Support in Dialogic Teaching

Evidence and Impact of Potential Quality Criteria in Dialogic Literature Classes

Abstract

Conversations are a central part of literature classes. They foster aesthetic experience and insights into literary texts, according to a widely held position in the German discourse on literature education. Most studies suggest that open forms of discussion are superior to teacher lead classroom discussions.  However, it has not been empirically shown what role a teacher should ideally take in a conversational literature class in order to achieve literary learning.

In this paper, we present some study results helping to clarify this issue. Based on four lessons on the literary text “Der blaue Falke” (Jürg Schubiger) we investigated which components of an authentic - i.e. neither artificially arranged nor clearly following a specific didactic conception - classroom communication can be identified as specific quality aspects of dialogic teaching in literature classes.  We employed a content analysis to identify quality aspects and related our evaluation of the teachers’ utterances to data from questionnaires which were filled in by the students at the end of each class. They evaluated the literary text and the conversation. Thus, the present study focuses ‚support‘ as a quality aspect of teacher actions in dialogic teaching, drawing on findings from task research in literature education.