5.1.1 Dialogic Teaching is highly accepted by primary school teachers in Zhejiang Province
The questionnaire results indicated that 64% of the respondents were aware that dialogic teaching is a teaching method that breaks away from the “teacher-centered” monologue teaching mode that pays undue emphasis on students’ subjective initiative and human rights. The respondents who indicated awareness of the concept of dialogic teaching showed high acceptance of the concept. Primary school teachers in Zhejiang Province hold that ideal classroom dialogue is productive and purposeful in situations where the classroom interactions is interactive and progressively result into coherent and expanded chains of understanding and enquiry (Teo, 2019). The understanding of ‘dialogic teaching’ is key to the high acceptance of the issue. Dialogic teaching is a pedagogical approach that draws numerous repertoires to improve students’ capacity to understand education and values the role of teacher-student conversation. The repertoires include learning talk, talk in daily life, classroom organization, and teaching talk. These four repertoires are responsible for the high acceptance of dialogic teaching by primary school teaching in Zhejiang Province.
The high acceptance of ‘dialogic teaching’ in Zhejiang Province by primary school teachers is that it encourages students to use dialogue to talk about all aspects of everyday lives that are expository, transactional, and exploratory (Petrová, 2013). The primary school teacher’s position is that dialogic teaching gives students a means of discussing ideas within and outside classroom walls. Dialogic learning corresponds to Bloom’s taxonomy because it recommends that students learn to explain, narrate, and speculate ideas. In a dialogic classroom, primary school students usually acquire skills used in learning talk that is applied environment that values exploration and questioning instead of single answer facts statements. The primary school teacher’s repertoire, such as recitation and instruction, also entails teacher-pupil-led interaction and discussion (Molinari & Mameli, 2010). Teachers highly accept dialogic teaching because it involves complex questions, stimulating interactions, and extended contributions. The teachers usually have a platform to intervene and guide students’ interactions. In the form of teaching, the teachers are responsible for the corpus of content they will invest in to nurture dialogic expectations and atmosphere.
Dialogic teaching is characterized by the primary school teachers relinquishing the control and floor of the dialogue to the students and can only provide essential reinforcement. The form of teaching is widely accepted because it provides a proper opportunity for the teachers to nurture students in a controlled condition. Dialogic teaching connects to the students’ ideas and perspectives even though it needs accountability. In the qualitative study conducted by this study, the primary school teachers and students’ multiple perspectives affirmed the special role by dialogic teaching as the premise of critical thinking (Hajhosseiny, 2012). Critical thinking improves the quality of education and ensures students are more engaged in the learning process. Dialogic teaching bolsters the practice of writing that is often highly valued among primary schools. The form of teaching also encourages teachers to redistribute classroom authority to sanction a student’s voices is a major contributor to classroom creativity.
The high acceptance of dialogic teaching by primary school teachers in Zhejiang Province is primarily driven by the importance they attach to it. The teachers indicated an awareness that dialogic teaching aims to maximize the potential of student-teacher interaction to improve or achieve the best educational outcomes for students (Petrová, 2013). The form of teaching motivates students to question ideas and develop knowledge through dialogue with their teachers and peers. The primary school teachers also indicated an awareness that dialogic teaching makes the classroom more inclusive because the students can participate and take a meaningful or active role in the classroom activities. The study showed that fostering dialogic interactions in primary schools has the effect of promoting deeper and wider thinking among students (Teo, 2019). Dialogic teaching may also transform the students’ relationship at the classroom level and allow them to readjust the roles traditionally assigned to students and teachers.
Dialogic teaching is also highly accepted by Primary school teachers in Zhejiang Province is because it is based on democratic values. The values do make students collaboratively work with one another and collaboratively reach an understanding that can enable them to move together and complete tasks in time. The results are evidence that supports the notion that most primary school teachers in Zhejiang Province use dialogic teaching to support students learning. In Zhejiang Province, students and teachers usually dialogue in diverse classrooms; hence teachers can promote classroom dialogue that will enable the students to attain better results in subjects such as Mathematics and English (Molinari & Mameli, 2010). The better results can be contrasted to poor performance if students whose teachers did not utilize dialogue teaching.
5.1.2 Dialogic Teaching teachers and students lack dialogue awareness, resulting in unsatisfactory classroom dialogue effect
The content of the dialogue between teachers and students is often limited to the specific teaching content, and the question and answer are to find the answers in the text. It is quite debatable how features associated with dialogic teachings such as elaboration of previous contribution and open questions can result be applied in teacher-student conversation. This research is predicated upon Burbules (1993) observation, who noted that three rules measure dialogue. These rules are participation, commitment, and reciprocity. If these three rules are not there, there will be an unsatisfactory classroom dialogue effect. Student’s participation in the classroom discourse has a significant role in dialogic teaching. The level of student participation in a classroom is a measure of the total quality of the educational discourse and quality. Both students and teachers and students understand that dialogic teaching necessitates them to actively engage in classroom activities. Unproductive participation may result in unsatisfactory classroom dialogue effects. Even though the students may have an opportunity to talk in unproductive participation, they passively solely by following the teacher’s guidelines. The student’s utterance is short and is usually characterized by less cognitive effort.
The observation by Burbules (1993) showed that commitment and reciprocity are key to successful dialogic classroom dialogue effects. The observation notes that dialogic teaching should be a collective responsibility where both students and teachers show collective concern. The reciprocity aspect will be absent if the educational tasks and discourses do not address all students in a given classroom. The research indicated a strong heterogeneity of commitment and reciprocity because the aptitude among different students in Zhejiang Province differs. Moreover, not all students may be interested in dialogic effects at a classroom level. The string heterogeneity complicates dialogic teaching’s primary role, which can be construed to be the realization of collectivity (Hajhosseiny, 2012). On the one hand, teachers may have difficulties planning a lesson due to the presupposition that more or fewer individuals possess a particular skill. Therefore, the teachers may choose to give different tasks to students within their proximal development zone. However, the teacher’s action is difficult because each student belongs to a unique zone of proximal development.
In dialogic teaching, the teachers conversant with the strong heterogeneity may opt to leave out low-track students from the subjects that demand more communication sequences. The research’s data indicate that only a portion of the most gifted and motivated students may play a role in dialogic sequences. This may result in an unsatisfactory dialogue effect because some students may feel left out with the teacher hence will not take an active role in other classroom engagements. The less participation by part of the students is against the basic principles of dialogic teaching, which hold that a teacher should strive to create an inclusive classroom. The teacher may also decide to set the classroom standards low enough for every student to excel. This decision will also result in an unsatisfactory dialogic effect because it makes dialogic teaching impossible by being more oriented towards social functions (Guilar, 2006). Collectivity should be a major reason a teacher should be motivated not to elicit rational argumentation and students’ responses. Dialogic teaching may be unsatisfactory if the teacher believes that an activity or task is difficult for a class. A teacher’s intention to have a high number of students in a class may force him to change communication patterns that consequently makes him not to have enough time to explain topics to students.
The dialogue model is confined to the traditional model of “the teacher asks — student answers — teacher feedback” and lacks the process of inspiring individual knowledge construction. Dialogic teaching is premised on the idea that students in experiment groups have the ability to apply relevant insights and knowledge more effectively than students in the control class. In dialogic teaching, the talk between teachers and students become so much internalized to the extent of becoming individual thinking (Guilar, J. D. (2006). The confinement to the traditional classroom model beats the essence of dialogic teaching because students are discouraged from being open-minded. The notion that a teacher may engage a student in dialogue with a pre-determined learning outcome is not dialogic. For several institutions, it is not pragmatically to commit their time and resources to educational activities that do not explicitly relate to their curriculum goals. The traditional teaching mode confines the teachers to only attaining the curriculum goal. The traditional teaching mode always makes it possible for teachers to teach in ways that do not relate to dialogic teaching.
The dialogue between teachers and students is often preset by the teacher before class. In class, students follow the teacher’s questions and are not aware of their own subjectivity. Subjectivity is usually created by the paradoxical experience of teachers in dialogical education. A teacher using dialogical teaching is usually faced with the dilemma of seeking not to lose a voice when teaching and not wanting to muffle the student’s voices. A dialogic teacher seeks to be as authentic as possible and should also be vulnerable enough to the student’s voice. If a teacher deploys dialogic teaching in a hermeneutic community, he needs to be an intense listener failure to which may result in failing to listen well to the students. The art of dialogic teaching crates subjectivity by taking different assessment methods (Boyd & Markarian, 2015). Teachers are usually subjective if they develop insights into the practice needs on the grounds of a subjective basis. In addition, students seem to have developed perceptions of teacher’s roles on a biased and highly subjective basis. The basis of such perception may be the students’ weakness or the difficulty encountered in classroom situations.
5.1.3 The form of dialogic teaching is simple, students’ participation is not high
The dialogue mode of “teacher asks — student answers” runs through the whole class, and the object of questioning is not a single student, or all students. Even if there are interactive ways of discussion, cooperation and exploration, it is still a student in the teacher’s questioning group at last. In dialogic teaching, teachers are usually encouraged to actively engage students in academically challenging classroom situations and discourse. The practice of such discourse usually take place in tension and embody the belief that students’ abilities are either context-independent or fixed. Dialogic teaching may contribute to a student’s inarticulateness because its emphasis is that a student’s thinking should be made apparent. Dialogical pedagogy may have a complicated impact on student’s identity work and participation in school work. Dialogical pedagogy calls for caring and egalitarian and still emphasize the cognitive challenge of the educational discourse (Gillies, 2016). The pedagogy also gives undue prominence to students with accountable participation and authoritative voice, which can be threatening to students perceived to have the low-intelligence ability. Even though the threats may exist in different pedagogy types, dialogic pedagogy amplifies them, thus making them difficult to ignore. The question of low student participation in participation is of great importance because it shapes the implementation of dialogic pedagogy and should be actively confronted. Confronting the form of low participation needs a radical shift in the way students think about their identity
There is no internal connection between the questions raised, and most of them are simple declarative questions, which students answer directly from the textbook without thinking. Such a single and boring way of dialogue seems to have an active classroom atmosphere and frequent interaction between teachers and students, but it is not interesting to students. Students are only the cooperation of teachers in class, and they do not participate in classroom teaching at all. Even though talk-intensive pedagogies are usually encouraged in the educational discourse, their design does not often result in the ideal scope, ambition, and contexts that are fundamental for an inclusive classroom (Matusov & Lemke, 2015). The expectation usually results in a distortion of the common beliefs concerning a pupil’s ability. Dialogic pedagogy is often based on the assumption that children can effectively learn through challenging classroom discourses and rich participation. However, there exist situations where students have fixed, context-independent, and inherent abilities. Examples of such abilities are “low ability,” “articulate,” and “bright.” Dialogic pedagogies often make students think visibly and result in intellectual changes to students who are regarded as having “low ability” and “inarticulateness.”
5.1.5 Silencing while speaking—Classroom dialogic teaching becomes a mere formality
Although the students take turns to answer questions in class, pushing to interact with teachers, they speak is not the real point of own heart, the sound of their voice is only the teacher wants to hear, but not your heart, they are not aware of their rights, but the right to obey the teacher, and then caused much criticism by Marcy “silencing while speaking”Dialogic pedagogy should be cumulative, purposeful and collective. There is usually a need to engage students in dialogic teaching because it is paramount in ensuring they attain deeper learning concepts that support their language skills, such as communication. From the results, it is clear that dialogic teaching enhances students silence in a teaching process if they have personal characteristics such as shyness (Boyd & Markarian, 2015). Such students’ willingness to meaningfully contribute to classroom discussions is usually limited, and both the students and teachers end up unfulfilled. The educational dynamics and classroom familiarity among students in dialogic pedagogy usually affect their ability to meaningfully contribute to discussions. In the research, quite a significant number of researchers felt that a classroom atmosphere was inappropriate for them. In a classroom context, the learners often come with particular expectations concerning their roles and that of their mats. Such roles usually create their perception and may result in silence if they are not fulfilled. The expectations may be based on the students’ educational and cultural backgrounds.
5.2 Explanation
5.2.1 Insufficient understanding of the theory of “dialogic teaching.”
The relationship between the generation of “dialogic teaching” and the preset of teaching content is not well understood. In the current classroom, due to the ambiguity in understanding the relationship between the two, two phenomena often occur: one is to follow the preset teaching objectives, ignore the unexpected events in the classroom, and ignore the teaching wit. The second is to blindly pursue the generation, regardless of the expected teaching goal, so that the teaching effect is not ideal. The insufficiency in understanding the basic concepts of “dialogic teaching” has resulted in problems in its application (Matusov & Lemke, 2015). Dialogic teaching is mainly understood as a form of teaching that harnesses students’ works and communication in a language that deepens their understanding. Even though primary school teachers have highly accepted dialogic teaching, the insufficiency in understanding has resulted in basic deficits that offset this form of pedagogy’s benefits.
The insufficient understanding of the theory of “dialogic teaching” is also brought by the failure to understand the principle of purposefulness and reciprocity. The principle of purposefulness posits that teachers should teach with certain educational objectives in mind. Teachers’ objectivity is problematic in the realization of dialogic teaching. In a number of occasions and classroom discourses, dialogic pedagogy is often irrelevant because they cannot sufficiently cover the subject matter they are expected to. On a number of occasions, the pedagogy perceives dialogue to be a carefree conversation that makes education enjoyable instead of deepening their understanding of a given subject matter. A lesson plan is a complicated factor that has prominence in dialogic teaching. This is because students’ responses may not be aligned to the teachers’ objectives because they may require a knowledge that is not in the teacher’s possession. In dialogical pedagogy, only the teachers are knowledgeable on a particular subject. Students are not capable of managing situations where the lesson plan is not available for the students (Matusov & Lemke, 2015). Reciprocity of dialogical teaching illustrates that teachers and students should mutually listen to one another. The criterion of reciprocity in this pedagogy is applied to feedback, meaning that the classroom participants develop one another. The insufficient understanding is exhibited in the principle of reciprocity through the students become less and less interested in classroom conversations when the teacher concentrates on a single student.
5.2.2 Teachers’ own quality is not enough to meet the practical requirements of dialogic teaching
Many teachers are still confined to traditional cultural concepts and only pay attention to the mastery of students’ knowledge and skills, but are far from doing enough to improve students’ divergent thinking, creative ability and deep thinking. Teachers’ quality limits the application of dialogic pedagogy. For example, a teacher who is not a great conversation will have issues directing the course of classroom dialogue (Gillies, 2016). Leading a dialogical class requires a teacher to have a precise comprehension of the type of content and lesson the teacher will talk about. On some occasions, even if teachers do not increase the quality of questions the students will ask, the students’ quality questions can improve the results over extended dialogic periods. Positive developments. Positive development in dialogic teaching is usually derived from the teacher’s belief in the utilization of dialogue to enhance deeper thinking among primary school students.
5.2.3 The students’ dialogue ability is weak and lacks subject consciousness
Through the investigation, we can find that the Chinese teachers in this school are fully aware that the students are the main body of classroom teaching which are to respect the students’ subjective status and give students more opportunities to show themselves and express themselves, the students’ learning enthusiasm and initiative compared with the traditional teaching has been greatly improved (Lefstein Gurion & Snell, 2011). On one hand, it is related to the exam-oriented education for a long time, which emphasizes achievement over ability. On the other hand, it is closely related to the students’ own dialogue ability and subject consciousness.
The weakness of students’ dialogue ability is weak primarily because of either structural or personal factors. The structural factors include the school’s inability to support students’ opinions and incorporate them into the educational discourse. The classroom may limit some students to fully participating in the dialogical pedagogy. Personal factors exhibited by students such as introverts may make the students’ dialogue ability to be weak. The students may also exhibit weak dialogue abilities if they do not relate well with their schoolmates and other school stakeholders.
5.2.4 The contradiction between “exam-oriented language” and “life language” in class
From the perspective of human existence and human nature, Bakhtin puts forward that dialogue is the feature of human existence, that is, the dialogue of “survival essence.” He started from the relationship between things; the dialogue is in human behavior activities, which is the need for human survival. From this theoretical basis, dialogue should be the language of our life, even in the classroom, should also be based on the language of life. Due to some external pressure and restriction factors, such as teaching tasks, teaching time, study pressure, teachers’ quality, and other factors, teachers and students’ possibility to carry out real dialogue and communication becomes very small (Renshaw, 2004). The focus on examination-oriented learning is not effective for long-term success in learning as it does not give learners an opportunity to communicate effectively. The research’s position is that students learn best in situations where they are actively engaged. On the other hand, life language is often intended to make students develop an autonomy that ensures their engagement and makes them responsible for various social practices and democratic behavior. The contradiction is primarily caused by the emphasis by exam-oriented language on tests and life language on a student’s autonomy.
5.3 Suggestions
The arbitrariness of the dialogue process in dialogic teaching creates a need for more research on the subject. Further research on the field of dialogic teaching should focus on the production of meaningful and valuable information and opportunities. The research should also focus on the perspective of a curriculum that aligns with the basic principles of dialogic teaching. There is a need to produce curriculum resources that the students can easily grasp and form the foundation of their creativity. Dialogic teaching should guide students in Zhejiang Province. The primary school teacher’s ability to effectively conduct a dialogical pedagogy should be thoroughly examined to properly guide and inspire students.
Conclusion
This paper explored the close correlation between dialogue and education, and the efficiency of the educational or pedagogical system depends on the teacher-student or student-student information sharing. Successful education can be explained by the quality of educational dialogue between the teacher and students from the sociocultural perspective. Dialogic teaching focuses on communication and cooperation, which can be regarded as linguistic communication or linguistic activities. The traditional recitation in the classroom is more monologue-based, while dialogic teaching is dialogic-based. Dialogic teaching belongs to the categories of both method and principle, and the method of dialogic teaching is diversified, and relevant principles can be applied to measure the effectiveness of dialogic instructions. The application of the “dialogic teaching” ideas in the real educational setting is susceptible to a series of factors like culture, class size, and there are numbers of micro-level researches studying the application of dialogic teaching and relevant factors that affect its effectiveness. Dialogical teaching prioritizes the role of culture in teaching and highlights the close relationship between talk and culture as well. China’s national culture is more group-oriented and hierarchy-based, and Chinese students show low willingness to challenge the authority of teachers and question the opinions of other students.
The education in China emphasizes the introduction of student-centered pedagogy, which stems from Western education and is predictable that the introduction of dialogic teaching in China will be combined with the reduction of class size in the future. Teacher-student talk is an indispensable component in conversational teaching, and there is evidence to support that the high-quality talk between teachers and students can improve their academic performance. The problems in the implementation of this idea are mainly reflected in the “superficiality” and “formalization” of dialogue. The understanding of ‘dialogic teaching’ is key to the high acceptance of the issue. Dialogic teaching is a pedagogical approach that draws numerous repertoires to improve students’ capacity to understanding education and values the role of teacher-student conversation. The content of the dialogue between teachers and students is often limited to the specific teaching content, and the question and answer are to find the answers in the text. A dialogic teacher seeks to be as authentic as possible and should also be vulnerable enough to the student’s voice. If a teacher deploys dialogic teaching in a hermeneutic community, he needs to be an intense listener failure to which may result in failing to listen well to the students.
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