Instructional Conversations Research Articles

Inclusion of home languages during early childhood instructional conversations

Including home languages in classrooms can increase multilingual students’ participation, improve literacy, and promote inclusion. It is a prevalent topic at academic conferences; however, home language use in classrooms is less common. This study was a microanalysis of home language use during Instructional Conversations at a linguistically diverse English-medium preschool. Data sources included 27 h of classroom videos of Instructional Conversations and interviews with educators who used children's home languages. Home language use during Instructional Conversations was rare in these data; however, when employed, it was followed by increased participation by the multilingual children, facilitating language and concept development. These findings indicate a need for explicit educator preparation on home language use in classrooms. Educators in this study who used children's home languages adopted alternative discourse patterns than those traditionally found in schools. They reported being motivated by the increased participation of multilingual children and positive responses from families.

Instructional Conversations for Equitable Participation to Challenge Deficit Views of Pidgin in Hawai‘i

ABSTRACT Hawaiʻi Creole, known as “Pidgin,” developed when speakers of various languages came to the islands as plantation workers and their children grew up speaking Pidgin. Discrimination toward Pidgin influenced language policies that marginalized Pidgin and its speakers. This study focused on four teachers’ perspectives of Pidgin and its marginalization and use in classrooms. The educators were engaged in professional development on small group discussion. Data sources included transcripts of discussions about Pidgin and its use in the classroom, teachers’ written reflections, and comments on each other’s reflections. Results indicated that the teachers observed the perpetuation of negative views about Pidgin. One teacher recounted that she initially appropriated these negative ideas, but changed her views while in college. Although some were initially unsure about Pidgin’s role in their classrooms, by the end of the professional development they appeared to have positive views about promoting all of their students’ linguistic repertoires.

Advancing Instructional Leadership: Instructional Coaching Skills Development Through Mixed Reality Experiences

Educational leadership preparation programs are tasked with advancing the development of future educational leaders’ instructional capacities, including the ability to engage teachers in instructional conversations through instructional coaching. The educational leadership program studied here includes a mixed reality experience designed to develop future educational leaders’ instructional coaching conversation skills. Therefore, the purpose of this research study was to examine future educational leaders’ perceptions of the development of instructional coaching conversation skills because of participation in the mixed reality experience. Findings indicated that, overall, participants held positive views of the mixed reality experience in supporting their development of instructional coaching conversation skills. Additionally, participants indicated development of other skills including, on-the-spot thinking, confidence, and reflection, among other skills. Results suggest that mixed reality experiences provide authentic, realistic learning opportunities to develop instructional leadership capacities.

Code Switching as a Teaching and Learning Strategy: Opinions and Perceptions of University-Level Students of French as a Foreign Language (FFL) in Ghana

The ongoing debate on code switching (CS) in multilingual societies and Foreign Language (FL) classes is still relevant and worth considering. This linguistic phenomenon simply refers to altering from one language to another during speech and writing (Richards and Schmidt 2013). While some authorities propose that interactions between learners and instructors in the FL class be carried out only in the target language, other opinions favour a careful blend of both target and source languages. Ghana, a multilingual country in West Africa, adopted English as its official language during the colonial era. French was later introduced to promote regional integration among Ghana and her neighbours, especially since Ghana is greatly surrounded by francophone countries within the subregion (Gandolfi et al. 2021). French has since then been the second most widely taught FL in the country, with a presence in almost all stages of the Ghanaian academic trajectory. This multilingual position of Ghana makes it common to find elements of CS present in FL classrooms, where both instructors and learners occasionally resort to English for instructional conversations (Chachu 2016). This study focuses on university students’ perceptions of CS between English as the source language and French as a foreign language (FFL) during the instruction of the latter. Some frameworks for teaching and learning FFL in Ghana prefer that the language of instruction and interaction be limited to the target language only (Soku and Azanku 2015). The Common European Framework of References for Languages (CEFR) however, suggests the possible use of CS for purposes of instruction when there are favourable conditions (Council of Europe 2001). To identify the roles of CS and investigate FL students’ opinions on this, our data was gathered from classroom observations and questionnaires that had both Likert scale and open-ended questions. This was at the end of their first semester of studying university-level FFL. It was observed that CS plays a significant role in the understanding of linguistic concepts and greatly improves students’ engagement and participation in the FL class. Of the 36 respondents, 34 felt their academic needs were met when the language of instruction and interaction alternated between French and English. Twenty-nine students reported losing focus easily in the FFL class in instances where the medium of interaction was limited to French alone, while 26 reported feeling nervous whenever they were asked to only communicate in French. For metalinguistic aspects of the language, 33 students, constituting 91.7% were of the view that a careful blend of English and French could go a long way to aid their understanding and foster the learning of grammatical concepts. Generally, students attested to better retention of vocabulary in the target language when there was a good blend of both languages. It is recommended therefore that language instructors resort periodically to CS to ensure understanding and engagement from students. CS also helps learners have the opportunity to intervene with their limited linguistic structures when they are faced with linguistic challenges in the FL classroom. Click here to read the corresponding ISSOTL blog post.

Creating equitable spaces for all learners: Transforming classrooms through biography-driven instructional conversations

This paper employs positive discourse analysis to explore the discourse practices of grade-level teachers at a diverse elementary school. It examines how discourse was used to invite and nurture learners’ willingness to share about and maximize the sociocultural and linguistic dimensions of their biographies. Two episodes of instructional conversation are used to illustrate how formal text properties of instructional conversations as well as social practices of the classroom influenced discourse and instantiated culturally responsive/sustaining pedagogy. Among findings, the discourse was found to position students as knowledgeable and capable, with use of mediation tools and teachers’ situational responsiveness emerging as pivotal instructional practices. Results highlighted the benefits of biography-driven discourse for culturally and linguistically diverse learners and illustrated the potential of positive discourse analysis to advance social transformation.

Contingency and Multimodal Communication in the Learning Environment

From a Vygotskian (1997) theoretical perspective, teachers and learners, of necessity, need to listen and respond to one another in a meaningful way, which, significantly, entails some form of role reversal (i.e., student as teacher and teacher as student). van Lier (1996) furthered this approach in relation to second language (L2) classroom environments, emphasizing the need for conversational symmetry between students and teacher so that participation by all includes contributing individual and collective thoughts and experiences in relation to the content of a lesson, or ‘contingent interaction’, which van Lier also based on a similar approach: Instructional Conversation. Furthermore, van Lier linked his perspective to Vygotsky’s (1987) central premise that language (signs) constitutes the primary mediational tool with which we navigate ourselves and the world, which includes not only meaning (znachenie) but sense (smysl), and as applied in the case of the current study to L2 immigrant children growing up in a multilingual society. Moreover, although Vygotsky had recognized the role of proto-gesture (e.g., an infant reaching for an object that is then brought by an adult) as perhaps the earliest form of semiotic mediation, he did not concentrate on nonverbal forms of mediation, nor did van Lier. However, the current research hopes to demonstrate that speech together with nonverbal forms of communication, especially in combination (multimodal ensembles) can constitute an important aspect of creating L2 contingent interaction, and following van Lier, as connected to the Zone of Proximal Development. Additionally, emotional development (Perezhivanie) as tied to contingency and as an aspect of cooperative social relations is given treatment. Data for the study come from a second-grade classroom of L2 learners of English engaged in a read-aloud lesson directed towards L2 language and literacy development.

Triggering STEM interest with Minecraft in a hybrid summer camp.

We investigated the application of Minecraft in the context of both in-person and hybrid summer camps for informal science learning. Our work focuses on determining the ways in which digital game-based learning experiences can act as triggers of interest in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Campers were invited to explore simulations of hypothetical versions of Earth (e.g., What if the Moon did not exist?), make observations of how these worlds are different from our own, and build habitats suitable for survival on these and other alien worlds. Multiple forms of data, including field notes, interviews, game log data, and in-game knowledge assessments, suggest that many different aspects of the game and informal learning contributed to interest development. In particular, learners were found to have their interest triggered by various in-game and contextual aspects of the learning experiences, such as instructional conversation, novelty, ownership, and challenge. These interest triggers remained constant across in-person and remote camp settings with no consistent differences emerging between the two settings.

Literacy (Dis)Orientations in a Secondary Classroom: Possibilities and Limits of an IntersectionalLGBTQ+‐Inclusive Curriculum

AbstractDrawing from a yearlong literacy ethnography conducted at a high school in a Midwestern U.S. city, this article extends queer literacies and queer pedagogies scholarship by exploring the frictions and resonances between strategies of inclusion and queering. While inclusion strategies emphasize using expanded representations of sexuality and gender, such as of LGBTQ+ life, queering approaches often trouble inclusion through, for instance, questioning normativities and epistemologies and embracing partiality, uncertainty, and crisis in learning. To unpack interconnections between inclusion and queering, I present an ethnographic case of a lesson in a sophomore humanities course, focusing on the teacherly moves of an English language arts educator leading an instructional conversation about a nonfiction article describing intersections among sexuality, gender, race, ethnicity, and class with respect to food insecurity. Engaging Ahmed's (2006) queer theorization of orientations, I develop the heuristic ofliteracy (dis)orientationsto describe the layered mixture of classroom literacy performances challenging and reifying oppressive values regarding intersections among sexuality, gender, race, ethnicity, and class. The teacher disoriented students away from (homo)normativities regarding knowledge of LGBTQ+ communities and reoriented them toward and around nuanced, intersectional understandings of queer and trans life. However, these anti‐oppressive possibilities were limited by orientations around a banking model of education and binaries. This ethnographic case suggests that educators sanctioning literacy orientationstowardintersectional LGBTQ+‐inclusive curriculum presents possibilities for liberatory social change insofar as they disorient students away from education‐as‐banking and epistemological binaries and reorient themaroundalternative ways of knowing, specifically intersectionality as a queering epistemology.

Argumentative Writing as an Epistemic Practice in Middle School Science

This study explores one teacher's instructional method for teaching life sciences using argumentation and argumentative writing rather than simple templates for writing claims and evidence. The microethnographic discourse analytic case study reported here included the teacher and 26 “advanced” eighth-grade students in a suburban middle school. Nine consecutive video-recorded lessons and related data were analyzed, focusing on how the teacher and students constructed the theory of evolution during instructional conversations about evidence and reasoning and about the content of students’ written arguments on the theory. The teacher created a context in which students developed arguments with teacher support to ensure that they were learning to use argumentation as a heuristic to understand concepts and to engage in argumentative practice central to doing science. The modes of participation of two case study students are contrasted to explore two different trajectories and to examine particular cases of writing a lab report.

Exploring young children’s argumentation as a heuristic intertextual practice

Argumentation is a fundamental communicative ability that children develop over time through formal schooling and daily practice with peers and family members. Literature on children's argumentation appears to have focused on their social interactions out of school, clinical environment, or informal pedagogic contexts. Even though there are research inquiries into children’s argumentation in formal academic learning, many have been focused on argumentative writing in math or science classes. Much less is known about teacher-led argumentation and the youngest children's emerging argumentation in language art classes, where argumentation is formally and systematically introduced and learned. This paper reports a year-long ethnographic study on argumentation in a first-grade English language art classroom in the United States. Ethnographic discourse analysis was conducted to analyze two key literacy events from the daily reader's and writer's workshop. It is supplemented with qualitative analysis of the researchers' field notes and the students' artifacts. Our findings highlight the inherent intertextual nature of children’s argumentation and a critical role the teacher played in eliciting and steering the children’s argumentation construction through strategic instructional conversations (especially accountable talk). Our findings also revealed teacher-led children’s intertextual argumentation as a powerful heuristic process and tool to enrich students’ learning. The paper concludes some classroom argumentation teaching practices based on the research findings.

Facilitating Culturally Responsive Teaching Through Online Courses and Coaching

Teacher professional development and education programs are enhancing job-embedded experiences to address the disparity between theory and implementation. Simultaneously, higher education is now offering online courses to attract geographically distant educators, especially in high-needs fields such as teaching English Learners and Culturally and Linguistically Diverse students. There is a need to investigate what online teacher professional development and education programs can do to promote teachers’ application of what they learn. This pilot study utilized the Inventory of Situationally and Culturally Responsive Teaching (ISCRT) to investigate 23 in-service teachers’ culturally responsive teaching (CRT) practices before and after receiving online coursework and coaching. When compared to the control group, treatment teachers’ scores on four of the five ISCRT standards—Joint Productive Activity, Language and Literacy Development, Challenging Activities, and Instructional Conversations—as well as the composite were statistically significant. Findings suggest online CRT coursework with complementary instructional coaching supports teachers’ implementation of new knowledge and pedagogy.

Cultivating an online teacher community of practice around the instructional conversation pedagogy: a social network analysis

Cultivating an online teacher community of practice around the instructional conversation pedagogy: a social network analysis

Literacy practices as social: relational-keys in literacy events

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to work toward more fully conceptualizing literacy practices as social by theorizing the combined relational and intellectual context for learning. This context is created through students’ and their teachers’ uses of language. In particular, the quality of language that creates this intellectual relational context is relational-keys that are inherent to any talk between people. Building upon Hymes (1974) conceptualization of key, relational-keys can be described as the emotional mood or spirit of a conversation, but they are much more than that per se. They are constitutive of the complex, multi-layered relationships that people have with each other, with themselves and with the material environment through their uses of language.Design/methodology/approachDrawing upon a classroom ethnographic study in a first-grade classroom and using discourse analysis of classroom interactions, the author uses data from instructional conversations to illustrate how students and their teachers collaboratively perform relational-keys.FindingsFindings reveal that students and their teacher perform relational and intellectual stances toward reading and toward each other through relational-keys, that frame the act of reading and their experience of doing it together.Originality/valueThe concept of relational-key provides literacy researchers with another tool to analyze what happens in instructional conversations. It also provides teachers with a curricular resource to identify relational-keys that are enacted. Therefore, teachers are able move away from the enaction of relational-keys that contribute to subtractive schooling, and toward relational-keys that nurture empowering stances in students toward reading and their relationships.

Promoting Conceptual Development of the Second Conditional in the Classroom Zone of Proximal Development

Drawing on Vygotsky’s Sociocultural Theory (SCT) and the theory of Instructional Conversation (IC), this study explores the development of L2 learners’ understanding of the second conditional during an IC in an online teaching video made by Macmillan Learning Teaching Education. During the IC, the instructor leads students toward a conceptual understanding of the second conditional by providing appropriate mediation sensitive to the class’s zone of proximal development (ZPD). The transcripts of the IC are analyzed with regard to the amount and type(s) of instructional mediation and the development opportunities created in this type of collaborative interaction. The analysis demonstrates the conceptual and linguistic development among the students in terms of the second conditional and shows the value of IC in creating a ZPD to promote L2 conceptual and linguistic development. In addition, this study raises the awareness of the value of online teaching videos in Sociocultural Theory and teacher education.

Composing Literary Arguments in an 11th Grade International Baccalaureate Classroom: How Classroom Instructional Conversations Shape Modes of Participation

In U.S. secondary schools there is an overriding emphasis on formulaic approaches to argumentative writing instruction in English language arts that tends to trivialize disciplinary norms of argument and evidence because of institutional pressure to bolster students’ test performances.  This paper seeks to provide an ethnographically-informed framework for understanding for whom, how, when, and to what extent it is possible for students to participate, through writing, in the study of literature as the central disciplinary content of English language arts. The corpus of data used in this study of an 11th grade International Baccalaureate (IB) classroom (26 students) consisted of classroom instruction (video-recordings and field notes) that occurred across an initial instructional unit (September 8th to November 3rd). Of particular importance is a summative writing assignment, teacher interviews and collaborative data analysis (with video clips), student interviews about instruction and their writing, samples of student writing, and related documents. We also analyzed two essays written by the two case study students in response to a writing assignment that the teacher, described as an IB “literary commentary with an unspecified topic” that she reframed as a literary argument. Discourse analysis of a series of events within instructional conversations revealed that rather than prescribed forms, the teacher offered “possible” writerly moves for her students’ arguing to learn. Consequently, her students enacted their writerly moves in a variety of patterns suggestive of disciplinary ways of knowing in English language arts rather than in a pre-set formula that they had learned in previous grades. In order to trace how the students enacted modes of participation (procedural display and deep participation) in disciplinary activity (literary argumentation) as writing practices and shifting writer identities  we also conducted a multi-phased and multi-layered analysis using procedures based off of previous intertextual analysis scholarship and backward mapping processes.

Improving Reading Comprehension and Speaking Performance of the Eight Graders Using ICM

The aim of this experimental study was to investigate whether or not there were significant improvements in students’ reading comprehension and speaking performance after being taught by using Instructional Conversation Method. This study also aimed to see the significant difference in reading and speaking achievements between the students who got the treatment and those who did not. Sixty eight eighth graders with the same reading level were selected as the sample and were divided equally into experimental and control groups. Pretest and posttest were given to both groups, but the treatment was only for the experimental group. The data obtained from reading comprehension and speaking pretest and posttests in both groups were analyzed by using paired and independent sample t-tests. The result showed that after the students were taught by using ICM there were significant improvements in their reading and speaking achievements. There were also significant differences in reading and speaking achievements between both groups. In conclusion, ICM could help students improve their reading comprehension and speaking performance.

Instructional Conversations: A Novel Approach to Patient Activation and Engagement of the Adolescent and Young Adult with Congenital Heart Disease

Instructional Conversations: A Novel Approach to Patient Activation and Engagement of the Adolescent and Young Adult with Congenital Heart Disease

Learning Opportunities about Teaching Mathematics: A Longitudinal Case Study of School Leaders’ Influence

Background/ContextWhen new, rigorous standards are adopted, teachers often need to learn new content and new ways of teaching while concurrently attending to accountability demands. Both formal and informal school structures potentially enable this new learning, and school leaders likely influence the nature of these structures.Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of StudyWe examine teachers’ learning opportunities in one school by asking the following research questions: (1) What is the nature of changes in teachers’ formal learning opportunities, as seen by changes in teachers’ workgroup conversations about mathematics instruction? (2) In what ways do school leaders shape the nature of instructional conversations, and thus formal learning opportunities, in teacher workgroups? (3) What is the nature of changes in teachers’ informal opportunities to learn, as seen by shifts in informal advice networks?Research DesignThis is a longitudinal case study using mixed methods: qualitative analysis of audio-recorded teacher workgroup meetings and quantitative analysis of informal social networks.Data Collection and AnalysisThis analysis is a part of a larger eight-year longitudinal study, the Middle-school Mathematics and the Institutional Setting of Teaching (MIST). Data used in this analysis were collected over a three-year period in one middle school that was working to improve mathematics instruction by focusing on teaching mathematics conceptually and building procedural fluency. Data used in this analysis include audio-recorded teacher workgroup meetings, informal social network surveys, interview transcripts, and student-level standardized test scores.Findings/ResultsWe found that formally, school leaders shifted teachers’ workgroup conversations away from instructional matters to those of standardized tests. Informally, teachers stopped going to each other for instructional advice. Triangulating interview data confirmed that over time, pressure that teachers felt to do well on the standardized tests shifted their attention away from a conceptual approach to instruction and toward an emphasis on test preparation.Conclusions/RecommendationsOur findings suggest that school leaders must be involved in new learning about standards and instruction to appropriately support teachers’ learning opportunities.

The Effects on Instructional Conversations on English Language Learners

The Effects on Instructional Conversations on English Language Learners

Developing English Supplementary Materials through Instructional Conversations

This study aimed to develop English supplementary materials to meet the needs of nursing students on English learning through Instructional Conversation (IC) method. This research was categorized into research and development. The materials were validated by two experts to come to the final product. This research conducted at the Nursing Study Program involving students of the second semester. The data collected from classroom and checklist observation, questionnaire, an interview. Considering the data collected, the English textbooks available and used in the Nursing Study Program contains English language learning materials that are still common and less specific for students used in the nursing study program. Therefore, English supplementary materials through Instructional Conversation (IC) method should be developed by considering the needs of lecturers and students. English supplementary materials through the Instructional Conversation method were developed by considering several aspects.