Abstract
With the advent of Common Core-based assessments, and resulting concerns about academic achievement, more and more students may require the level of instructional intensity tutoring affords. The extent of knowledge regarding the discourse that occurs within the tutoring context is, however, limited. As a result, it is difficult to envision and implement a protocol that incorporates responsive tutor/tutee interaction. This article describes an analysis of discourse patterns that occur as a tutor responded to student difficulty. The study is framed using Bakhtin’s concept of dialogue—the ways in which interactions are influenced by the joint speaker/listener identity that is characteristic of interlocutors—and the way this played out in a dialogic instructional context. Excerpts from eight previous tutoring studies served as a foundation for the present research. The primary data source for the analysis was start-to-finish audio-recordings of 40 hours of instruction with two fourth grade readers. After preliminary open coding, overarching categories such as questioning, providing information, and demonstrating strategy use—and more detailed codes within these categories—were applied to the transcripts. Major findings demonstrated that: (a) the tutor’s moves were varied and balanced and differed somewhat from child to child, (b) some interactional sequences appeared more effective than others depending on the topic and child, and (c) interactions in this setting differed in important ways from those found in the research literature. I argue here that the dialogic characteristics of tutor/tutee interactions served the children involved and should serve as the basis for additional tutoring protocols.
Highlights
With the advent of Common Core-based assessments, and resulting concerns about academic achievement, more and more students may require the level of instructional intensity tutoring affords
Each claim is supported by excerpts from the transcribed data and, in the case of RQ 3, from the tutoring dialogue reported in the reviewed research literature
I employed four criteria when selecting quotes that would best serve my analytic focus (Jacob, 1987): (a) first and foremost, the excerpts were reflective of the data as a whole; (b) on average, quotes included approximately five moves which was the mean for all sequences in the data; (c) on the other hand, the excerpts were long enough to capture the essence of each interaction; and (d) the number of quotes selected from each child is similar
Summary
With the advent of Common Core-based assessments, and resulting concerns about academic achievement, more and more students may require the level of instructional intensity tutoring affords. Important is basing lessons on student data (Leal, Johanson, Toth, & Huang, 2004), allowing students to select texts for reading (Mokhtari, Hutchison, & Edwards, 2010), and employing mediational tools such as lists of steps that support children as they begin to internalize reading strategies (Jaeger, 2017). These studies have failed to forge a link between the results obtained and the quality of tutoring discourse. In what ways are these dialogue characteristics linked to instructional sequences that end with the child coming to an understanding of the content with which s/he originally struggled? Do these characteristics vary by student?
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