Instructive Dialogues on Literary Texts

Abstract

In our conceptual paper, we propose the framework Instructive Dialogues on Literary Texts. We describe how teachers can identify questions about the literary text which are worthy of clarification and central in such dialogues. The worthiness of questions depends on three criteria: A question worthy of clarification has to be testable based on the literary text and either disputable—i.e., it elicits multiple answers—or urgent—i.e., there is a students’ urge to clarify—or both. We are going to derive these concepts from the characteristics of literary texts, particularly from their ambiguity and polyvalence, and relate our framework to existing concepts of educational dialogue in literature classes. Moreover, we systematize teacher moves by applying notions of task research to whole-class dialogues. With these verbal moves, teachers can help their students to (collaboratively) interpret literary texts. Setting out our framework, we contribute to domain-specific concretizations of instructional quality and scaffolding. Furthermore, we propose a domain-specific definition of high-level comprehension.