Dialogic Teaching In Tertiary English Classrooms In Chinese EFL Context

Traditional SLA research has been dominated by the cognitivist paradigm that views language learning as primarily an internal psychological process isolated in the mind of the learner and largely free from the social and cultural contexts where ESL/EFL learning takes place. In the past two decades or so, SLA has been experiencing tremendous impact of various sociocultural perspectives, which, though diverse in research agendas, share a similar epistemological stance that views knowledge as negotiated and co-constructed and learning as situated practices taking place in physical and social contexts. Thus, participation and context are crucial to learning.The dialogic approach to teaching and learning can be traced back to Socrates in the west and Confucius in the east. Recent deployment of dialogue as a model for teaching and learning has been inspired by Vygotsky's sociocultural theory of learning and Bakhtin's writings on the inherent dialogicality of language and thinking, both highlighting the social foundations of learning, the mediating role of language both in cognitive development and in identity formation, and the link between individual and social. According to Bakhtin, language is chained utterance situated in social and historical contexts with its beginning"preceded by the utterance of others"and its end"followed by the responsive utterances of others"(Bakhtin, 1986, p.72).Dialogic instruction differs from monologic instruction—the transmission model of instruction in that it emphasizes the interactive, contingent, flexible and responsive features of instructional activities (Nystrand, 1997; Alexander, 2005). Wertsch and Toma (1995) see dialogic teaching as the organization of instruction in such a way that teachers treat source texts, students'utterances, and their own statements as"thinking device". In other words, dialogic instruction entails the co-construction of meaning through intersubjective negotiations rather than merely memorizing linguistic forms and using them in isolation.In the Chinese EFL classroom, specifically in the Intensive Reading classrooms, however, it has been found that monologism dominates the classroom discourse. The term"monologic"is not used in its usual sense of only one person talking with no interactional involvement of another party. Rather, it characterizes the type of classroom talk or instruction that treats the texts and the teachers as the sole source of knowledge while positioning students as receptacles to be filled with linguistic knowledge and factual information from the reading passages. Aligned with the transmissionist model of teaching and what Freire (1990) calls the"banking"method of instruction, the monologic instruction ignores the co-constructed nature of knowledge and learning while seeking to"fill students up"with the right answers and"essential"linguistic points. This type of instruction is more concerned with requiring students to recall what someone else has thought or said, rather than to articulate, examine, elaborate and revise what they themselves think or want to express.The monologic classroom discourse tends to be tightly scripted and dominated by the authoritative voice of the teacher or the"autonomous"text. This mode of discourse reinforces and reifies the hierarchical distance between the teacher and students.In contrast with the monologically oriented discourse, the dialogically organized discourse is found to create different teaching and learning experiences for the students and position the teacher and students with different identities and roles. In the dialogic classroom, classroom discourse is not prescribed but emergent and negotiated. Teachers ask genuine questions to explore a concept or to seek multiple interpretations. There is substantive conversation and utterances are contingent, one building on another, thus creating textual coherence. The source of knowledge is not exclusively from the teacher and the textbook. Rather, students can be positioned as"primary knower", active agent, author,"text maker of meaning", and legitimate"participatory member of community". Teachers may choose to temporarily suspend their institutional power and allow students a wider interactional space where they are not only responding to the teacher but also responding to one another. And the experience of learning created for students are transformative rather than transmissionist in that students are engaged in the co-construction of meanings through the on-going dialogue between the text, the teacher and students themselves in the EFL classroom.For teachers who subscribe to the dialogic mode of teaching, they need to take into consideration the cultural and contextual impediments, such as the concern for face, perceived language proficiency and reification of language system.This study has incorporated multiple data collection methods, including transcribed classroom talk, informal interview conversations with the participants and the examination of classroom artifacts. Both numerical data of coded teacher-student interaction and telling excerpts have been used to address the research questions. The significance of the study is mainly twofold. Theoretically, the dialogic approach to EFL teaching and learning has enriched the SLA research by taking into account the sociocultural perspectives of teaching and learning. In addition, from the practical aspect of EFL classroom teaching, the dialogic model, manifested through classroom discourse features that emphasize responsiveness, contingency, reciprocity and substantiveness, aims to enhance the quality of teacher talk, enable teachers to be reflective on the dialogical relationship between teacher and learners, the reader and the text, and ultimately open up the space of learning.