Dialogic Teaching in a Teacher Education College: An Analysis of Teacher Educator and Pre-service Teacher Talk in Physics Classrooms

The purpose of this case study was to determine the functions of pre-service teachers’ talk and to explore how the teacher educator supports the development of conceptual understanding in a dialogic classroom setting. The participants in the study were a physics teacher educator who employed dialogic teaching to teach mechanics and 52 third-year pre-service teachers at a college of teacher education in Ethiopia. Data for the study were collected through video-recorded classroom observations of three 90-minute lessons. The Kumpulainen and Wray typology of functions of talk were used to determine the functional categories and their relative frequencies in pre-service teachers’ talk. Mortimer and Scott’s forms of teacher intervention were used to explore the nature of the teacher educator’s support in developing understanding. The findings of the study indicated that the pre-service teachers used their classroom talk for a variety of purposes, mainly for providing responses to the teacher’s questions, describing reasons and expressing disagreements in the group discussion. It was also shown that explanation, questioning, providing examples and illustrations, exploring understanding, clarifying group work activities, and encouraging for justification were among the strategies mainly used by the teacher educator to assist knowledge construction.