Introduction

This study aimed to investigate an experienced science teacher’s discursive moves during a classroom inquiry. It examined how the teacher enacted particular discursive moves during the specific moments of the discursive exchanges. This was done judiciously by an in-depth temporal analysis of the cumulative distributions of the teacher discursive moves (TDMs) that were performed by the teacher to handle the discursive journey. This type of analysis was essential and attainable in the sense of Vygotskian teaching and learning. Certain concepts must be therefore introduced to demonstrate the importance of the current study.

Vygotskian Science Learning

Vygotsky (1978) stated that a (science) phenomenon may be conceptualised in two planes: interpsychological (social) and intrapsychological (cognitive/individual). On the interpsychological plane, a group of learners compare, contrast and discern various ways of thinking and talking regarding a phenomenon (Scott 1997). On this plane, diversifying semiotic tools as speech genres (e.g. symbols, diagrams) are rehearsed. The rehearsals of the publicised concepts follow the internalisation of the reproduced phenomena among the group members. Thus, on the intrapsychological plane, individual re-considerations are performed for appropriation. This is the best way of establishing individual-led schemes for re-comprehending the previously negotiated concepts through semiotic mechanisms, for instance, language, gestures, mimics, graphical representations or symbols (Vygotsky 1981, 1987).

For science learning, spontaneous concepts and scientific concepts were differentiated by Vygotsky (1987). Individual-led spontaneous concepts are embedded in everyday communication. Spontaneous concept formation does not involve any process aimed specifically at mastering them (Scott 1997). Scientific concept formation requires more formalised procedures as data collection, analysis and interpretation or instruction, since the emergence of the scientific concept begins not with a random encounter with phenomena but through a mediated relationship to the phenomenon under consideration (Vygotsky 1987).

Two distinctive concept formations (spontaneous vs. formalised) imply that an individual may develop a differentiated thinking and talking style from others (cf. Mortimer 1995). The same (science) phenomenon can be understood and externalised distinctively by two distinct thinkers-talkers. For example, a sixth grader may hold spontaneous concepts about atoms incorporating both simplified and shallow thinking. A scientist, on the other hand, may operate more in-depth, with complementary ways of thinking-talking about the atoms (Mortimer 1995). In this context, Bakhtin (1986) put forward the idea of social languages. A social language clarifies a discourse particular to a specific part of the society and such discourse is embedded in a given system at a given time (Holquist and Emerson 1981). An example makes the point clearer.

A solid-state physicist would consider a glass by means of the existence of the intermolecular forces and interactions among these forces in terms of resting in solid state. A glass blower deals with the artistic aspects of the produced glass. For the solid-state physicist and glass blower, the realities of glass within social, cultural, historical and contextual worlds influence the ways of thinking and talking of these two camps. The former discerns the glass through scientific experimenting accompanied particular discourses (e.g. states of matter, intermolecular forces and atoms). The latter would discuss how glass blowing should be undertaken to design state-of-art creations since s/he has artistic design concerns when thinking about how to shape the glasses aesthetically by applying specific glass-blowing techniques. This example directly reveals the intimate relation between thought (ways of thinking) and language (ways of talking).

Leach and Scott (2002) and Scott (1998) amalgamated Vygotskian and Bakhtinian concepts and contextualised social language phenomenon for instructional purposes. These researchers distilled everyday social languages of learners, social languages of scientists and social languages of school science. Everyday social languages signify the spontaneous concepts. The social languages of scientists signify the formalised ways of meaning-making of a phenomenon: dissolving the salt in the water, which the students also try to explain. Thirdly, the social languages of school science are shaped, or strictly formed; for instance, around a specific curriculum including the teaching of particular science contents while excluding others. An example makes the difference tangible between the social languages in the instructional context.

Students can use such expressions (thinking-talking styles) as “plants feed on the earth,” or “I’ve consumed my energy today,” both of which are far from being scientifically appropriate. However, students, using this everyday social language, can express the occurrences in their environment in this way and do not feel uncomfortable about this. This is because the learner has observed plants in soil and when s/he adds some nutrients such as water to the soil, and then the plant draws up the nutrients through its roots and grows. Moreover, when a child becomes tired after playing tag, s/he can think that the activity was energy consuming. For the first instance, an expert in plant physiology would account for the feeding of plants by photosynthesis through chemical equations using distinctive jargon. For the second example, an expert in biological energy systems can explain the process of a human becoming tired by taking the energy transformations (e.g. aerobic respiration, consuming and producing ATP) into consideration.

Vygotskian Science Teaching and Justification for the Study

When the two social languages are infused into the instructional contexts, there may be two distinctive decision orientations for a science teacher (Mortimer and Scott 2003). S/he may ignore everyday social languages of the students and make only the social languages of school science or scientists prominent. Alternatively, s/he may attach importance to both social languages. The first decision would be straightforward and needed only knowledge-transmission modes of teaching. However, when the other case is taken, there would be different points to be raised (Aguiar, Mortimer and Scott 2010; Scott, Mortimer and Aguiar 2006).

For science teaching, teachers should consider the social languages that learners bring to the class. However, teachers must convey specific contents that are inherently closer to the social languages of scientists in the form of social languages of the school science (Leach and Scott 2002). To grasp the student-led background meaning for moving on the discursive exchanges, a teacher has to perform more dialogic TDMs (McNeill and Pimentel 2010). It would be more instrumental to reveal the everyday thinking-talking of learners through more dialogical TDMs. A teacher may pool the student-led ideas by not interrogating whether they are relevant for the social languages of the school science (McMahon 2012). A teacher may pool, summarise and consolidate the student-led ideas (Oh and Campbell 2013; van Booven 2015). Moreover, a teacher may clarify, elaborate and probe the student-led assertions by comparing, discerning and categorising them (Pimentel and McNeill 2013). There is therefore less space for the vocabularies of science.

On the other hand, when students externalise their own thinking-talking, it would be time to put forward social languages of scientists, if their (scientists’) thinking-talking present a more illustrative explanation of the phenomenon (Leach and Scott 2002). For this, a teacher has to take an intellectual position to eliminate or ignore particular student-led assertions and deliberately make some other student-led assertions featured (McMahon 2012; Kawalkar and Vijapurkar 2013; Oh 2010). At this point, the purpose of the teacher is to challenge the students who have alternative thinking-talking that may not account for the revealed contradictions embedded in their everyday social languages (Chin 2006; McMahon 2012). This may be conceived as a persuasion process from teacher in prompting the students for eliminating some out-of-scope student-led utterances and a sharply selection of the neater and closer utterances to the social languages of school science (Edwards and Mercer 1987; Kawalkar and Vijapurkar 2013; Lemke 1990; van Booven 2015). In this phase, a teacher may play devil’s advocate role by prompting the students for debating, providing alternative points of views and asking for justification (Christodoulou and Osborne 2014). A teacher should provide a more argumentative or evaluative discussion context in which the students may have chances to detect their own fallacious reasoning (thinking-talking), then, it would be more reasonable to convince them to adopt a novel social language that would be closer to the school science social languages. Thus, a science teacher has to display both more dialogical and monological TDMs when her students began to accept an alternative thinking-talking system.

At the last phase of the discursive streaming, when students begin to welcome and operate a novel thinking-talking style that scientists have developed, it would be more likely to enact more monologic TDMs for finalising and closing the discursive streaming by reviewing the vocabularies of the newly appropriated thinking-talking system (Mortimer and Scott 2003). To put it differently, there is now a space for the jargons of science. The students had already adopted the scientist-led thinking style by engaging in, for instance, experimental processes through sharing group-based findings to persuade others that their assertions are evidence-based, thus more valid and reliable in researching into the phenomenon. Thus, the newly emerged language would not be unfamiliar to the students (Mortimer and Scott 2003). Thus, finalising, closing and reviewing TDMs would be more instrumental to summarise the newly thinking-talking system that the students have already began to internalise. Thus, a teacher may operate more monologic TDMs, such as direct lecturing, presenting logical expositions, hinting and affirmation-cum-direct instruction (Pimentel and McNeill 2013; van Booven 2015). To summarise, three introduced interwoven cycles of classroom discourse can be labelled as follows: initiating (more dialogic TDMs); developing-expanding (both dialogic and monologic TDMs); finalising (more monologic TDMs). This has been denominated as the harmony or rhythm of the classroom discourse (Mortimer and Scott 2003).

In this study, aside from the above-discussed features of the discursive streaming, another aspect of the dialogically/monologically oriented TDMs were explored. If science teaching can be accepted as a discursive journey, within different temporal streaming of the discursive exchanges, a teacher should enact more dialogic and/or more monologic TDMs in a combined, systematic and pragmatist manner. During the initial cycles of a discursive streaming, there would be an accumulation of the more dialogically oriented TDMs. While the discursive streaming progresses and when the student-led ideas are matured by comparing to and discerning from the scientist-led arguments, a teacher may be expected to alter her discursive posture into a more monologically oriented one to persuade the students that there would be a more elucidatory thinking-talking system over another. Thus, there must be a temporal cumulative distribution of the dialogically oriented and monologically oriented TDMs during science discourse. Hypothetically, initiating phases of science discourses may pervasively incorporate more dialogic TDMs, whereas developing-extending phases may include equally more dialogic and more monologic TDMs. Furthermore, finalising/closing phases may mostly include more monologic TDMs. However, this should be evidently tested. Thus, a temporal analysis was conducted in this study to test the above-stated hypothesis regarding the streaming of the discursive exchanges that may incorporate diverse accumulations of the dialogic and monologic TDMs. The research questions of the current study were:

  1. 1.

    Which TDMs were enacted by an experienced science teacher of sixth-graders during a discursive journey through a student-centred teaching activity?

  2. 2.

    What were the cumulative distributions of TDMs when the teacher managed the discursive journey by initially considering and negotiating the everyday social languages of learners and completed by prompting the students to recognise and appropriate the social languages of (school) science?

Methods

Participants

Participants were a science teacher with six years of experience and his 26 sixth-grade students (females = 12, males = 14), aged 11–12, in a private school. The teacher was a PhD student in the field of science education. He worked for an international project that aimed at disseminating student-centred teaching in the Turkish context. He was on a journey to become a teacher educator by undertaking designing, planning and implementing professional development programs for elementary and secondary science teachers. The experienced teacher had plentiful opportunities for enhancing his knowledge base and competencies of in-class inquiry. For instance, he worked as a member of a scientific community in which professional development activities were developed and implemented to augment novice science teachers’ knowledge and skills regarding the student-centred approach of argument-based inquiry (ABI). After managing university-based iterative workshops, the teacher provided professional on-site support for the development of teachers in their schools. Thus, the teacher grasped both in-site and on-site experiences for accomplishing the well-structured ABI implementation detailed below.

Argument-Based Inquiry Implementation

The ABI approach is a researched-based frame of science inquiry activities (Cavagnetto and Hand 2012). The ABI presents a concrete framework to lead students’ inquiry activities and provides metacognitive support to encourage students to reason about data to create their own evidences in a heuristic sense (Cavagnetto and Hand 2012). The content of the implementation was the properties of matter. This topic was determined because it was productive in capturing student-teacher exchanges (Mortimer 1998). The major purpose of the teacher was to create an argumentative context in which the students form their theoretical models (Buty and Mortimer 2008) to understand how matters behave in specific states. Three cycles of the implementation are detailed below.

First Cycle: Initiating-Developing-Expanding

In this phase, the teacher aimed at pooling student-led ideas about matters and properties and theoretical modelling as well as persuading students that they held a less elucidatory thinking-talking style. He presented mind-stretching examples that convinced the students that they could hold conceptual, epistemological and ontological conflicts regarding the properties of matter. In other words, the teacher made the cognitive contradictions embedded in the student’s thinking-talking system explicit. The thought-provoking teacher questioning revealed that the students had to ponder on their contradictions to clarify them by designing and negotiating their own theoretical models. Such contradictions are detailed below.

Conceptual Contradictions

The teacher presented the idea that if the matter incorporates atoms and when someone holds a pen, they are touching the atoms of the pen. The students did not accept this and even found it disturbing; they supposed that atoms are embedded in matter.

Ontological Contradictions

The students were negotiating the existence of the spaces among the molecules to categorise the states of the matter. The teacher then proposed that if molecules incorporate spaces students had already mentioned, what other matter or things could fill or infuse these spaces (What is the matter or stuff that could fill the spaces in an atom?).

Epistemological Contradictions

The student-led modelling was interrogated by the teacher and other students in terms of whether the established models were able to reflect the actuality of the nature and structure of matters.

In this cycle, the responsibilities of the teacher were to

  • listen actively to the students’ utterances,

  • make their thinking fallacies explicit,

  • pose scaffolding questions to guide the students towards alternative ways of thinking-talking.

The roles of the students were to design their own theoretical models regarding

  • positions of atoms and molecules for specific matter or within a solution of two items of matter,

  • the existence of intermolecular forces,

  • specific states of matter, matter combinations as solutions,

  • the solid, liquid and gas formations of solutions (e.g., when the students modelled a condensing or evaporating liquid salty water).

Second Cycle: Experimenting or Modelling

In this cycle, the teacher supported the students to reconsider their initial models by pointing out the unfit parts of the models that were previously created (Buty et al. 2004; Mortimer 1998). The students established their own models and engaged in pondering about the models to produce evidence to support or modify their initial theoretical hypothesis. The discursive quality of the next phase (whole group negotiations) was based upon the diversity of the produced models. Some student groups were working on the same modelling. While monitoring the groups, the teacher therefore prompted the students to ponder about alternative aspects of the phenomenon to generate a variation for the established models to augment the scope of negotiations in the next cycles. In this cycle, major discursive objectives of the teacher were to

  • prompt the students to consider and apply more enlarged aspects of the modelling,

  • prompt the students to monitor other groups’ modelling,

  • encourage the students toward multivariable reasoning in the sense of modelling, for instance, by taking more than one variable into account in fictionalising a molecule’s atomistic configuration (e.g. the solid-state imagining (first aspects) of a salt-water solution (second aspect)).

In this sense, it was more possible and credible for the students to animate varying aspects of models and modelling processes. Indeed, during the second cycle of the implementation, the teacher tried to increase the potential for variation and decrease the potential for uniformity regarding models and modelling.

Third Cycle: Finalising-Reviewing

There were competing theories of the students about the properties of the matters (what aspects) and the epistemological nature of the modelling (how aspects). The teacher therefore contrasted the groups’ model-based argumentations. In this context, the purpose was to increase the deepness of the student-student negotiations by comparing their mutually exclusive model-based articulations. For instance, representations of the intermolecular forces within a water-salt solution had been modelled by two different student groups. They also had established distinctive models even though they engaged in the mental reflections on the same phenomenon. These moments were the most generative discursive expansions for the classroom discourse.

There were several roles of the students in this cycle such as:

  • presenting their modelling to competing groups,

  • involving in the rigorous negotiations of the presented models in terms of their authenticity,

  • criticising each other regarding the relevancy and actuality of the model.

Above-stated attempts of the students resulted in more verbal exchanges between the teacher and students, and among the students. To illuminate further, every group tried to convince the other groups that their models revealed the reality in the best way or were the closest to reality. This was more possible under the guidance of the teacher’s instrumental discursive moves. To support them, he deliberately invited the students to criticise, evaluate and judge their classmates’ thinking in the form of modelling.

Data Collection and Analysis

The video-recorded ABI implementation lasted approximately 200 min. The teacher was aided by an assistant who placed the cameras in the best location in the laboratory to capture the discursive exchanges. The assistant also walked around the classroom using the camera to record one-to-one negotiations. The class participants had been informed about the purposes of the video recording when they had completed consent forms agreeing to participate in the study. The students were also accustomed to the video recording process since as members of the project, they had been filmed many times. Data analysis was conducted in three steps.

Creating Episodes

Prior to the analysis, the video-taped data was transcribed verbatim incorporating 432 turns of talk. The main purpose of the current study was to establish the cumulative distributions of the enacted TDMs along a continuum. The whole transcript therefore had to be divided into episodes containing less talk turns. The division was crucial in determining the cumulative proportions of the detected TDMs within the cycles of the implementation. In separating an episode from another, some specific teacher-led utterances were cautiously considered. An example makes the point clearer.

Anyway, let’s return to the beginning. Now, a friend of yours previously mentioned that atoms are gluey. Let’s discuss this idea, what do you think about this? (Turn-30, first episode; interval: Turn-1 to Turn-30; containing 30 turns of talk).

This was where the teacher and students moved onto the next episode. The underlying utterance represents a new initiation or sharp moving onto the next episode.

Clarifying/Coding the TDMs

For the 432 talks of turns, 26 episodes were created. Each episode contained different frequencies of the enacted TDMs. Clarification of the displayed TDMs were attained by systematic observation (Mercer 2010), a branch of discourse analysis. Mercer (2010) proposed that researchers can develop their own categorising system, or they can adopt an off-the-shelf system. Based on this suggestion, a theory-based and data-driven coding catalogue was developed for coding the enacted TDMs. The coding catalogue (see “Appendix A”) incorporated eight higher-order categories and more than 200 analytical codes (enactments of each discursive move) gathered around the categories. By strictly abiding by the coding catalogue and the streaming of the discursive exchanges, the researcher trained himself to identify teacher-led utterances (TDMs) corresponding to each category indicated in the catalogue. The researcher thus worked from video recording and assigned himself what he saw and heard to the categories. In other words, the researcher assigned analytical codes to the utterances given by the teacher as previously defined within the categories. A set of categories was therefore generated into which the whole teacher-led talks could be discerned and classified.

Identifying the Cumulative Distributions of the TDMs Within Episodes

The displayed TDMs were accumulated within episodes. In this sense, the major aim was to obtain cumulative proportions of the relative occurrences of the TDMs within each episode. Therefore, it would be feasible to detect whether more monologic and more dialogic TDMs were distributed in the specific way hypothesised in the current study. That is, as hypothesised in this study, the teacher was expected to enact more dialogically oriented TDMs for the initial episodes and more monologically oriented TDMs for the latest episodes of the classroom discourse.

Findings

The teacher presented 204 analytically coded TDMs that were collapsed to compose higher-order categories. The 16 subcategories of the TDMs were gathered around six higher-order categories (Table 1). Figure 1 shows the relative percentages of the subcategories. A discursive move that aimed to challenge the ideas of the students (e.g. playing the role of devil’s advocate) constituted about 16% of the enacted moves and was most frequently displayed. The other prominent moves were requesting clarification (14.3%), guiding the students to make judgements, legitimisations, evaluations and criticisms of their classmates’ thinking (13.8%) and asking the students to make wise predictions (10.3%).

Table 1 Variation in the TDMs enacted during the implementation
Full size table
Fig. 1
figure 1

Occurrences of the TDMs during the implementation

Full size image

The TDMs incorporated both monologic (e.g. knowledge providing and evaluating) and dialogic orientations (e.g. evaluating-judging-critiquing). As classified in Table 1, during the implementation, the teacher attempted to evaluate the student-led utterances against the canonical knowledge of science. He also asked for simple observations, comparisons and projections. The teacher displayed communicating TDMs to capture the underlying meanings behind the student-led utterances. Moreover, the teacher allowed for student-led evaluations and judgements when the students were negotiating their models. In addition, he acted as a challenger to show the students their conceptual, epistemological and ontological conflicts to carry the negotiation one step further. The teacher also presented particular TDMs to manage the flow of the discursive exchanges.

A specific analysis was conducted for detecting the specific accumulations of the TDMs within the continuum of the cycles of the ABI implementation. Twenty-six internally homogenous episodes were extracted incorporating 432 turns of talk and 204 TDMs. The episodes were devoted to the initiating-developing-expanding and finalising-reviewing cycles. From Episode-1 to Episode-10, initiating-developing-expanding cycles were managed by the teacher (Table 2). The episodes from 11 to 26 were also dedicated to the finalising-reviewing sessions. To summarise, 10 episodes were allocated for the initiating-developing-expanding cycles (talk turns: 1–203), and 16 episodes were for the finalising-reviewing cycles (turns of talk: 204–432).

Table 2 Accumulations of the displayed TDMs among the cycles of the negotiations
Full size table

Within each episode, the relative occurrences of the enacted TDMs were counted to determine the cumulative distributions of the TDMs within the lines or continuum of the implementation, to test the hypothesis of the current study. Particular TDMs were selected for the cumulative analysis. The criterion was the percentage of the relative occurrence of a discursive move. It was determined as 5% and above. Based on the relative occurrences of the TDMs (Fig. 1), eight of them were selected for the cumulative analysis. Selected TDMs are listed in Table 2. Metaphorically, whole negotiation cycles were sequenced from Episode-1 to Episode-26 within a platform or spectrum and TDMs were counted to reveal the specific locations (accumulations or spreading) of the discursive moves along the sequences or continuum.

In Table 2, two intervals for the division of the episodes (initiating-developing-expanding: from Episode-1 to Episode-10; finalising-reviewing: from Episode-1 to Episode-26) can be seen. The relative occurrences of the TDMs within the two intervals of the episodes were compared to detect whether the teacher enacted a selected discursive move more frequently, for instance, within the first interval (Episode-1 to Episode-10) compared to the second interval (from Episode-1 to Episode-26). Decisions were made for the alterations in the accumulations of the TDMs from the first interval to the second one. Three types of accumulations were found for the TDMs, as listed below:

  • The TDMs showing plain trend lines: asking for making predictions and challenging;

  • The TDMs displaying increasing trend lines: presenting logical expositions, monitoring and evaluating-judging-critiquing;

  • The TDMs demonstrating decreasing trend lines: embodying, probing and requesting for clarification.

Increasing/decreasing trend lines were re-categorised as sharply, moderately or slightly. Sharply increasing/decreasing tendency showed a significant fluctuation in the accumulation of a particular discursive move (e.g. presenting logical expositions: from 0 to 100%; difference: 100%). Moderately increasing/decreasing tendency revealed an intermediate change in the accumulation of a specific discursive move (e.g. monitoring: from 29.4 to 70.6%; difference: 41.2%). Lastly, slightly increasing/decreasing tendency exhibited a vaguely alteration in a particular move (e.g. evaluating-judging-critiquing: from 35.7 to 64.3%; difference: 28.6%). Based on these alterations in the accumulations of the selected TDMs, descriptive trend lines were established mathematically and reflected on the decisions for the accumulations of the TDMs.

The TDMs Showing Plain Trend Lines

There were two extracted TDMs showing a plain trend from Episode-1 to Episode-26. These TDMs were asking for making predictions and challenging. During the discursive exchanges, the teacher displayed asking for making predictions move by prompting the students to make wise guesses and projections regarding the topic under negotiation. The teacher also challenged the students through pointing out counter-arguments, contradictions and flaws in their utteran. An example episode is presented below to illustrate how the teacher was able to perform these discursive moves.

In Table 3, the teacher and students were negotiating the presumptive spaces in the atoms. After the utterance of Student-3 incorporating an assertion that there should be spaces within the atoms of the wall of the classroom, the teacher directed the students to make an estimation whether a beam of light passes through the wall. This utterance of the teacher was contingent upon the previously mentioned student-led utterances. The Student-3 provided a response implying her presumption. Then, immediately, the teacher posed a challenging argument signifying that if there is space in the wall, a beam of light must go through since the rays of light scatter within the space.

Table 3 An excerpt displaying the negotiation regarding the spaces within the atoms
Full size table

As seen in Fig. 2, the frequencies or the occurrences of these two discursive moves stayed within the plain line clarifying that these discursive moves were displayed homogenously during the classroom discourse. There were fluctuations or episode-based alterations in the occurrences of these discursive moves. However, the trend line exhibited that in initiating-developing-expanding and finalising-reviewing cycles, these moves were detected as they were distributed among many episodes from the beginning to the end of the classroom interactions (see also Fig. 2).

Fig. 2
figure 2

The TDMs showing plain trend lines

Full size image

The TDMs Displaying Increasing Trend Lines

With an incremental tendency from Episode-1 to Episode-26, the teacher enacted three discursive moves: presenting logical expositions, monitoring and evaluating-judging-critiquing. For monitoring move, the teacher prompted students to follow the classroom happenings regarding what was the content and context of the temporal negotiation cycles. For presenting logical expositions, the teacher first collected several ideas from the students, then, selected and ignored a part of the ideas pooled; finally, he tried to present an internally consistent argument based on the neater ideas that were mostly closer to the social languages of the school science. For evaluating-judging-critiquing discursive move, the teacher deliberately invited the students to make rigorous judgments, evaluations and legitimisations regarding the proposed ideas of the classmates.

In Table 4, there are examples of the TDMs showing an incremental tendency. In episode (Table 4), the discursive purpose of the teacher was to negotiate how and to what extent the salt may influence the melting or freezing point of the water. Based on the student-led responses regarding the conditions of the freezing and melting, the teacher at first recapped the student-led ideas (“Salt lowers the freezing point of water”). As it is clear in the excerpt, there was no implication regarding lowering or increasing a liquid’s freezing point within the student-led utterances. This confirms that the teacher tried to talk about the languages of the school science. Thus, he transformed the student-led utterances into a more formalised talking style and he tried to present a logical exposition by referring to how the melting and freezing of water happen in different temperatures, particularly, for the case of the salty water. This was accompanied with a challenging move of the teacher, as he reminded the students that they had an alternative idea about the melting and freezing of the water. Then, based on the confused utterances of Student-6, Student-8 and Student-11, the teacher represented another formulation about the behaviour of the water in higher and lower temperatures by delivering another logical exposition. Student-6 seemed to be encouraged; thus, provided a well-structured argument about the relation between the amount of cold in the air and amount of the salt in the water in explicating the negotiated phenomenon. This utterance was specifically noticed by the teacher, and he put forward it by monitoring move. Then, the teacher intentionally invited the entire class for evaluating and legitimating Student-6’s well-established argument.

Table 4 Conversations regarding the relationships between the salt, water and melting ice
Full size table

As seen in Fig. 3, there was a sharp increment for presenting logical expositions move. In details, after Episode-10, or after completing initiating-developing-expanding cycles of the discursive exchanges (see also Table 2), the teacher was liable to enact a more monologic discursive move as presenting logical expositions. In other words, the teacher did not operate this particular move in a homogenous sense. Rather, it was accumulated within the last cycles (episodes) of the negotiations (whole group negotiations as finalising-reviewing). This was also moderately valid for monitoring (moderately increasing) and evaluating-judging-critiquing (slightly increasing) moves. However, the cumulative occurrences of the latter two discursive moves were less heterogeneous compare to presenting logical expositions move. These moves (monitoring and evaluating-judging-critiquing) were not mostly accumulated in the last episodes as they were also detected within the Episode-1–Episode-10 interval (see also Table 2).

Fig. 3
figure 3

The TDMs displaying increasing trend lines

Full size image

The TDMs Demonstrating Decreasing Trend Lines

During the implementation, the teacher also enacted specific discursive moves that had a decreasing trend line. These were revealed as embodying, probing and requesting for clarification moves. These were labelled as communicating moves as operated by the teacher to comprehend the background meaning or embedded reasoning in the provided student-led utterances (see also Table 1 for detailed descriptions).

In Table 5, communicating moves are presented. In this episode, the purpose of the teacher was to deepen the student-led ideas about the atoms and their positions. There was a rigorous challenge for the students in this episode regarding the locations of the atoms: within (the atoms are inside the matter) vs. without (the atoms are on surface of the matter) or both (the atoms cover the matter). After Student-4’s utterance, the teacher requested for a clarification whether or not the atoms are within the matter. In here, the teacher wanted to comprehend what was the authentic implication under the provided response to deepen upon the negotiation. Then, Student-4 explicitly clarified his response. By a probing move, the teacher tried to learn much more about the underlying aspects of the provided response. After receiving a plausible response, the teacher tried to make the conversation more concrete in terms of the existence of the atoms and their positions in the matters. In this sense, the teacher exhibited a pen and interrogated whether he was holding the pen or the atoms of the pen. The responses Student-1, Student-2 and Student-4 signalled a cautious “Yes”. Then, for the second time, the teacher asked for another clarification to capture the implication(s) of the cautious “Yes”.

Table 5 Discussions about the positions and places of the atoms of the matters
Full size table

Even though these three communicating discursive moves were detected within several episodes, from Episode-1 to Episode-26, there was general tendency showing a decreasing line as displayed in Fig. 4. In other words, it was revealed that the teacher was likely to enact the communicating moves in the initial episodes of the classroom discourse. He then lowered the usages of the communicative moves. Thus, as Fig. 4 shows, there are accumulations for the three discursive moves until the Episode-10, then, there were slight (requests for clarification), moderate (embodies) and sharp (probes) decreasing for the occurrences of these moves.

Fig. 4
figure 4

The TDMs demonstrating decreasing trend lines

Full size image

Discussion

There are several points to be discussed based on the findings of the current study. As aforesaid, the main objective of the study was to find the evidence-based clues regarding the accumulations of the TDMs in the cycles of the negotiations of the ABI implementation. It was a test of the hypothesis that the teacher had to enact some particular discursive moves for initiating, developing and expanding cycles of the negotiation while displaying distinctive discursive moves for finalising and reviewing the discursive journey.

There are different but intimately interrelated framings in characterising the continuum or streaming of the classroom discourse. For an in-depth reconsideration of the findings of the current study, three classroom discourse framings are presented in Table 6 in addition to the ABI framing. As seen, the comparative framings include Mortimer and Scott’s (2003) divisions of the classroom discourse, Bakhtin (1934) stages of appropriation, Engle and Conant’s (2002) productive disciplinary engagement and the ABI framing (Cavagnetto and Hand 2012). Accumulated TDMs within the distinctive cycles of the ABI implementation will be reconsidered through the framings to augment the scope of the discussion.

Table 6 A collection of the theoretical framings for the classroom discourse
Full size table

There are five prominent points to be discussed. The first discussion point is about the challenging moves (see also Table 1) that were dispersed homogeneously during the streaming of the implementation. As inferred from Table 6, challenging moves serviced to both dialogical and monological discursive purposes. To advocate, challenging moves appeared to be distributed into most of the cycles of the discursive streaming. For dialogical purposes, the teacher sought for the alternative student-led responses. However, the teacher enacted the challenging moves for mostly more monological purposes. In the context of this study, the featured point was to interrogate why the challenging moves were dispersed through most cycles of the negotiations.

During the implementation, the students were responsible for convincing the teacher and their classmates of their modelling as illustrative and closer to the reality of the matters and their atomistic configurations. Thus, first, the teacher led the students to investigate alternative ideas that emerged during the classroom discourse about matter and modelling. This was the dialogical side of the challenging moves. To explicate, the teacher only showed that there might be alternating reasoning about the matter and modelling; in other words, the alternating student-led ideas about the phenomenon under negotiation could be contradictive. However, the teacher had to reach an intellectual consensus about the matters and modelling. Thus, particular student-led assertions had to be selected and featured while others had to be ignored and eliminated. In order to do this, the teacher had to make the conceptual, ontological and epistemological cognitive conflicts of the students about the matters and modelling explicit for other’s evaluations (Mortimer and Scott 2003; McMahon 2012).

When the teacher posed questions about the matter and modelling, the students inherently used their own everyday social languages in responding to the teacher. Then, the teacher had chances to exhibit the cognitive contradictions within the students’ everyday thinking-talking. Thus, during the discursive streaming, in a gradual sense, the students began to be convinced that their thinking-talking was not instrumental in analysing the unidentified facets of the phenomenon. When this was the case, the students appropriated an alternative thinking-talking that seemed to be more powerful in accounting for the dynamics of matter and properties.

The teacher’s challenging moves were instrumental for students' conceptual understanding. The students executed language and semiotic mechanisms to develop and rehearse emerged meanings on the intermental plane. Then, the created social negotiations of meanings through displaying alternative and challenging languages (ideas) composed the mediational mechanisms that enabled individual cognition on the intramental plane. When the students were challenged by the teacher on the intermental plane, they understood that they had to shift, modify and revise their thinking-talking especially through trimming their ill-structured reasoning on the intramental plane. This was a process in which not only concepts were formed by the students based on views of the canonical knowledge of science, but the students formed a consciousness (e.g. “My ideas do not work well in illustrating the matter and related models, therefore, I should change them”). As Leontiev (1981, p. 57) stated, “the process of internalisation is not the transferral of an external activity to a pre-existing, internal ‘plane of consciousness’: It is the process in which this plane is formed”. This is also labelled as the transformation of socially shared languages and other semiotic meanings into internalised processes (Vygotsky 1978). As a whole, the student-led concept formations were more possible and plausible under the guidance of concrete challenging moves bythe teacher.

This matches with the interwoven stages of the appropriation (Bakhtin 1934) showed in Table 6. In addition, this gradual modification in the student-led thinking-talking also matches with the problematizing model (Engle and Conant 2002), as the students were promoted to take on intellectual problems that were exhibited by the teacher by the aid of challenging moves. It was also an exploration of the contradictory student-led ideas as the teacher deliberately opened up the problems (Mortimer and Scott 2003) regarding the matter and modelling. However, this does not mean that the challenging moves were mostly detected for the initial cycles of the negotiations. These moves were embedded in most of the episodes as all members of the class had to defend their arguments about the phenomenon under discussion throughout the classroom discourse and response to the teacher-led challenges.

The second discussion point is about the communicating moves (probing, embodying, requesting for clarification) performed mostly in the initial cycles of the negotiations, thus serving more dialogical purposes (Table 6). Similar to other studies’ findings, the teacher staged the communicating moves to clarify and discern the background meanings of the students (Edwards and Mercer 1987; Kawalkar and Vijapurkar 2013; Lemke 1990; van Booven 2015). The teacher presented communicating moves mostly for the initial cycles of the implementations for two reasons. At the outset, the teacher had to comprehend the underlying meanings embedded in the student-led utterances. Otherwise, it was not attainable to detect and make the student-led cognitive contributions explicit in augmenting the scope of the negotiations. In other words, primarily the teacher had to capture the meaning underlying the student-led utterances to determine whether they possessed conceptual, epistemological and ontological cognitive contributions. Secondly, there were several discursive interactions and exchanges among the students. Thus, the student-led utterances had to be comprehensible to all members of the class. In this manner, when the teacher performed the communicating moves, the underlying meanings of the student-led utterances become more apparent and transparent to the students (Chapin et al. 2003). As a whole, first, the teacher and contributing students had to understand each other’s utterances’ implicit or explicit conceptual intentions; then they would be able to argue something in response to others’ utterances.

As an inference, there might be a close relation between challenging and communicating discursive moves. According to Bachelard (1968), “two people must first contradict each other if they really wish to understand each other. Truth is the child of argument, not of fond affinity” (p. 114). As revealed in this study, principally, it was essential for the teacher and students to capture the implicit lexical orientations of each other’s utterances. Then, it was more probable to detect the fallacious thinking-talking embedded in the semantic structures of the student-led utterances. Thus, if the class members wanted to contradict each other, they first had to grasp the underlying meaning embedded in the offered utterances. Lastly, the occurrence of the communicating moves decreased towards the latest cycles of the negotiations, because all members had commonly grasped the background meanings, reasoning or intellectual positions of their classmates.

The third discussion point is about the monitoring move servicing more monological discursive aims (see also Table 6). The teacher knowingly reminded his students that they had to eliminate particular arguments or pay attention to other specific assertions and this was substantially possible through the monitoring move. Thus, there was an array of selecting, ignoring or eliminating processes for the student-led ideas. To do this, first, the teacher encouraged the students to follow their own understanding of a classmate’s utterances. Namely, the teacher stimulated his students to be cognisant of others’ ideas (van Zee and Minstrell 1997a, b).

Therefore, the students comprehended that the negotiation groups and teacher drove forward certain concepts, explanations, illustrations, drawings or reasoning while excluding or ignoring others (Berland and Hammer 2012; Hutchison and Hammer 2010). To be clear, there were teacher-led foregrounding and backgrounding reminders, allowing the students to monitor which aspects of the everyday social languages were not useful and which aspects of the social languages of the school science should they pay attention to in illustrating the matters and modelling (e.g. “A major question has been raised just now concerning how many salt molecules are inserted into the water molecules” Turn-308). This provided a metacognitive awareness for the students regarding their mind-changing sessions. Through monitoring move, the students perceived that their previous thinking-talking style had altered or modified and now they held a novel thinking-talking style. This awareness was mostly visible at the latest stages of the negotiations as the teacher displayed the monitoring move at those stages.

The fourth discussion point is about the evaluating, judging and critiquing (EJC) moves. These moves seemed to service more monological discursive purposes. As seen in Table 6, EJC moves mostly appeared in the latest cycles of the negotiations. The teacher prompted the students to evaluate and judge their own utterances and those of their classmates through the EJC moves (e.g. “Is there anyone who wants to pose a question to your classmate? Would it happen the way she explained?” Turn-88). After negotiating various aspects of the matters and modelling, it was the time to evaluate, judge and legitimate the proposed assertions particularly in the last stages of the discursive exchanges.

The teacher enacted the EJC moves for delivering accountability and authority of the streaming of the classroom discourse to the students (Engle and Conant 2002). In the context of accountability, the teacher deliberately invited the students to select and make some ideas more prominent and ignore some other ideas that were not closer to the school science social languages on the intermental plane. By this, the teacher authorised the students in addressing such evaluations, judgements and legitimations (Engle and Conant 2002). To put it differently, the teacher accredited the students as co-legitimators or co-evaluators (Chin 2006, 2007; van Booven 2015; van Zee and Minstrell 1997a). Thus, the students were in action in persuading their classmates that the alternative thinking-talking system would be more appropriate in pondering about the matter and modelling. Thus, the students were mostly accountable for the social languages of science by critiquing others’ meanings regarding the phenomenon under consideration. Consequently, the students had to change or modify their previous thinking-talking regarding the phenomenon under consideration based on the rigorous external evaluations and judgements on the intramental plane.

This was (only) possible within the last stages of the discursive streaming as the students began to acknowledge that the novel thinking-talking system is completely their own (Bakhtin 1934). Now the monological purposes of the teacher were to lead the students to operate, and expand on the use of the scientific view by handing over responsibility for its further operation (Mortimer and Scott 2003). To explicate, in the latest stages of the discursive continuum, epistemologically, the EJC moves led to the students pondering on what they know and why they believe in the utterances of others (Berland and Hammer 2012; Hutchison and Hammer 2010; van Zee and Minstrell 1997a). Thus, in the negotiations, the teacher did not act as the sole person in the class who decided what was correct and why this was so (Lemke 1990); rather, the student body were the co-evaluators and co-judgers.

The fifth discussion point is about the presenting logical expositions move incorporating overly authoritative purposes (Mortimer and Scott 2003). In the very latest cycles of the negotiations, the teacher explicitly provided canonical knowledge of science through direct lecturing (Edwards and Mercer 1987), presenting logical expositions (Lemke 1990), providing narratives (Scott 1998) and operating verbal cloze (Chin 2007). Normally, delivering knowledge claims to the students cannot be acknowledged for a typical ABI implementation (Cavagnetto 2010; Cavagnetto and Hand 2012). However, in the sense of the current study, the students had already negotiated the phenomenon, suggested varying assertions through modelling processes in shedding light on the confronted cognitive challenges. In the very last stages of the implementation, it was the time for the students to move on to the worlds of scientific thinking-talking through the teacher’s wrap-ups and reviews (Mortimer and Scott 2003). In this context, for the teacher, it might be more appropriate to display the discursive moves within more authoritative spectrum in reviewing or wrapping-up the previously created discourse (Mortimer and Scott 2003).

Conclusions

The teacher might perform particular discursive moves in moving the students from a thinking-talking system that they used to a novel one that is established for the school science and closer to the social languages of the experts or scientists. This study presents some clues thatthe accumulations of the enacted TDMs during a discursive continuum that make this discursive journey possible and meaningful in terms of science learning and teaching.

According to the discursive mechanics patterned in this study, a teacher should perform challenging moves within all cycles of the discursive exchanges. However, it would be more feasible to capture the underlying meaning, reasoning or thinking that may be explicitly or implicitly embedded in the student-led utterances before exposing the student-led cognitive conflicts. This proves that communicating moves should be regarded for the sake of the classroom discourse. As a whole, communicating moves may be more expected to be occurred for the initial cycles of the negotiations.

After communicating with the students, and making their phenomenon-based conflictions explicit, it would be more purposeful selecting, putting forward, ignoring or eliminating the student-led ideas. It would be more beneficial for the classroom discourse when the students are able to monitor which assertions had been left behind or went on with. Furthermore, in shaping the thick boundaries of the proposed knowledge claims, a teacher should design an evaluative discursive context in which the students have epistemological, ontological and conceptual accountability to others and disciplinary norms showing the need of more monologic discursive moves. Finally, it may be the essence of the classroom discourse to directly present the scientific content through logical expositions that should be built on the previously interrogated ideas regarding the topic under consideration.

Implications of the Study

One of the most important implications of this study isfor professional development of science teachers in enacting particular discursive moves for more student-centred instructional approaches. In this study, it was shown that meaning making as a dialogic process (Mortimer and Scott 2003) may not be considered as a simplified issue to be handled (Crawford 2000). On the contrary, it is substantially sophisticated, requiring a concrete and continuous balance between more dialogic and more monologic TDMs or between mostly mutually exclusive social languages. To put it differently, within the background of the in-class conversations, there can be rather complicated intellectual exchanges and interactions due to distinct social languages creating a discursive-pedagogical tension for the teacher. As detected, a teacher may be in need of iteratively rearranging his or her discursive moves’ pedagogical orientations to take the student-led utterances (everyday social languages) into account and finalise the discursive streaming ina way that is expected to be neater to the scientific point of view (Scott 1997).

However, it is the case that the teachers may not have pedagogical awareness about their discursive moves’ fluctuating orientations or alternating social languages of different communities in undertaking an in-class inquiry. As all the observations are theory-laden (Chalmers 1999), a science teacher may not hold a pedagogical-discursive lens to monitor the emergences of the alternating social languages as well as revealed fluctuations and specific accumulated distributions of particular TDMs. To construct a meta-awareness for science teachers, they should be involved in deliberately designed and implemented professional development programs.

In this sense, Oliveira (2010) reported that many analytical parts of TDMs may be directly and explicitly taught to or shared with teachers during longitudinal professional development sessions. In Oliveira’s (2010) study, the teachers were introduced to the types of the occurrences of teacher-questioning patterns and informed about the discursive functioning of teacher-questioning patterns (e.g. open-ended, close-ended and managerial). This provided teachers with skills to advance in-class questioning and, more importantly, the participatory teachers became pedagogically aware of the discursive power and pedagogical meanings of teacher-questioning. In a similar vein, influences of the alternating social languages, prominent analytical TDMs and related accumulative distributions of the TDMs can be explicitly embedded in professional development processes in boosting science teachers’ pedagogical-discursive lenses to change their potential in-class decisions and accompanied actions.

As a final suggestion, following Schon’s (1983, 1987) recommendations, during professional development processes, in educating a reflective practitioner, teachers may make self-reflections on multilayered aspects of the discursive moves to systematically observe and evaluate enacted discursive moves’ genres and accumulated distributions that may be scaffolding in undertaking a genuine in-class inquiry. Methodologically, the pedagogical-discursive awareness can be more attainable through stimulated recall sessions as the core part of several well-designed professional development programs (Calderhead 1981; Nilsson and Vikström 2015).

Further Studies

As accepted, there are two camps of a typical classroom: teacher and students. This study only focused on the teacher-led verbal externalisations’ instructional orientations. However, the respondents were the students and they developed and formed their concepts and consciousness regarding the concepts by means of surrounding TDMs. It has been an imperative to research into any influences of TDMs on the student-led outcomes such as semantic complexities of their responses (cf. van Booven 2015), reasoning qualities (cf. Hardy et al. 2010) or argument structures (cf. Martin and Hand 2009; McNeill and Pimentel 2010). To explicate, it has been accepted as a reality that the discourse (TDMs) and the cognition (student-led cognitive outcomes or intellectual contributions to the classroom discourse) are intimately related (Chin 2006, 2007). Thus, as an immediate suggestion for future studies, the effects of TDMs on the student-led cognitive outcomes/contributions should be researched using a methodology like, for instance, the one adopted in this study to make the discursive turn in learning psychology (Bruner 1990) more transparent by scanning all analytical interactions and exchanges between the members.