Teacher talk, teaching philosophy, and effective literacy instruction in primary-grade classrooms.

摘要

Teachers inform, affect, and influence students daily through verbal interactions. In this interpretive study, four exemplary primary-grade literacy teachers in four elementary schools in Middle Tennessee were observed during typical literacy instruction and interviewed in order to connect their language (teacher talk) to their beliefs. The participants' responses to four teaching philosophy measurement tools were analyzed in order to understand how their teacher talk reflected their teaching philosophies and enhanced effective literacy instruction. Using multiple field observations, transcripts of classroom observations, individual open-ended interviews, a focus group interview web log, questionnaires, and memo-writing, this study investigated the relationships among teacher talk, teaching philosophy, and effective literacy instruction.;Based on the results from four teaching philosophy surveys, each teacher was assigned a three- to four-term label describing her philosophical orientations. All four teacher participants shared progressive philosophical orientations towards progressivism, cognitivism, and humanism. Constant comparison analysis revealed that the teachers in this study shared common language features. Of the many coding possibilities that emerged, 28 codes were common across data sets. These codes were collapsed into four major and three minor categories of teacher talk. The major categories in order of prevalence were Teacher Feedback, Task Focusing, Setting the Learning, and Closed Questions. The minor categories in order of prevalence were Agency-Building, Promoting Thought, and Connecting Learning . Social linguistic discourse analysis was utilized to integrate and analyze the observation, interview, and web log data. The analyses showed that teacher talk from the minor teacher talk categories reflected and supported the progressive philosophical beliefs of the participants. Findings from this study suggest concrete strategies for improving teacher education in literacy instruction.