Strategy Instruction Shifts Teacher and Student Interactions During Text‐Based Discussions

Abstract

AbstractThis study examined how teacher and student interactions were influenced by a multistrategy reading model, Collaborative Strategic Reading (CSR), where students learn to apply before‐, during‐, and after‐reading strategies in small cooperative learning groups. Five middle school English language arts teachers and their students (N = 184) participated as part of a two‐year efficacy trial of CSR. Discourse analysis was used to compare the differences in teacher–student talk when the teacher and the text remained the same across typical instruction and CSR lessons. Results indicated that strategy‐based collaborative practices offered opportunities for discourse patterns that were not observed in typical lessons. Overall, a higher proportion of talk in CSR lessons focused on discussing the text when compared with lessons without CSR. Features of student–teacher interactions during strategy‐based instruction included more student and teacher academic talk turns, a higher ratio of student talk to teacher talk, longer sequences of student–student exploratory talk, less teacher talk focused on giving information, and the use of reading strategies to facilitate discussion about text content. Findings suggest that strategy instruction models can increase the dialogic nature of classrooms by resituating the location of knowledge as distributed among students, with talk and strategies as tools to improve comprehension.