CLASSROOM DISCOURSE

CLASSROOM DISCOURSE

Cazden,S. ; Gernsbacher, M.A.; & Goldman, S.R.(2003). Classroom Discourse.

Different issues have been applied about the quality of classroom discourse in the las 20^th century, classrooms are no longer addressed as passive ones, or learning by heart activities, it is now focus on developing communication abilities, emphasizing learning by doing.

It is said that teachers in the classrooms are in charge of developing higher order thinking   where the students can express, explain their reasoning and work cooperatively respecting other points of view but at the same time questioning about those.

According to the text, the conception about discourse in the classroom has change, it has being used to achieve communicative goals in the classroom, and also the result has been shown in the changes in the curriculum and assessment methods.

The chapter is divided into different sessions: lessons, variations in discourse features, talk with peers and computers, differential treatment and cultural differences, and students discourse development. Each of them is going to be a little bit explained. The majority of the topics bring information based on some studies that were developing in the classrooms.

LESSONS

The common traditional lessons often show discourse patterns of students imitating teachers, passive students given responses and addressing evaluations. The nontraditional lessons allowed students to interact with others questioning about knowledge and using metacognitive processes.

VARIATIONS IN DISCOURSE FEATURES

Variation can be categorize according to speaking rights and listening responsibility, teacher questions, teacher feedback, and classrooms routines  

Speaking rights and listening responsibility: See how students take turns and how they hear and take up the contributions of their peers, teacher use the devoicing strategy to encourage further discussion and build community of learners.

Teacher questions: Teacher’s questions definitely have an impact in students learning process; they can be useful especially when are metacognitive questions, in other words, those are authentic questions.

Teacher feedback: When giving feedback it has to be focus on achievement but based on the need for improvement, not as a tool to punish or emphasizing on mistakes but given solution on how to overcome them.

Classrooms routines: routine classroom activities can help students to give more of their attention to academic content.

TALK WITH PEERS AND COMPUTERS

The word “with” means in this case working together, students use computer collaborate since a few computers are available in the classrooms, teachers are no always the authority in the class sometime students discuss a topic with peers without computers and then several activities in which interact in a variety of ways with technology.

DIFFERENTIAL TREATMENT AND CULTURAL DIFFERENCES

Differential treatment and cultural differences refers to the issue of achieving equity in students’ opportunities to learn. The former perspective mostly refers to overdifferentiation, it occurs when some student are given more access to material, resources, knowledge etc. and cultural differences refers critically to underdifferentiation, teachers have to seek inclusion in their environments leading students to have a better learning process.

  STUDENTS DISCOURSE DEVELOPMENT

It is said that new expectations for students discourse should become part of the explicit curriculum taking into account that discourses express speakers identity and interactional role, so it is a good idea have in the classroom discourse socializations that allowed students to questioning and reflecting.

"Discourse is the organization of language beyond the level of sentence and the

Individual speaking Turn, whereby meaning is negotiated in the process of interaction" Carterand Nunan, ( 2001) According to this to authors it can be said discourse is a really important issue where meaning can be creating in the process of interaction, there are a lot of issues to address in the classroom and observing the discourse can be really helpful.

I can say that having read this chapter allowed me to think about how I can use the discourse in my environment to improve learning and teaching processes. Sometimes we as teacher just omit information or we are not able to see what is happening because we do not take the time to reflect about that, and questioning and reflecting as it was mentiond in the chapter are very important.

How interesting would be have meetings with other teachers and work collaborative base on the classroom discourse. I think that will change completely our practices and ways to deal with classrooms. From my point of view it is a challenge in education, work with this powerful tool.

This text also made me to reflect about what kind of classrooms we are creating; those ones described as traditional, where interaction, reflection and questioning is not allowed or we are setting environments where our students can develop higher order thinking processes.

Carter, R. and Nunan, D. ( 2001). Teaching English to speakers of other languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.