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Article Excerpt
Abstract. This study examined the nature of student talk and the teacher's role during book discussions. The participants were 17 first- and second-graders with and without disabilities in an inner-city inclusion classroom. Applied conversation analysis techniques were employed to analyze two videotaped book discussions. Results indicated that student-selected topics and contingent talk were necessary for fluent conversational discourse. Additionally, the teacher's role was crucial in apprenticing students to deal with a novel participant structure and its attendant complex linguistic and cognitive requirements. Results also demonstrated the competence with which students with disabilities assumed influential and decisive roles in the discussions. Implications for students with disabilities are discussed in terms of opportunities for self-expression and involvement in constructing and negotiating the activity.
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Conversation, whether ordinary or institutional, can be defined as "talk-in-interaction" (Schegloff, 1989) that must be negotiated with others to be effective. Institutional conversation typically possesses institution-specific goals and structures (Silverman, 2001), exemplified in school classrooms by the traditional initiation-response-evaluation pattern (I-R-E) (Mehan, 1979). However, an increasing awareness among educators of the social, as well as academic, aspects of cognition has resulted in increased use of a more reciprocal model of classroom conversation that emphasizes student participation leading to autonomy and empowerment in classroom interaction.
Learning more conversation-like patterns of classroom talk presents difficulties for some children. For example, young children are developmentally unprepared to handle conversational skills such as topic-sharing. Children from economically disadvantaged backgrounds typically have not participated in conversations with their caregivers to the same extent as middle-class students, and thus exhibit fewer conversational skills (Bloom, 1998). Further, children with disabilities, including many who have language and learning disabilities, often display expressive and receptive communication difficulties, are less engaged in social interactions than their general education counterparts, and tend to experience greater difficulty with the pragmatics of conversational discourse (Alves & Gottlieb, 1986; Mathinos, 1991; McIntosh, Vaughn, Schumm, Haager, & Lee, 1993).
Insufficient research attention has been given to the ways in which children are active in the teaching-learning process (Biemiller & Meichenbaum, 1998; Stone, 1998). For example, the promotion of conversational skills to increase student autonomy and self-regulation, in particular, has generally not been emphasized in classroom research. Yet, in the area of the language arts, there has been increasing recognition that students' participation in book discussions may have positive influences on the acquisition of higher-order thought and mental processes (Raphael, Pardo, Highfield, & McMahon, 1997) as well as the development of conversational skills.
This study examined the processes by which first- and second-grade students were supported to become more proficient in literary conversations. The focus of this research was a group of students with language and learning disabilities (LLD) for whom participation in conversations about literature is often a challenge.
Effective Literature Discussions
The conception of what literate performance means has broadened, since "state and national frameworks emphasize substantive goals such as understanding the purposes and features of different kinds of narrative texts (narrative, informative, persuasive) and understanding the meaning of sophisticated literary concepts such as imagery, metaphor, and point of view" (Morocco, Hindin, Mata-Aguilar, & Clark-Chiarelli, 2001, p. 47). Thus, students are expected to make inferences about character motivation, recognize a wide range of text genres, apply a theme to a literary text, describe their own responses to a text, engage in literary reasoning, and provide evidence to support an interpretation (Marzano & Kendall, 1995; Morocco, Cobb, & Hindin, 2002; Morocco et al., 2001). Many of these interpretative strategies and reasoning abilities are the focus of literature discussion frameworks employed in schools (Raphael et al., 1997).
Four fundamental processes are necessary for students to participate effectively in literature discussions. First, literary response requires the acquisition of new language and interpretive skills (see Barnes, 1993; Englert, Tarrant, Mariage, & Oxer, 1994; Gee, 1992; Lemke, 1987; Wells, 1999). These skills include knowledge of the interpretative responses and stances to texts used by skilled readers, including those that are (a) text-based (knowledge of genre or story grammar, as well as responses sequencing events, summarizing, and understanding character motivation); (b) reader-based (personal experience, feelings or affect, putting self in situation); and (c) author-based (understanding author's craft, motive) (Raphael et al., 1997). These requirements offer particular challenges for students with LLD, who have problems generating multiple interpretations of a text, engaging in story comprehension, understanding or using metaphor, moving beyond literal interpretations to share personal feelings and experiences, evaluating text, and drawing on multiple sources of information (Goatley, 1997; Idol & Croll, 1987; Kuder, 2003; Wiig & Semel, 1984).
A second set of processes for effective discussions involves shifts in the structure of power and authority. That is, the teacher does not remain in the position of ultimate "cognitive authority," but gradually shifts responsibility to students for employing interpretative strategies, as well as for asking questions, clarifying meanings, and justifying and evaluating answers. In such mutually constituted discussions, students have power to shape the direction of the discourse as they are called upon to introduce topics and questions, build on one another's ideas, finish each other's incomplete sentences, and struggle to understand unfamiliar ideas and perspectives (Barnes, 1993). From time to time, students' talk may sound tentative and cognitively uncertain, but these are the occasions when their ideas and perspectives can be developed, synthesized, shaped or opposed, as they construct and reconstruct ideas in the context of the thinking of the entire group (John-Steiner & Meehan, 2000). Simultaneously, through participation in challenging discussions, students come to know they have the capability to undertake the rigorous work of intellectual inquiry. The goal of book discussions is to internalize thought and interpretative response, but in order to achieve that end, a supportive context must be created that furthers students' opportunities and abilities to observe, communicate, and receive feedback on their literary thoughts, decisions, and choices.
A third set of processes for furthering the participation of students in literature discussions involves the use of specific teaching processes that support the advancement of students' interpretative skills and discussion performance. An apprenticeship model, with its concomitant emphases on modeling, coaching, and gradually transferring control to students for implementing and regulating interpretative strategies in book discussions, has been found to be an important basis for the successful instruction and self-regulated use of cognitive strategies in a number of literacy contexts, such as reading (Palincsar, 1986; Palincsar & Brown, 1989; Palincsar, Brown, & Campione, 1993; Vaughn, Gersten, & Chard, 2000) and writing (Baker, Gersten, & Graham, 2003; Englert & Dunsmore, 2002; Harris, Graham, & Mason, 2003). A high level of responsiveness is typical of the teacher who uses the talk of students to assess current states of knowledge, and then makes contingent and scaffolded responses based upon those assessments in order to nudge students' development beyond extant levels of performance (Goldenberg, 1993; Stone, 2002). For students with LLD, it is especially important that teachers offer graduated assistance and a hierarchy of support based on what students know and need to know about the text, the interpretative strategies, or the discussion process (Kuder, 2003; Stone, 1998, 2002). At the same time, teachers cannot simply teach and regulate the use of interpretative strategies; they must relinquish control of the strategies and the discussions in a developmentally responsive process based upon the emergent skills and knowledge of students (Wiencek & O'Flahavan, 1994). In short, in book discussions, there is an inherent tension between the need to retain control of classroom activity and, at the same time, transfer control of book discussions and interpretative strategies to students (O'Flahavan, Stein, Weincek, & Marks, 1992).
Fourth, to actively participate in literature discussions, students must also develop the ability to follow and respond to the prior speakers' utterances by employing a combination of listening, speaking, and communication strategies. When discussions go well, they involve coherent talk in the same way that Applebee (1996) suggests that curriculum is conversational, in that students discover "interrelationships that ... echo back on one another" providing "not only new contexts for exploring or redefining the established topic, but new perspectives on other elements in the conversation, and on the topic itself" (p. 76-77). Good discussions, therefore, have a coherent, recursive, and reciprocal pattern of initiating and responding to utterances that promote the deeper involvement of speakers in meaning-construction activity.
There are two types of conversational coherence that students must acquire (Almasi, O'Flahaven, & Arya, 2001). Intertopic coherence involves the ability of speakers to select, introduce, and sequence old and new topics to smoothly and logically connect and transition between speakers and topics. Intratopic coherence allows speakers to provide depth to the discussion of particular topics by engaging in strategies such as recalling information from prior topics to enhance the current topic, using elaborations to demonstrate an individual's understanding or contribute to the telling of a story (Duran & Szymanski, 1995), providing evaluations that demonstrate effective management of the activity, drawing on personal experience, or making intertextual links to elaborate the discussion.
Difficulties of Students with Language and Learning Disabilities with Regard to Managing and Maintaining Coherent Conversations
Despite the emphasis on instructional conversations in the educational literature (Goldenberg, 1993), teachers and students with LLD face several dilemmas related to managing and maintaining coherent conversations. Thus, in addition to the necessity of teaching and learning the interpretative strategies, basic conversational skills must be developed to overcome difficulties with group processes, topic initiation, and topic maintenance.
Problems with group processes. A major management issue concerns establishing communicative processes, which are crucial in sustaining effective conversations. For example, difficulties in turn taking encountered by students with LLD include getting the floor to take turns, giving turns to others, and using sophisticated conversational skills (e.g., avoiding interruptions and using simultaneous speech in judicious ways; Brinton & Fujiki, 1989; Tannen, 1984). Additionally, stepping into mutually constitutive and recursive roles associated with being the speaker and the listener in conversations is especially challenging for students with LED, who tend to have trouble taking the "other" perspective in terms of anticipating speaker or audience needs regarding continuity and appropriate information (Roth, Spekman, & Fye, 1995).
Problems with topic initiation (intertopic coherence). A second issue in conversational management involves the skill of speakers in selecting, introducing, and sequencing topics. Participants may have trouble establishing a topic that is interesting to others in the group, or in initiating or signaling shifts in topics at appropriate times. Part of this may be due to difficulty with managing topic or speaker transitions, resulting in abrupt topic shifts and the failure to use strategies that sustain topics (Almasi et al., 2001). This ability is of particular consequence for students with LLD, who are less sensitive to the conversational needs of their partners (Spekman, 1981), and have difficulty signaling and adjusting their talk to the language levels of their speaking partners (Bryan & Pflaum, 1978; Kuder, 2003).
Problems with topic maintenance (intratopic coherence). Difficulties with topic maintenance include mishandling questions, failure to add new information to the topic, difficulty following the thread of conversation as topics are introduced, reluctance to give up a topic when appropriate, and failure to connect topics and utterances with previous ones (Almasi et al., 2001; Brinton & Fujiki, 1989; Sacks, 1992). Children with learning disabilities or specific language impairments typically display difficulties with these maintaining strategies compared to their general education peers (Brinton, Fujiki, & Powell, 1997; Mathinos, 1991), inasmuch as they tend to produce less complex sentences (Simms & Crump, 1983; Vogel, 1974), have word-retrieval problems (Wiig & Semel, 1975), fail to understand words with multiple meanings (Wiig & Semel, 1984), and elicit less elaborated responses from other speakers (Bryan, Donahue, Pearl, & Sturm, 1981). Such difficulties in extending topics at the local level (words, sentences, and meanings) impact these students' participation in larger and less bounded segments of discourse that span multiple topics, ideas, and speakers.
Given such difficulties among students with LLD, teachers may avoid placing these students in literature discussions and conversations that are heavily dependent on verbal interaction. However, doing so may underestimate the extent to which these students can attain conversational skills, and worse, may deprive them of crucial opportunities for learning (Goldenberg, 1993; Wells & Wells, 1984). Several researchers have provided evidence that the participation of students with disabilities in book discussions can have powerful beneficial effects on students' interpretation of literature, comprehension, and communicative abilities (Goatley, Brock, & Raphael, 1995; Morocco et al., 2001, 2002; Raphael et al., 1997).
Although there have been several qualitative studies with upper-elementary populations (Goatley et al., 1995; Morocco et al., 2001, 2002), few, if any, studies of literature discussions have included primary-grade children with language and learning disabilities. Their less sophisticated mastery of the language and social facets of communication coupled with difficulties in language processing and production can seriously affect the quality of their book discussions. Similarly, the role of the teacher in changing the traditional institutional discourse to allow for an alternative structure that is more empowering for students by supporting the participation of students with disabilities in book discussions has not been fully investigated.
The purpose of this descriptive investigation was to examine the development of students' discussion skills and the nature of the teacher's role in book discussions in an inclusion context with primary-grade students with and without disabilities. Of importance was the nature of the scaffolds that teachers provided, the nature of students' interactions during book discussions over time, and students' ability to maintain topical coherence. We examined the book discussions at two points: (a) midyear, when the teacher had recently initiated book discussions in her classroom; and (b) end of year when she felt more successful in achieving her goals for book discussions. We interviewed the teacher to provide an insider's perspective on the goals of the book discussions and her role in achieving her discussion goals.
Of primary interest in this research were three questions: (a) How did the teacher perceive and fashion her role in modeling, promoting, and scaffolding certain kinds of discourse, as well as supporting the development of conversational coherence (based on teacher interviews and transcriptions of discussions)? (b) To what extent did primary-grade students with LLD develop the ability to engage in book discussions, as represented through their ability to manage group processes as well as to introduce, develop, and sustain topics (e.g., maintain intertopical and intratopical coherence)? and (c) How did the teacher and student roles, and the nature of book discussions, change over time?
METHOD
Participants
Located in an urban midwestern city, the participants were primary-grade students and their teacher in an elementary school (grades kindergarten through fifth grade) characterized by a high mobility rate and a large number of students from low socioeconomic backgrounds. Approximately 86% of the students attending the school received free or reduced-cost lunches. The 17 students who participated in the study were members of an inclusion class of about 30 students. Represented among the 17 participants were three grade levels and four ethnic groups. Eleven of the participants received special education services and/or were considered to be nonreaders by their teachers. The participants of the book discussion groups are described in Table 1.
The teacher in the study, Ms. Travis (pseudonyms are supplied for all participants), was an Anglo-American female who had taught for several years as a general education teacher. At the time of the study, she was teaming and coteaching with the special education teacher to provide instruction in a full-time, multi-age inclusion classroom. This meant that all primary-grade students (K-3) with disabilities were enrolled full-time in the classroom for the entire school day. Mrs. Travis, as well as the special education teacher, had participated for several years in the Literacy Environments for Accelerated Progress (LEAP) Project (Englert, 1998). The LEAP Project involved a longitudinal examination of how students with learning disabilities were apprenticed into reading and writing literacy through the teacher-researcher collaborations that supported these apprenticeships.
Book Discussions in the Classroom
Book discussions were a regular weekly feature of the participating classroom. The two discussions analyzed in this...
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