An Empirical Study On Discourse Strategy "Revoicing" Of Primary School Science Teachers

Classroom discourse affects the process of teaching and learning.How science teachers use discourse resources to guide students to participate in classroom interaction will directly affect students' scientific learning.“Revoicing” is a special form of discourse,which means that teachers reformulate the students' utterance by repeating or reorganizing the speech.Foreign studies have shown that revoicing can promote students' participation in discourse interaction in sciences classroom.However,there are few special studies on such discourse strategy in China.This study takes the interactive discourse of student-teacher of the lower grades of science classroom as the main analytical material,in order to investigate revoicing discourse strategy of primary school science teachers in China.Firstly,existing research on revoicing are sorted out,and theoretical framework of this study is founded.Secondly,based on the existing research results,three frameworks for analyzing the linguistic structure,expression form and teaching function of the teachers' revoicing are constructed,which are used to encode and analyze 15 videos of demonstration class.Then,on the basis of quantitative analysis,the in-depth qualitative analysis of the teaching episodes involving teacher's revoicing is carried out,and the classroom interaction patterns and its' characteristics are summarized.This study tries to answer the following questions:(1)How is the use of revoicing by primary school science teachers in China?(2)What's the impact of revoicing used by primary school science teachers on classroom interaction in China?(3)From the perspective of promoting students' participation in classroom discourse interaction and improving students' subjectivity,how can Chinese primary school science teachers rationally use revoicing?Through the analysis of 696 teachers' revocing,the study found that when primary school science teachers use revoicing,in most cases,they only pay attention to highlighting the scientific knowledge,opinions or related teaching content involved in the student's response.And in a few cases,teachers will use indirect speech like “he/she + say/think/feel + idea” to re-express students' ideas and stand out students' contributions.The teachers' revoicing have multiple expression forms,including repeating,rephrasing,expanding and reporting,but their use probability is gradually reduced.The teaching functions of revoicing in the classroom are complex,and can be divided into four dimensions: “related teaching content”,“manipulating student opinions' position”,“inducing students to further respond” and “other functions”.Further qualitative analysis found that there are three classroom interaction patterns involving teachers' revoicing in the classroom: the “co-construction pattern” of knowledge,the “teacher derivation pattern” of knowledge,and the “teacher establishment pattern” of knowledge,which correspond to interactive-democratic,teacher-led,teacher-authoritative classroom interaction type.And it shows that the use of revoicing has a dual impact on primary science classroom interaction in China.Finally,based on the above conclusions,this research provides some pedagogical implications in how primary school science teachers rationally use revoicing.