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Although classroom discourse is the principal medium of learning in school, teachers rarely pay attention to how they structure it. Appropriately, they focus mainly on what they are teaching and what their students are learning; at best, awareness of classroom discourse itself is subsidiary.

That is both unfortunate and understandable since the structure, quality, and flow of classroom discourse are all likely to affect what students learn and how well they learn it, according to researchers at WCER's Center on English Learning and Achievement (CELA).

Martin Nystrand, Lawrence L. Wu, Adam Gamoran, Susie Zeiser, & Daniel Long have found that teachers generally possess little systematic information about these connections, in part because past research has been inattentive to the role of discourse in learning.

CELA's work addresses this issue in several ways, by modeling the pulse of classroom discourse and assessing the role of authentic questions, student questions, and uptake, for example, in terms of their cumulative and local role in structuring the foundation for dialogic zones of interaction.

Student-teacher interaction—indeed even individual teacher questions—have their roots in previous interactions, with current interactions carrying implications for subsequent ones. Understanding how classroom discourse unfolds and their constitutive role in the process, may help teachers gain informed control over how they interact with students and how they might create instruction settings that both engage students and foster learning.

For more information, contact Martin Nystrand at nystrand@ssc.wisc.edu, and Adam Gamoran, at gamoran@ssc.wisc.edu.