Dialogic Literacy Research Articles

Theorizing Digital Dialogic Comprehension Pedagogy With Rural Primary Teachers: A Relational Praxis of Knowledge, Space, and Time

This grounded theory study explored how primary-grade teachers perceive and enact dialogic English Language Arts (ELA) comprehension pedagogy in the novel context of pandemic-induced digital learning. The study involved nine diverse rural primary teachers teaching digitally during the coronavirus disease pandemic. The researchers followed a constructivist, postmodern orientation to co-construct substantive theory with the knowledge of participating teachers. The researchers conducted two rounds of virtual interviews and collected digital artifacts of ELA comprehension instruction. Qualitative data were analyzed using constant comparative analysis to address teacher perceptions and enactments of digital dialogic comprehension instruction. The emergent substantive theory represents connected, iterative processes of teachers perceiving and enacting dialogic, digital instruction. First, teachers espoused a dialogic stance toward ELA instruction based on their beliefs in various comprehension paradigms, diverse funds of knowledge, and multiplicity of voices in discourse. Relatedly, teachers responded to particularities of virtual contexts, digital discourses, and pandemic times to enact dialogic ELA comprehension instruction through a reconstruction of literacy pedagogies. Implications for research and practice are discussed, including the need for ongoing negotiation of dialogic pedagogy in diverse instructional contexts, to cultivate teachers’ dialogic literacy practices in locally and culturally responsive ways.

Preschool Educators’ Perspectives on Dialogic Literacy in Preschoolers

This research delves into the perceptions and expressions of dialogic literacy among preschool teachers, seeking to explore dimensions such as its definition, significance, strategies, assessment methods, and parental involvement. The study engaged a cohort of 15 educators, comprising 10 females and 5 males, selected based on their experience and qualifications in early childhood education. Through semi-structured interviews, these teachers provided rich and detailed insights, forming the basis for a thorough examination of dialogic literacy in the preschool setting. Intentionally diverse, the participant pool included educators from various preschool environments, both public and private, aiming to capture a broad spectrum of perspectives and approaches. This deliberate variation facilitated the exploration of potential disparities in understanding and implementing dialogic literacy across different contexts. Employing a qualitative research approach, the study emphasized semi-structured interviews as the primary method of data collection. The interview questions covered key aspects, including definitions, teacher strategies, classroom activities, assessment methods, and parental engagement. The design aimed to extract comprehensive responses, allowing participants to share their unique perspectives, experiences, and practices related to communicative proficiency in early childhood education. Thematic analysis was applied to categorize and organize the interview data, unveiling common patterns and themes. To enhance the study's reliability, methodologies such as member checking, peer debriefing, and triangulation were employed. The research maintained a strong ethical foundation, prioritizing participant privacy, confidentiality, and voluntary involvement throughout the entire process. The findings present a holistic understanding of dialogic literacy implementation in diverse preschool settings, enriched by the inclusion of educators with a minimum of two years of teaching experience. This study contributes valuable insights to the field of early childhood education, shedding light on the multifaceted nature of dialogic literacy and its versatile application across different educational contexts.

Relationships between Reading Identities and Dialogue: Perspectives from Fifth-grade Multilingual Learners

Drawing upon a theoretical framework that acknowledges the bidirectional relationship between local discursive acts and institutional structures, this paper analyzes classroom observations with student interviews to understand how fifth-grade multilingual learners are making sense of dialogic literacy instruction to support their reading development. Findings reveal a relationship between how a learner’s identity with reading informs how they understand the utility of classroom dialogue to support reading development, and subsequently the degree to which they exert agency to engage in classroom literacy practices.

Use of implicit intertextuality by undergraduate students

The present paper explores the differences between high-graded essays (HGEs) and low-graded essays (LGEs) in the use of implicit intertextuality expressed in persuasive essays written by undergraduate students. Their choices of implicit intertextuality are analysed within ENGAGEMENT. It constitutes a subsystem of the appraisal system formulated within the interpersonal meaning of a Systemic Functional Linguistics Framework. ENGAGEMENT consists of Monogloss (one voice) and Heterogloss (multiple voices). The present paper is concerned with Monogloss, focusing on 'presupposition' which is an element of Monogloss. As a result of applying the Monogloss system to an academic discourse field, a great deal of extension of the Monogloss system was required.Text analyses reveal that significant differences are identified between HGEs and LGEs in the extent to which different types of Monogloss were deployed for the establishment of their authority while attempting to contextualzse their essays. Successful writers tend to use more presuppositions rather than other types of Monogloss such as 'fact' and 'assert' than unsuccessful writers in conjunction with other heteroglossic options along the schematic structure. The differences identified are interpreted in terms of Dialogic Literacy Perspectives. Pedagogical implications will be discussed in terms of their contributions to the support of academic literacy and integrity.

Embracing Wobble: Exploring Novice Teachers’ Efforts to Enact Dialogic Literacy Instruction

AbstractContemporary school contexts present challenges for novice teachers seeking to support students’ literacy development by bringing content into dialogue with students’ lives. These challenges, framed as wobble moments, often contribute to high rates of teacher attrition. However, dialogue with peers, colleagues, and mentors can help teachers learn from the tensions they encounter as they enact dialogic literacy instruction. The authors share the struggles of novice teachers working to enact dialogical practices and describe how an oral inquiry process framework helped them negotiate these challenges. Working from a Bakhtinian stance, the authors present three wobble moments that were connected to school structures, personal and professional identities, and conformity to demonstrate how the oral inquiry process helped the participants learn from the difficulties they faced. Findings suggest that the oral inquiry process framework can help teachers navigate difficulty through dialogue and enact pathways that empower them. Recommendations for implementing this framework are also included.

Dialogic Literacy: contexts, competences and dispositions

Dialogic Literacy is understood as being able to participate in productive dialogue with others and is a key competence for learning and active citizenship in a cultural and societal landscape shaped by the ‘participatory turn'. The article develops a definition of Dialogic Literacy based on a cross-disciplinary approach combining deliberative discourse, collaborative rationality, and Moral Foundation Theory. Furthermore, it presents a framework that educators can utilize in order to transform classroom discussion into activity that fosters learners' Dialogic Literacy. Finally, the article argues for elevating the status of Dialogic Literacy as an overarching learning goal that should become an integral part of language education.

Dialogic literacy: Talking, reading and writing among primary school children

The work reported in this paper was supported by the Direccion General de Asuntos del Personal Academico of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) (DGAPA-UNAM) (PAPIIT Project Number: IN303716). Professor Rojas-Drummond would like to thank the Faculty of Education at the University of Cambridge, UK for hosting her as Visiting Scholar while part of this manuscript was being prepared. Her visiting Scholarship was funded by the National Council of Science and Technology in Mexico (CONACYT Project Number: 160873). In addition, some of the methodological tools used in the study reported derived from a collaborative work carried out for a project entitled ‘A Tool for Analysing Dialogic Interactions in Classrooms’ (http://tinyurl.com/BAdialogue) funded through the British Academy International Partnership and Mobility Scheme (ref. RG66509), between January 2013–December 2015.

New Directions of Literary Education through the ‘Reading Aloud' of Literary Work

The Korean language education is based on skill based Functionalism has been settled as the major paradigm of Korean language education after the 5th national curriculum. The current national curriculum is still under its influence. But the theoretical approach to first language education has rapidly shifted from cognitive and constructional approach to social constructional approach. The social-constructivism premises that the learning is constructed on the social level not on the individual level. One of the most effective learning method is having students discuss the literary work using a dialogue. Literary works as authentic materials, provide lively dialogues which consist of genuine questions and answers, and the explorations of meaningful problems. These activities are the ideal aspects of Korean language education.BR The present study aimed to heighten the dialogic literacy in the classroom discourse through the ‘reading aloud’ method. To do this, I adopted a scaffolding model of reading aloud, which is employed at the three phases of reading class: pre-reading, during-reading, and post-reading. Also, this study presented sample activities using some literary texts. With this new teaching model, both teachers and students cooperate to make a new meaning in the language classroom. In this respect, ‘reading aloud’ will be worked as a scaffolding for the authentic discussion.

Toward Dialogic Literacy Education for the Internet Age

In order to reconceptualize literacy education for the Internet Age, we first need to understand the extent to which our thinking has already been shaped by literacy practices. I begin this article with an exploration of the relationship between ways of communicating, ways of thinking, and the way in which we understand education. Face-to-face dialogue, for example, means that thought is experienced as somebody’s voice. It is not surprising then that oral cultures tend to understand education as initiation into a living relationship with voices. Literacy, by contrast, especially print literacy, has tended to afford the rather different idea that thought can be dissociated from voices and represented by signs and symbols. Under the regime of print literacy, education has often been understood as first providing access to the collective store of knowledge represented in books and then transmitting this knowledge across generations. Although the Internet preserves some of the affordances of print literacy, it also returns us to some of the affordances of oracy, since it supports two-way participation. In the second half of the article, I outline a possible response to the challenge of the Internet Age. This response is not another “new literacy” but the proposal that we locate literacy education within a larger context, the context of dialogue, not only dialogue with specific others but also with generalized others and ultimately with the Infinite Other.

Constancy and Variability: Dialogic Literacy Events as Sites for Improvisation in Two 3rd-Grade Classrooms

This multisite study investigates dialogic literacy events that revolved around narrative and informational texts in two 3rd-grade classrooms. The authors offer a metaphor of musical improvisation to contemplate dialogic literacy events as part of the repertoire of teaching and learning experiences. In literacy learning, where there is much structure and also many degrees of freedom, an improvisation metaphor is helpful for considering attentive listening, contingent responding, and creative interplay in the classroom. This study contributes to literature on dialogic literacy events by explicating how teachers and students are interdependent coparticipants who collaboratively construct meaning as they improvise during text-based discussions. The authors analyze discourse from multiple instances of two focal dialogic literacy events: discussions of fables and folktales in a low-socioeconomic-status school in the northeastern United States and discussions of newspaper articles in a middle-class school in the southwestern United States. In both classrooms, moderately open structures, shared repertoires of predictable talk moves, and precomposed material facilitated improvisation in three forms: teacher soloing, student soloing, and group improvisation. Teachers used constancy and variability to facilitate productive dialogic discussions. Such discussions may help teachers address the Common Core State Standards by providing children opportunities to participate in academic discussions related to diverse texts.

Reading difference: picture book retellings as contexts for exploring personal meanings of race and culture

AbstractIn racially and culturally homogeneous school settings, opportunities for children to interact with those who are unlike themselves are not always available. Picture book retellings provide contexts within which students are exposed to racial and cultural differences by allowing them to engage in vicarious events with people they might not otherwise encounter. In this article, the authors explore two fourth graders' aided and unaided picture book retellings. They argue that retellings are dialogic literacy events that provide children with opportunities to explore difference through social imagination and develop empathetic response to a wide range of fictional others.

Las tertulias dialógicas, un recurso didáctico en la formación de docentes.

The aim of this paper is to present the results relations with educational student’s perceptions about the use of dialogic literacy in collaboration with a school from Logroño called Caballero de La Rosa. The student could take part but also observe how to manage it as a future professor. The results show the nature of learning achieved, according to a model of inclusive school.

Head in the clouds: a review of current and future potential for cloud-enabled pedagogies

This paper reviews the research on the disruptive and transformative potential of newly-emerging cloud-based pedagogies. It takes into consideration the extent to which Cloud Computing can be leveraged to disseminate and scale web-based applications within and across learning contexts. It examines ideas from current literature in Web 2.0- and cloud-based education that might serve as useful when deploying cloud-based services and infrastructure. The paper draws on several key ideas to clarify how cloud- and Web 2.0-based pedagogies are informed by the shifting knowledge landscape, including a review of the concepts of disruptive pedagogies and transformative technologies. With recourse to emerging research on participatory cultures, the importance of coming to terms with newly emerging literacies, modalities, types of citizenship and ways of interacting and collaborating is addressed. Referring to notions of dialogic literacy, constructionist and co-constructivist learning, as well as possible models for online collaborative writing, the paper reviews current research on the capacity of web-based applications in enabling transformed learning and explores how this might enable broader, web-enabled participatory cultures within and beyond the institution, in light of the economies of scale made possible by cloud-based infrastructure.

Attribution in high-and low-graded persuasive essays by tertiary students

This paper explores cross-cultural and grade-based differences in the use of intertextual resources in persuasive essays written by tertiary students. Expressions of explicit intertextuality are analysed using the model of Attribution, an element of the engagement system formulated within the interpersonal metafunction of Systemic Functional Linguistics. The text analysis, supported by interview results, reveals that while there are some differences in the overall use of Attribution between native English speaking and ESL students, the most significant grade-based differences were found in expressions of Attribution and in the Attribution patterns adopted in the presentation of intersubjective claims supported by evidence. The differences identified are interpreted in terms of dialogic literacy perspectives. Pedagogical implications are discussed in terms of the contribution of the differences to the success of the essays, and the need to support academic literacy.

Supporting Dialogic Literacy Through Mashing and Modding of Places and Spaces

Technology-dependent teaching strategies can exploit the currently underused capacities of mediarich Web 2.0 technology to enable student engagement and support higher order thinking. In particular, Web 2.0 technologies support learners' opportunities to coconstruct ideas/knowledge and ways in which they can add their own interpretations in to Web 2.0 tolls that enable modding of existing products and collations of multimodal information from multiple sources thorugh mashing.

An integrative framework for the analyses of argumentative/persuasive essays from an interpersonal perspective

This paper concerns delineating an interpersonally consistent and comprehensive framework for the analysis of argumentative/persuasive essays (APEs) written by tertiary students. In order to examine undergraduate students' interpersonal management, I principally adopt schematic structures from a Sydney school genre-based approach in addition to two important interpersonal systems of interaction and evaluation recently developed within systemic functional linguistics (SFL). Drawing on SFL alongside interaction in writing and Bakhlinians' dialogic literacy, the interpersonal aspects in APEs are examined from three main perspectives: Interactive (schematic structures), Interactional (the metaphorical realizations of commands), and InterPERSONAL meaning (the three main APPRAISAL systems: ATTITUDE, ENGAGEMENT, and GRADUATION). Analyses of two sample essays demonstrate that the framework provides ESL teachers with resources to be able to guide students to write academic essays successfully by meeting the expectations of academic audiences both in structure and language features.

Dialogic Education in Spain: Some Initial Words

In April 2003 three educational conferences were organized simultaneously in three different Spanish cities ­ Barcelona, Zaragoza and Vitoria ­ under the title "Learning Communities: Quality Education for All". These conferences meant the celebration of the success and consolidation of an educational project that has been taking place in Spain since the beginning of the nineties and that each year continues to expand throughout the country. All the schools that function as Learning Communities have a feature in common: they are based on dialogic learning and they are oriented towards achieving school success for all children. Both Gordon Wells and Marta Soler-Gallart participated in the conference: Gordon was invited to share his ideas on dialogic inquiry and to describe his experiences and research in schools; Marta explained the theory and practice of dialogic literacy drawing on her experience with teachers in some of the learning communities.

Landmark Essays on Bakhtin, Rhetoric and Writing

Contents: Part I:Theory, Language, Rhetoric. C. Schuster, Mikhail Bakhtin as Rhetorical Theorist (1985). R.A. Harris, Bakhtin, Phaedrus, and the Geometry of Rhetoric (1988). J. Klancher, Bakhtin's Rhetoric (1989). T. Kent, Hermeneutics and Genre: Bakhtin and the Problem of Communicative Interaction (1991). K. Halasek, Feminism and Bakhtin: Dialogic Reading in the Academy (1992). M. Bernard-Donals, Mikhail Bakhtin: Between Phenomenology and Marxism (1994). M. Cooper, Dialogic Learning Across Disciplines (1994). K. Halasek, M. Bernard-Donals, D. Bialostosky, J.T. Zebroski, Bakhtin and Rhetorical Criticism: A Symposium (1992). Part II:Composition Studies, Pedagogy, Research. J.S. Ritchie, Beginning Writers: Diverse Voices and Individual Identity (1989). J.J. Comprone, Textual Perspectives on Collaborative Learning: Dialogic Literacy and Written Texts in Composition Classrooms (1989). G.A. Cross, A Bakhtinian Exploration of Factors Affecting the Collaborative Writing of an Executive Letter of an Annual Report (1990). D.H. Bialostosky, Liberal Education, Writing, and the Dialogic Self (1991). T. Recchio, A Bakhtinian Reading of Student Writing (1991). M. Middendorf, Bakhtin and the Dialogic Writing Class (1992). N. Welch, One Student's Many Voices: Reading, Writing, and Responding With Bakhtin (1993). H.R. Ewald, Waiting for Answerability: Bakhtin and Composition Studies (1993).