Collaborative Discourse Research Articles

Fostering literacy learning in supportive contexts.

Young children with learning disabilities typically encounter difficulty with academic tasks requiring intentional effort and effective use of metacognitive skills--qualities that competent readers and writers possess. In response to these difficulties, special educators often modify literacy instruction, isolating the "basic skills" of literacy (such as decoding and penmanship) from meaningful reading and writing activities. Such instruction contributes to impoverished notions of literacy and exacerbates problems of metacognition. The two research programs reported here challenge the conventional literacy instruction provided to many young students with LD. The programs are rooted in developmental and cognitive theory and research, as well as emergent literacy theory. The social nature of learning is emphasized, with a focus on the role of the teacher, the form of discourse, and the role of text in literacy instruction. Results show that children with learning disabilities benefit from strategy instruction occurring within classroom cultures that support collaborative discourse, the flexible application of comprehension strategies, and appropriate, meaningful opportunities for reading and writing.

Concurrent cognitions during conversations: Protocol analysis as a means of exploring conversations

Identifying the cognitive activities that occur as individuals interact is critical to understanding conversational processes. Previous attempts to explore people's thoughts as they converse are inherently limited by an inability to tap into concurrent cognitions: those thoughts that occur simultaneously with listening and speaking. We propose and test a procedure to capture these concurrent thoughts by using netwoiied computers where individuals communicate with one another over terminals and simultaneously talk aloud their thoughts. Results demonstrate that this technique can offer evidence of cognitive activities such as inferencing and planning in conversation, as well as bolster the validity of certain conversational maxims that, up to now were assumed, but never actually demonstrated in collaborative discourse.

1 The foundations of classroom action‐research in initial teacher training

We cannot take it for granted that teachers will develop the disposition and skills to engage in self‐evaluation, and this paper stresses the importance of collaborative evaluation and discourse in the initial training course. Examples are given of how the action‐research process can enhance the understanding of specific teaching episodes. It is argued that such experience forms an important foundation for the future professional development of teachers. ‘If he is fortunate the young teacher will join the staff of a school which is engaged corporately in the task of self‐evaluation with all that it implies for collective debate and decision taking.’ (DES, 1981, 19)

A global model of neuronal command-control systems

In learning of the death of Lars Onsager, friend and great scholar, it seemed appropriate to us, as a small tribute to his memory and his interests, to present some ,of our speculations regarding the organization of the nervous system. We hope that this essay may provide useful insights into such organization. We offer it in full awareness that it represents an oversimplification of the problem at hand and that its global extent is much too broad to be considered critical. We write it, nevertheless, because we consider that on certain occasions a use of metaphors about the intrinsic processes in a complex system may offer more to human discourse and understanding than the more precise but often cryptic language of the specialist. A recent paper of ours (Iberall and Llinas, in press) presented a cybernetic view of command-control in complex living systems and offered some central ideas reached after a number of years of collaborative discourse. New advances in our biological and physical understanding, and further discussion, have led to the development of the following set of hypothetical theses for command-control in living systems, including memory. These theses are cast as a global model at the level of single cells. However, elaboration to the level of a brain, even a human brain, seems to us to be considerably simplified when the dynamic topology of the theses considered here are

Online Collaborative Discourse as a Form of Support for Students with Learning Difficulties in Mathematics

The present research study was carried out in an online learning environment in a small group of eighth-grade students. The research proposes a learning framework that relies on collaborative mathematical discourse with the intention to promote the reasoning ability of students with difficulties in mathematics. The aim of mathematical discourse is the reciprocal building of the ability of the learner with difficulties to provide explanations during the discourse between the learner and his peers and between the learner and the teacher. This type of learning was found to be effective, and the communicational continuum between the learner and the material and between the learner and the group is preserved. The learning process built on authentic mathematical tasks strengthened the learners’ ability to create communication among themselves. The discourse encouraged the development of mathematical thinking abilities among the learners with difficulties, such as posing arguments and drawing conclusions while explaining and justifying these arguments. The mathematical discourse also encouraged students to choose and to monitor the form and processes of their thinking and increased their problem-solving ability.