A Dialogic Turn in Research on Learning and Teaching to Comprehend

Rereading Comprehension Pedagogies: Toward a Dialogic Teaching Ethic that Honors Student Sensemaking

“…Even some of the research discussed by Wilkinson and Son (2011) in their recent review of discussion approaches they characterize as dialogic, such as Questioning the Author or Instructional Conversations (Beck, McKeown, & Blake, 2009;Goldenberg, 1992Goldenberg, /1993 do not necessarily share the premise central in dialogic comprehension-as-sensemaking, that meaning is responsive, emergent and in flux. Though Wilkinson and Son themselves acknowledge that "the product of comprehension -meaning -is not stable" (p. 359), Questioning the Author and Instructional Conversations do not create any explicit space for student understandings that differ from those of the teacher; they illustrate well how discussion might serve as a vehicle for having students achieve the right fixed meaning (comprehension-asoutcome).…”

Improving students’ narrative comprehension through a multiple strategy approach. Effects of Dialogic Strategy Instruction in secondary school.

“…One of the more viable turns taken in research on the learning and teaching of text comprehension in the last decade is the emphasis on dialogic approaches (Almasi et al, 2001;Soter et al, 2008;Wilkinson & Son, 2011). Although attention to the role of classroom dialogue goes all the way back to the 1860s (Nystrand, 2006), research on how structured discussions may 'scaffold' (Wood, Bruner, & Ross, 1976) higher-order thinking about texts has provided a number of new insights.…”

A randomized control trial of Shared Evaluation Pedagogy: The near-term and long-term impact of dialogically organized reading instruction

“…For example, reciprocal teaching (Palincsar & Brown, 1986;Takala, 2006) and inference training (McGee & Johnson, 2003), which do at times involve students talking directly with each other, may emphasize student-generated test questions (not fully satisfying the authenticity criterion), place no special emphasis on teacher uptake of student ideas (not fully satisfying the contingency criterion), and/or work from structured, pre-scripted protocols that deliberately shape what will be talked about when (not fully satisfying the organic student-driven dialogue criterion). As Wilkinson and Son (2011) have argued in their review of the historical turn in recent years toward dialogism in contemporary reading instruction, authentic dialogue no doubt is possible within some forms of strategy-based instruction (and, indeed, could potentially account for assessed comprehension gains more than student application of the strategy taught); still, they categorize such programs as conceptual precursors of dialogic teaching, not as part of the current wave of dialogic teaching, explaining what is distinctive in the current wave of dialogic teaching in these terms:…”

“…From a dialogic perspective, it is from the interaction and struggle among different, even competing, voices that meaning and understanding emerge. Wilkinson and Son (2011) have argued that the move toward dialogically organized instruction is motivated by concerns about strategy instruction becoming so "mechanical" as to "inhibit generative learning" (p. 366) as well as being hard for teachers to learn and practice. Because we share these concerns and have insufficient space to provide a full review of all reading comprehension programs that involve student talk, we focus our subsequent literature review on discussionbased approaches anchored in the aforementioned criteria.…”