Researchers and educators have long recognized the role that oral discourse plays in fostering student learning. Historically, much of classroom instruction has relied on the Initiate-Respond-Evaluate (I-R-E) pattern of oral discourse.3 In this pattern, the teacher initiates discourse through asking a question, the student responds to the question, and the teacher evaluates the students' response, giving feedback through brief words and phrases such as great or not quite. This pattern of oral discourse, though prevalent in many educational settings, is associated with negative student outcomes when compared with oral discourse structures that enable students to share divergent opinions and hold sustained discussions. Under the recognition that oral discourse is important to learning outcomes, many researchers have studied how teachers can use discourse moves that promote sustained discussion among students. Though research has studied how K-12 teachers can use particular discourse moves to foster sustained student discussions in science, relatively little empirical research has studied how K-12 teachers can use discourse moves to foster student discussions related to engineering design, especially when these teachers are working with large populations of English learners. The purpose of this exploratory study was therefore to identify the discourse moves that two middle school teachers used to foster dialogic exchanges between their students, many of whom were English learners, as they engaged in engineering design activities.
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