The Interpersonal Mode Classroom Discourse The Interpersonal Mode

Preview Questions

Classroom Discourse The interaction that occurs between teachers and students and among students in classrooms. Teachers and students construct and understanding of their roles and relationships, and the expectations for their involvement in the classroom. To be successful, students must develop the communicative competence to be successful in these roles.

What should they understand? How to listen or appear to listen at appropriate times How to take turns With whom it is appropriate to speak Identify the cues in the teacher’s talk that make apparent what it is they are to learn How to display their developing knowledge and skills in ways that are appropriate.

Interpersonal Mode There is a positive correlation between students’ involvement in their classroom interaction and their communicative development.

Pattern of Classroom interaction defines The communicative activities through which learning occurs Ways in which students are assessed Impact how students will participate in subsequent classroom activities and future educational events.

Initiation-Response-Evaluation (IRE) Typical of Western schooling K-University. Does not allow for complex ways of communicating between teacher and student Provides students limited opportunity to develop the skills needed to construct extended oral and written texts.

Decisions on Interaction Based on Pedagogical Beliefs Where teacher questions and comments are probing and open-ended, and students are allowed to ask questions and expand on the talk in addition to responding to the teacher, participation in classroom discourse will facilitate learning. Instructional conversation occurs.

Instructional conversation Focus is always on an intellectually challenging topic or theme of interest to students. All class members are highly involved. Teacher is the facilitator. Students are encouraged to produce intellectually challenging contributions and are supported by the teacher to articulate their thoughts and reasoning. Teacher helps students link their background experiences and prior knowledge to the discussion.

Communicative actions that facilitate students’ conceptual and communicative development Modeling – the communicative and cognitive behaviors that are needed are demonstrated to the students. Teachers talk about their own thinking demonstrating for students how to connect prior information to new information. Students can be provided with audio or video recordings of an activity they will perform. Modeling exposes students to words phrases and other linguistic cues they will need for an activity.

Feeding back Lets students know the standards (rubrics) with which students are being evaluated and how well they perform in relation to the standards. is descriptive provides a clear model of what is expected so students can understand how to improve their performance is timely, frequent and ongoing

Contingency Management Teacher makes clear the connections in the discussion Teacher keep the conversation going through the use of confirmations, comments (oh really, that’s interesting, well stated) Teachers help students construct a meaningful and intellectually meaningful conversation.

Orchestration of student talk Direct teaching – provide students with information Questioning – eliciting extended student discourse, helping students activate and make connections to background knowledge. Explaining- defining or illustrating the meaning of a concept or term, offering reason for some actions or beliefs, making the causes of an event clear.

Orchestration of Student Talk Task structuring- arranging tasks so that the what the students need to learn is clear, they are cognitively and communicatively accessible to learners. Tasks that are too easy can lead to frustration and lack of motivation just as tasks that are too hard can have the same result.

Teacher questions Are important for creating instructional conversations. The different kids of questions that teachers ask create supportive conditions for comprehension and participation. They help students move forward on the proficiency continuum.

Bloom’s Taxonomy Provides a useful framework for talking about the cognitive work that teacher's questions can stimulate in students. For World Language teachers Bloom’s taxonomy can serve as a framework for eliciting from students a range of linguistic, communicative, and cognitive skills.

Bloom’s Taxonomy as portrayed by the Pirates of the Caribbean

Probing questions While the taxonomy can help us vary the kinds of cognitive activity we ask students to engage in, there are additional types of questions that need to be considered. Probing questions push students to elaborate Can you elaborate?, How does that relate to what Sarah said?, How does that relate to your earlier comments? Can you say more?