Year

2023

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Department

School of Education

Abstract

Teachers, students, and researchers grapple with the conflicting ideas that supporting talk in the classroom is often vaguely defined and crucial for successful learning. This conflict holds particularly true for English as a foreign language (EFL) university instructors in South Korea, given the individualised institutional standards and fragmented pedagogy. Empirical research investigating talk in the language learning classroom has for decades advocated for increased opportunities for student speaking. Despite this call, student talk is viewed as products or outputs without a clear understanding of how such talk is socially constructed. Treating talk as production instead of a productive and ongoing dialogue may perpetuate patterns of classroom discourse wherein teachers are transmitters of knowledge and students are passive recipients.

English language teachers seeking to address such concerns have recently turned to a teaching approach that centrally places dialogue – the dialogic teaching approach. Dialogic teaching in EFL courses can afford students greater possibilities to contribute to classroom talk and offer university instructors a theoretical lens to interrogate their own speaking practices. This approach could be transformative for EFL instruction as it centres variegated types of talk in building knowledge and reciprocal relationships between speakers.

However, findings into implementing the approach are investigated by researchers, or more often, a lone teacher-researcher seeking to adopt the dialogic teaching approach. This early research is usually characterised by minimal input from students or the broader teaching community. Simply put, whereas the dialogic teaching approach values and emphasises various speakers’ voices, research into implementing the approach is monologic – characterised by the voices of a single research team or teacher. What is needed is a methodological approach that aligns with the dialogic teaching principles of collaborative, supportive, and collective inquiry with the aim to adapt, rather than adopt, the dialogic teaching approach.

Presented in this thesis is an educational design research project intended to contextualise the dialogic teaching approach in a university EFL course. This inquiry is underpinned by the theoretical contributions from dialogism and sociocultural theory, grounding the project in a fully conceptualised understanding of talk and its role in language and learning. Eight EFL university instructors and six students collaborated with the author to design and refine a conversational English course to align more closely with dialogic teaching principles and meet their academic outcomes.

Findings from this collaboration explore improvements in the productiveness of student small group talk, the instructors’ engagement in the uptake process of the dialogic teaching approach, and design principles designed for future implementation. Connecting these diverse findings is the central feature of talk, realised by the participants’ collaboration through the course’s development. These findings are aspirational in that they demonstrate the kind of growth possible for teachers and students and heuristic for future research intended to adapt dialogic teaching for EFL classrooms. For meaningful implementation of the dialogic teaching approach, a concerted, collaborative effort, as evidenced in this thesis, is necessary to adapt and contextualise the approach for language learning classrooms.

FoR codes (2008)

1302 CURRICULUM AND PEDAGOGY, 200401 Applied Linguistics and Educational Linguistics

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Unless otherwise indicated, the views expressed in this thesis are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of the University of Wollongong.