Determining the Mechanics of Classroom Discourse in Vygotskian Sense: Teacher Discursive Moves Reconsidered

This study identified the accumulated distributions of the enacted discursive moves during classroom inquiry to demonstrate how a science teacher reacted to the existence of two mutually exclusive social languages: everyday social languages of the students vs. social languages of school science. The participants were a science teacher and 26 sixth-grade students. The major data source was the video recording that was analysed through systematic observation in two phases: coding and counting. It was concluded that challenging moves (playing the devil’s advocate role, asking for alternative explanations) were dispersed homogeneously throughout the streaming of the implementation. Challenging moves therefore served both dialogical and monological discursive purposes. Communicating moves (probing, embodying, requesting clarification) appeared mostly in the initial cycles of the negotiations, thus, serving dialogical purposes. The monitoring moves (ask about mind change, framing), the evaluating, judging and critiquing moves (reflective discourse) and presenting logical exposition moves (direct lecturing, narratives, verbal cloze) served more monological discursive purposes and appeared mostly in the latest cycles of the negotiations. The results are discussed in light of current research-based framings of classroom discourse. The outcomes of the study imply that science teachers should be engaged in longitudinal professional development programs in which, through self-reflection, they may develop a pedagogical-discursive lens to monitor their discursive moves’ wide-ranging genres and accumulated distributions for coping with two mutually exclusive social languages.