Exploration of the relations between the teacher's discursive roles and the students' cognitive contributions to the classroom discourse

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Tezin Türü: Doktora

Tezin Yürütüldüğü Kurum: Orta Doğu Teknik Üniversitesi, Eğitim Fakültesi, Matematik ve Fen Bilimleri Eğitimi Bölümü, Türkiye

Tezin Onay Tarihi: 2017

Öğrenci: YILMAZ SOYSAL

Danışman: ÖZGÜL YILMAZ TÜZÜN

Özet:

The current study aimed at exploring the relations between the types of teacher discursive roles and the students‘ cognitive contributions to the classroom discourse. Students‘ cognitive operations were considered as their utterances‘ semantic complexity, cognitive pathways, reasoning quality and argument structure. It was also aimed at investigating some contextual influences of the inquiry classrooms on the students‘ ability to make cognitive contributions to the classroom discourse. The participants were one elementary science teacher and her 19, 7th grade students. There were three types of collected data: video record, field note and teacher interview. The video-recorded lessons were the primary data source in addition to secondary data sources as field notes and teacher interview. A sociocultural discourse analysis was conducted to analyze the data in order to address the research questions. The results showed that the teacher played out diverse discursive roles and three of the roles that teacher exhibited were consolidated. The consolidated discursive roles were teacher clarifies, elaborates and probes the ideas; teacher focuses learners on focal aspects of and encourages monitoring to classroom discursive events and teacher conducts reflective discourse (e.g., ask for evaluation). The results also demonstrated that quantitative and qualitative changes regarding the role as teacher conducts reflective discourse were significantly and considerably effective in altering the dimensions and the ways of the student-led cognitive contributions to the classroom discourse. Some contextual differences were also discussed in terms of discourse-cognition relations by means of the analysis of researcher‘s field notes and teacher interview. Finally, recommendations for teacher education were offered for future research.