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This thesis reports on a research project investigating how a sample of eight teachers of P2 children in Scotland encouraged dialogic interaction in their reading groups while following prescriptive policy. The research is based on a detailed analysis of the discourse of reading sessions conducted by the eight teachers, and is informed by previous research on oral language development, the role of dialogue in children’s learning, and the relationships between reading development and classroom discussion. The project uses mixed methods, applied to a framework derived from exchange structure research. Patterns of interaction have been examined quantitatively and qualitatively, with a particular focus on learners’ initiations, the making of text-life links by learners and teachers, and the extent to which these are integrated into the reading experience by the teachers’ use of contingent responses. The discourse analysis section of the findings is preceded by a preliminary examination of the teachers’ beliefs about classroom talk, and is followed by discussion of their views on the usefulness and adaptability of the research process itself as a means for enabling them to make their reading sessions more interactive. The project finds that the interactivity of the reading sessions is shaped by the teachers’ moment-by-moment decision-making about the control of centrifugal and centripetal forces in discourse; in particular, how far to allow children’s personal responses to the text to deflect group attention from the central goals of skill development and text coverage laid down by reading policy. The teachers reported their own experiences of teaching reading as being characterised by a tension between encouraging children’s personal engagement with, and responses to, reading material, and fulfilling the demands of a prescriptive curriculum within severe time constraints.

Thesis advisor: Katherine L. McNeill / Recent science education reform documents and standards, such as the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), call for school science to better reflect authentic scientific endeavors by highlighting the centrality of students engaging in science practices. This dissertation study focuses specifically on argumentation (through the modality of talk), one of the eight science practices emphasized in the NGSS. Although extensively studied, argumentation rarely occurs in classrooms. The absence of this science practice in classrooms is partly due to the student-driven exchanges required by argumentation differing greatly from the interactions that occur during traditional instruction, where students primarily speak to and through the teacher. To transform the type of talk that occurs in science classrooms it is necessary to examine discourse patterns, as well as the roles classroom members take on, in order to identify and develop strategies that can facilitate the shift in discourse norms. This dissertation employs a mixed-methods approach, using social network analysis (SNA), multiple case study methodology, and discourse analysis (DA), to deeply examine video recordings of three middle school classrooms engaged in argumentation through a science seminar (a type of whole class debate). Findings from the SNA highlight the importance of argumentation research integrating a focus on argument structure with dialogic interactions, and point to the benefits of using multiple types of representations to capture engagement in this science practice. Furthermore, examining the manner by which teachers articulated student expectations and goals for the argumentation activity suggest the need to continue supporting teachers in developing and using rich instructional strategies to help students with the dialogic component of argumentation. Additionally, this work sheds light on the importance of how teachers frame the goals for student engagement in this science practice, specifically as being either individual goals or communal goals. Lastly, findings from the DA stress the relationship between discourse patterns and interactional norms, and also suggest the need to expand our perspectives of who can prompt for critique during an argumentation activity.

Although there have been a large number of studies on the use of L1 and L2, there seem to be few on L1 use in Chinese university EFL classrooms, especially investigating the language use of those who teach English to students at different proficiency levels or teach different types of English courses. This thesis aims to analyze four Chinese EFL teachers’ actual use of L1 and L2, to understand their attitudes and beliefs regarding this issue, and their own perceptions of and reasons for their language use, and to explore possible influencing factors. The reading-and-writing lessons and the listening-and-speaking lessons of these four teachers, who were teaching non-English major students at four different levels, were observed and recorded. All the observed lessons were subjected to quantitative analysis with the aim of providing a clear picture of the distribution of their L1 and L2 use. Some episodes selected from these lessons were subjected to further detailed analysis, in order to provide an account of the circumstances, functions, and grammatical patterns of their language use, as well as their language use across different frames of classroom discourse. The teachers were interviewed subsequently about their general beliefs on the use of L1 in L2 teaching and learning. Separately, in a stimulated recall interview, they were invited to provide comments specifically on their language use in the selected episodes that were replayed to them. The quantitative findings show that the amount of the teachers’ L1 use was not necessarily closely related to their students’ English proficiency levels, although the teacher of the students at the lowest level used the highest amount of Chinese in her lessons. However, a noteworthy finding was that all four teachers used more Chinese in the reading-and-writing lessons than in the listening-and-speaking lessons, although with substantial individual variation. The qualitative analysis of classroom data indicates that these teachers switched often at unit boundaries, but rarely at clause boundaries. They also switched frequently within units, especially within noun phrases, and the ‘Chinese determiner + English noun’ pattern is the main one they had in common. Furthermore, the teachers used Chinese as the matrix language in their mixed utterances in most cases, and these mixed utterances nearly always fitted Myers-Scotton’s Morpheme Order principle and System Morpheme principle. The teachers were also found to use Chinese in a variety of circumstances, such as talking about lesson plans or examinations, dealing with exercises, analyzing text, teaching vocabulary, checking the students’ comprehension or retention, giving the students advice on learning, telling anecdotes and assigning homework. The functions for which they used Chinese could be divided into four main categories: facilitating developing lesson content; supporting students and carrying out classroom management; delivering information related to teaching agenda or examinations; and facilitating communication beyond language learning and teaching. The most frequent function common to all four teachers was translation. Furthermore, the study used four different ‘frames’ to analyze classroom discourse, and found that the teachers used the L1 with varying frequency across these frames. Moreover, although all four teachers believed that using the L1 was beneficial to L2 learning, their attitudes towards the medium of instruction were different. While two advocated using the L1, the other two expressed a preference for speaking English-only and perceived their L1 use as a compromise or an expedient. The teachers reported many reasons for their L1 use. The factors that affected their language use consisted of both immediate classroom factors, such as functions of utterances, students’ language use, students’ perceived mood, students’ background knowledge, the difficulty of lesson content, time limitations, teachers’ awareness of their own L1 use, and teachers’ state of mind at a particular moment in a lesson, and relatively static factors, such as the university policy, students’ L2 abilities, teaching objectives, teachers’ beliefs regarding L1 use, and teachers’ L2 abilities. Through its detailed analysis of the teachers’ language use, as well as their relevant beliefs and decision-making, this thesis hopes to make a contribution to L2 teachers’ professional development and L2 teaching, especially in helping to establish a pedagogically principled approach to L1 and L2 use.

Mathematics education studies have shown that part of learning mathematics is learning its language. The language of mathematics is said to include specialised terms and ordinary language terms that have contextual meanings in mathematics. Considering the fact that learners in South Africa are performing poorly in mathematics in the international comparative studies, e.g. TIMSS, there was a need to investigate how teachers facilitate second language learners’ access to the meaning of mathematical terms in multilingual classrooms in South Africa. This study investigated a teacher’s practices in the facilitation of learner access to mathematical terminology in a Grade 11 multilingual class in a township school in Vosloorus, South Africa. The study employed a qualitative approach in investigating Discourse practices that the teacher used to define mathematical terms to second language learners in a multilingual classroom. Direct classroom observations and a teacher interview were the main data gathering methods. The main findings were that the teacher used a combination of interactive practices that involved group work, telling, individual student interactions and initiation, response and evaluation methods. Among definition teaching strategies used were the textbook procedural definition and the textbook descriptive definitions. The chalkboard and the textbook were the main artefacts of the Definition Discourse. The study concludes that the Definition Discourse of the multilingual classroom is a process that involves not only the definition of terms but also an integration of teaching methods and interactive practices where definitions of mathematical terms can be taught even through the eliciting of procedural methods of working out mathematical problems.

Philosophiae Doctor - PhD / The study set out to investigate siding and translanguaged siding as an under-researched student-to-student communication which happen parallel to teaching. Lemke (1990) defines siding as student-to-student talk while the teacher is teaching, and Antia (2017) defines ‘translanguaged siding’ as student-to-student talk in a language or combination of languages that is different from the LoLT. In this way, siding encapsulates ‘translanguaged siding’.

This is a compilation thesis consisting of three different articles with the purpose to explore the relationships between language practices, identity construction and learning in the context of the Vehicle Program, a vocational program in Swedish upper secondary schools. A feature of the particular setting studied here that sets it apart from the general education of auto mechanics in Sweden is that it was carried out in English. The study focuses on language practices within a community of practice where the norms for second language use, gender arrangements and identity work are negotiated in conversations between students and between students and teachers. The language practices are considered as talk-in-interaction, and identity construction and learning are understood as processes in socially situated activities. The study was conducted through an ethnographic approach, including observation, field notes, approximately 200 hours of video recorded interactions, and interviews with students and teachers. The recorded interactions were analysed using tools from conversational analysis and methods focusing on linguistic activities and interactional patterns. An eclectic approach combining linguistic ethnography, ethnometodological conversation analysis and socio-cultural theory of learning, in particular the concept of communities of practice, form the basis of the theoretical framework. The findings in study I highlight that language alternations are repeatedly used in the workshop as a meta-language to play around with language, which relates to emerging communicative strategies that also produces – and helps contest – local language norms. Study III suggests that teasing in students’ peer relations are not only disruptive, off-task behavior, thereby rendering them important only from a classroom management perspective. Teasing, this study proposes, should rather be seen as an organizing principle by which the students are able to position themselves in relation to an institutionally established language ideology. Study II focuses on how participants invoke and renegotiate conventional forms of masculinity tied to the ability of handling tools. Such micro-processes illuminate how gender is a constantly shifting social category that is done, redone and possibly undone. The findings suggest that new forms of auto mechanic student identities are formed that challenge current dominant discourses about what a mechanic should be.

This study aims to explore power asymmetry in the organisation of teacher-student interaction by looking at turn-taking systems and the restriction of participants. This is achieved by combining the frameworks institutional discourse, conversation analysis (CA) and critical discourse analysis (CDA) and by looking at sequences of teacher-student interactions at seminars. The study encompasses analyses of classroom discourse at university level and uses data culled from the Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English, MICASE. These data are analysed in relation to turn-taking systems and power asymmetry (i) to explore how teachers organise their classroom talk in terms of the allocation of turns, sanctions and control over the discourse and (ii) to determine to what extent teacher-student interactions show signs of power asymmetry. The results show that the teachers control the classroom discourse in a number of ways. Firstly, the analysis shows that the participatory roles of “teacher” and “student” have different claims to power and that these roles are more or less restricted by the design of the turn-taking system in place. Secondly, the teachers are found to organise the discourse in turn-taking systems that have implicit rules. Thirdly, the teachers not only have greater participation rights, but also greater control over the students’ participation rights, as witnessed by the fact that the students get disciplined if they break the rules of the system.