Chapter 12 page 260
CHAPTER 12
Teaching for Understanding and Belief
Chapter 12a
Discussions and Questioning
A. Recitations
Ideally, discussions give learners an opportunity to be active agents in their own learning. To construct
new conceptions and acquire new ways of thinking, students need a chance to express their ideas and hear
others’ ideas. But much research suggests that discussions often fail to achieve these goals. During the
typical discussion, teachers play a dominating role. Teachers do most of the talking and tightly regulate the
content of discussion. In her book Classroom Discourse, Courtney Cazden (1988, p. 134) wrote that
“teachers give directions and children nonverbally carry them out; teachers ask questions and children
answer them, frequently with only a word or a phrase. Most important ... the roles are not reversible.
Children never give directions to teachers, and rarely even ask them questions except to request
permission.”
Most discussions in most classrooms are less “discussion” than they are “recitation.” Recitations are deeply
entrenched in classroom practice. During a Recitation, the teacher maintains continuous control of the
topic by asking a seldom-broken string of assessment questions. An assessment question quizzes students
about a matter already known to the teacher. Students who have become accustomed to Recitation as a
form of discourse are well aware that the teacher has predetermined what will be counted as an acceptable
answer. The assessment question is different from a genuine request for information, in which the
questioner does not already know the answer.
Recitations have a predictable, repeated IRE pattern -- teacher Initiation, student Response, followed by
teacher Evaluation (Mehan, 1979; Sinclair & Coulthard, 1978). Here is an example:
Initiation Teacher So why do you think that Amy let the goose go?
Responses Student Because she knew that the goose needed to return to its mate.
Evaluation Teacher OK
next Initiation Anybody else?
In the Recitation, the teacher controls turntaking. Following a teacher question, students typically bid for
turns by raising their hands. The teacher nominates the student who will respond. This student has the
floor until the teacher takes control again, evaluating the response of the student who has just spoken, and
then initiating the next IRE cycle. During Recitation, most of the talk is teacher talk; students collectively
express from a fifth to a half of the words (Almasi, 1995; Beck, McKeown, Sandora, Kucan, & Worthy,
1996; Cazden, 1988).
Researchers have found that most teacher questions in Recitations are lower-level questions. Most
commonly they are questions that can be answered directly by repeating words from the text. Higher-order
questions that require student thinking and inferences are less common.