| Description |
There are many proponents of the concept of dialogic teaching in contemporary educational sciences. The classic definition of the concept comes from Alexander (2006) who states that spoken language should play a central role in teaching as it provides an opportunity to influence students’ cognitive processes through their involvement in the classroom discourse. Theory of dialogic teaching contains various conceptual tools from which we discuss indicators and principles of dialogic teaching. Indicators are observable phenomena that represent dialogic teaching – for example, authentic questions, uptake, higher order teacher feedback, open discussion (Nystrand, 1997), total student talk time during interactive sequences, triadic interaction (Molinari & Mameli, 2013), occurrence of the student questions (Nystrand et al., 2001), student utterances with thoughts of reasoning (Pimentel & McNeill, 2013), the presence of elaborated explanation in student talk (Sotter et al., 2008), etc. However, it has been also argued that the presence of indicators itself does not guarantee dialogic nature of teaching (see e.g., Boyd and Markarian, 2011; 2015). Alexander (2006) argues that the crucial role is in epistemology of classroom interaction. This is why Alexander suggests following set of principles. Dialogic teaching should be: (1) collective, (2) reciprocal, (3) supportive, (4) cumulative, (5) purposeful. Indicators are often being used as tools for the analysis of empirical data gathered in classroom environment. However, the principles of dialogic teaching are rarely used for these purposes. This can be explained by the fact that the principles are difficult to operationalize. In this paper, we answer the question of how to monitor whether the principles of dialogic teaching are implemented during lessons.
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