Encouraging students to participate in collaborative discourse allows students to constructively engage one another, share ideas, develop joint understanding of the course content, and practice making scientific arguments. Argumentation is an important skill for students to learn, but students need to be given the opportunity in class to engage in…

Background: Pedagogical agents are computerized talking heads or embodied animated avatars that help students learn by performing actions and holding conversations with the students in natural language. Dialogues occur between a tutor agent and the student in the case of AutoTutor and other intelligent tutoring systems with natural language…

This study examines how instructional conversations revealed the ways two teachers' argumentative epistemologies (ideational and social process) shaped literacy events focused on the warranting of evidence. A microethnographic study of the literacy events within each teacher's respective instructional unit revealed that each teacher's epistemology…

Teacher recognition of student argumentation has been addressed by many researchers (e.g., Schwarz, 2009; Krummheuer, 1995; Bieda & Lepak, 2014; Whitenack & Yackel, 2002). Further, standards for mathematics learning emphasize the importance of including argumentation in the K-12 classroom (NCTM, 2000; CCSS, 2010). The study reported here…

This paper explores the construction of classroom contexts facilitative of student engagement in Mathematics. Employing a form of discourse analysis framed within a participation approach to learning, the paper provides insights into the construction of such contexts. The affordances and constraints of constructing such a context are discussed in…

In this article, we focus on the contributions that a simulated jury-based activity might have for pre-service teachers, especially for their active participation and learning in teacher education. We observed a teacher educator using a series of simulated juries as teaching resources to help pre-service teachers develop their pedagogical…

Students' learning is assumed to be promoted through peer-group discussion. Most studies show the presence of qualitative improvements in either oral or written reasoning as a result of such interactions. However, knowledge on the relationship between talk qualities and text qualities is scarce. We adopt an explorative design using statistical…

Studies have shown an association between argumentative discourse in science class, better understanding of science concepts, and improved academic performance. However, there is lack of research on how argumentation can increase student motivation. This mixed methods concurrent nested study uses Bandura's construct of motivation and concepts of…

Dialogic talk, in which different ideas are considered, promotes conceptual understanding in science, and is in line with South Africa's school curriculum. The problem is that dialogic talk is difficult to facilitate and may run counter to cultural norms. As a result, classroom talk is often not dialogic. This paper reports on the nature of…

This paper discusses feedback for developing L2 writing. It presents data from a serendipitous audio-recording of one L2 master's student's tutorial with her dissertation supervisor at a UK university, which is extracted from a 13-month linguistic ethnography. Following "academic literacies" scholars, I view the tutorial as a…

The focus of the article is on the ideal of using dialogue to promote contact between school and home. The aim was to explore this ideal by taking into account both an observed interaction session and how the participants perceive this interaction. The study draws on data from observation of a meeting about a pupil with special needs and his…

Evidence suggests that a disconnect is growing between the information provided in Christian sermons and the life challenges faced by those church attendees. To bridge that divide, the purpose of this study was to better understand the characteristics of a sermon that enhance learning for churchgoers in Christian churches. The guiding question…

This article draws on M. M. Bakhtin's (1981) notion of dialogism to articulate what it means to understand a scientific idea. In science, understanding an idea is both conceptual and epistemic and is exhibited by an ability to use it in explanation and argumentation. Some distillation of these activities implies that dialogic understanding of a…