Teacher talk: An analysis of salient features in the classroom discourse of effective teachers during primary literacy lessons.

摘要

Educational research substantiates that teacher communications play a key role in influencing students' academic motivation and achievement. This study explored the classroom discourse of effective primary teachers to determine communication patterns (including motivational constructs, such as control, competency, and attributions) extant during literacy instruction. Heeding the call for extended research of motivational constructs within contextualized experiences, the study's qualitative design included observing and analyzing teacher-student interaction via a classroom discourse methodology. The researcher was a nonparticipant observer who collected data via observation, notes, videotaping, questionnaires, and interviews in order to analyze the classroom discourse of second-grade teachers identified as effective by their building principals. The researcher coded the lesson transcripts and managed them using the Ethnograph computer software program. Of the many coding possibilities that emerged, 20 codes were common across data files. These codes were collapsed into five literacy-oriented categories: Community Building, Expectation of Participation, Task Focusing, Strategy Building, and a Process Perspective. Teacher Feedback, Stylistic Structures, and Attribution Interactions were also analyzed as code categories. Results indicate that these teachers actively established literacy communities in their classrooms and via their verbiage encouraged their students to participate as responsible and contributing members of those communities. Transcripts indicated that these teachers' talk focused students on literacy tasks, modeled literacy strategies, and provided a process perspective to literacy that framed the lessons. In addition, the data evidenced common teacher feedback patterns and linguistic styles, including the specific questioning patterns. Analysis of the motivational aspects of the teachers' talk indicated that the classroom discourse included many salient features aligned with current theories of academic motivation, although attributional dialogue, an initial focus of the study, was not predominant. The data supported the mastery-oriented, self-regulated, social-learning concepts of current motivational theories. The study rendered a profile of how effective second-grade teachers communicated to students about the literacy-learning process. The shareable insights gleaned from the study may enlighten teachers, teacher supervisors, and teacher trainers regarding the multifarious nature of current literacy instruction and contribute to an effective teacher-talk schema that may serve to increase effective instruction.