This paper traces the sophisticated negotiations to re-inscribe the authority of Nature when a school science experiment fails during the enactment of a highly rated science curriculum unit. Drawing on transcriptions from classroom videotapes, we identify and describe four primary patterns of interaction that characterize this process, arguing…

Teachers play a vital role in the classroom environment. Interaction between teacher and students is an essential part of the teaching/learning process. An educator, Flanders originally developed an instrument called Flanders Interaction Analysis (FIA). The FIA system was designed to categorize the types, quantity of verbal interaction and direct…

In order to become productive members of an academic community, it is important for students to master its procedural practices. By adapting Bourdieu's concepts of cultural capital, habitus, and field, we examined procedural practices of first-graders from minority and low-socioeconomic-status backgrounds in the context of student-led literacy…

The purpose of this study was to develop paradigms of verbal interaction for problem solving discussions. Taking selected definitions from previously published work, categories were built which classify verbal moves. Using the categories, models of verbal interaction were built which subsumed such verbal interaction concepts as the venture, move,…

This article examines major trends in research on the teaching process, emphasizing two models for studying classroom interactions--process-product and descriptive. Also discussed is interpersonal interaction as it is studied in social psychology. (CB)

An observation system was designed to describe cognitive aspects of teacher discourse that could be related to ATI interactions. Twelve videotaped lessons were analyzed using the system; 13 of 19 categories had correlations greater than .70. Percentages of discourse for the four eighth-grade teachers studied are presented. (MS)

Bakhtin's language theories give educators a view into how people develop and communicate with language through dialogue. These conceptions can be applied to teaching in a variety of positive ways. The authors explore how teaching based on Bakhtinian concepts might function in the classroom, paying particular attention to the concepts of dialogue,…

A model for processes of abstraction, based on epistemic actions, has been proposed elsewhere. Here we apply this model to processes in which groups of individual students construct shared knowledge and consolidate it. The data emphasizes the interactive flow of knowledge from one student to the others in the group, until they reach a shared…

Research Funded by the Central Fund for Research, Pennsylvania State University (Grant (Grant No. 151).

A review of the research of E.G. Mishler, H. Mehan, and others suggests that a unified theory of the mechanics of how continuous discourse is accounted for in classroom behavior is necessary for further study. Discourse analysis meets the criteria for selection of a theoretical framework because it deals with all the language within the classroom…

An annotated bibliography of 14 journal articles and documents from the ERIC indexes presents literature on verbal and nonverbal behavior, feedback of interaction analysis data to teachers, classroom coding manuals, and interracial interaction. (JN)

This article describes a new construct for coding the social communicative performance of school-aged children as they interact with peers and teachers in the classroom. The Social Communication Coding System (SCCS) allows clinicians a way of describing how children actually spend their time during the school day by observing ongoing behaviors…

The two studies reported in this article examine the verbal and nonverbal interaction patterns of (1) bilingual teachers as they switch from one language to another, and (2) bilingual adults in the same classroom, usually a teacher and an assistant teacher or aide.

A study of classroom communication. (CH)