What Influences Teachers' Decisions about Talk in Middle Years Classrooms?[R]

Talk remains by far the most used medium of instruction and classroom action. Classroom talk is typically dominated by triadic dialogue or an I-R-E (Initiate-Response-Evaluation) pattern of talk noted in the literature as consistent across grades and subjects. Studies seem to indicate that teachers utilize traditional forms of talk, even though they know about, and have been trained in the use of, alternative forms. This paper offers some analysis of a group of teachers in South Australian schools who participated in a research project in which they studied classroom talk--the paper's researcher developed a meta-analysis of the kind of curriculum and pedagogy the teachers were practicing. The paper explains that the researcher's analysis was critiqued by the teachers who approved its general direction. The paper discusses in turn, in two sections, the different factors teachers considered and the discourses that appeared to be constituting teachers' decision making. It finds that this analysis also revealed the complexity involved in changing classroom practices in relation to talk. (NKA)