Teaching practices for initiating and sustaining classroom dialogue about text and language within senior high-school science

Making appropriate language choices to represent meaning about sequences of activity in sequential explanations is essential for success in senior high school biology classrooms, but the ways in which teachers can engage students in classroom dialogue that includes opportunities for the development of this language and associated textual understanding has not been investigated. Design-based research supported two biology teachers in two Australian high schools to learn about the language patterns in English required to represent meanings about activity in senior high school biology and to develop practices that engaged students in classroom dialogue that assisted the learning of the discipline-specific language and associated texts. Through iterative cycles of planning and classroom implementation, the teachers and researchers co-designed practices for involving students in classroom dialogue that made explicit the language of the discipline, began to develop a metalanguage and supported students to reason about their creation of texts and language choices in the disciplinary context. Analyses of transcripts taken from videos of classroom dialogue allowed for the identification of the teaching practices that effectively involved students in dialogue about language and text. Practices associated with text comparison and contrast were most effective for generating classroom dialogue for language learning in biology.