like remote goals in many classrooms, where transmission models of lecture-based instruction are still prevalent. In this environment with the teacher as the central figure, the classroom practices are more like monologues rather than dialogues and depend heavily on what the teacher says. In classroom environments in which instruction depends greatly on teacher-centered monologues and textbooks, students are often excluded from the dialogues In this environment, there is not much space for students to generate and negotiate meaning
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