Nystrand, Martin. (1997). Opening Dialogue
This little book should have a very big impact. It gives the results of
the "largest ever study of classroom discourse and its effects on
learning"-112 eighth and ninth grade language arts and English classes
comprising 1,100 students for each of two years. Nystrand and his
colleagues observed some 450 class sessions in rural, urban, and suburban
Minnesota-a state which consistently scores at or near the top on national
standardized tests.
The results are painfully sad, if generally unsurprising. "Despite an
apparent emerging consensus about the sociocultural foundations and
character of literacy and classroom discourse, most schooling is organized,
we found, for the plodding transmission of information through classroom
recitation. Teachers talk and students listen, and the lower the track, we
found, the more likely this is to be true."
Drawing on Michael Bakhtin's theory of dialogism, Nystrand analyzes the
plodding transmission as "monologic" discourse, where the teacher's voice
and authority dominate the classroom with "centripital" force, privileging
static, canonized knowledge. Nystrand advocates a much more "dialogic"
pedagogy, where there are many diverse voices-including those of students'
experience-empowered to contribute to the collaborative production of
knowledge. Recitation and fact-testing characterize one pole. Open-ended,
"authentic" discussion and extended writing the other pole.
US English teachers rely primarily on lecture and monologic recitation.
Indeed, much of what they call discussion should be more accurately termed
recitation: "a tightly-scripted lesson; we get the impression the teacher
is working from a highly wrought list of topics and questions, covering
points in a particular order (and perhaps preparing students for a test). .
. rather than responding to the substance of what students have to say."
For all its apparent order, such discourse is "choppy and lacks coherence."
While it might be useful for building a base upon which to move toward more
interpretive and open-ended discussion, Nystrand found it rarely does.
Classrooms are all too often "orderly but lifeless." Only about one fourth
of students participated in question-and-answer recitation. Open-ended
discussion, as opposed to recitation, occurred on average less than one
minute a day. In the majority of classes there was no open-ended
discussion at all. In literature courses, where, given the content, one
might hope for more discussion calling for interpretation, the rule is
"bite-sized pieces of information distilled into countless worksheets and
continual recitation," despite an average class size of about 20.
For this methodologically rigorous study, Nystrand and his colleagues used
a specially-designed program on laptop computers to code some 23,000
questions for the source (teacher or student), whether or not there was a
response, whether or not it was "authentic" (did not have a prespecified
answer), whether or not there was uptake (from a previous answer), the
cognitive level (on a scale derived from Applebee and others), and level of
evaluation (pushing the question further as opposed to merely responding
"correct" or "good question").
The accumulated numbers come to numb, as much of the instruction surely
must for many students. The picture is particularly bleak for low-track
students. Teachers in low track classes lecture over 40% more and spend
half as much time in discussion as in high track classes. Low track
students do 2.6 times the grammar exercises, fill-in-blanks five times
more, and do true/false and multiple choice four times more often than high
track students. Teachers comment twice as much about the content of high
track students' writing than low track students' writing. After some
careful analysis, Nystrand concludes that differences in instructional
discourse to a large extent account for achievement inequality. High track
students are talking and writing more about the content. The results
contradict the usual rationale for ability grouping-that it gives teachers
more time to concentrate on the particular needs of students.
Perhaps the most telling findings come from his comparison of the classroom
discourse data with results of a five-question short answer test he used to
measure learning: asking students to tell whether the endings of the
stories they read for class were happy or sad, to name characters, to tell
the ending, and to describe the conflict and the theme or main idea. The
tests were scored for such factors as extent of recall and depth of
understanding.
His central finding is that what he terms dialogic instruction-based on
open-ended discussion about literature rather than recitation-had a strong
correlation with learning. This is especially telling since the average
class engaged in less than one minute of it a day. Open-ended discussion
unrelated to literature had a negative effect on learning (which may
suggest why there were similar rates of open-ended questioning in all
tracks, but greater learning in high track classes, where authentic
questions were focused on literature). In general, extended writing
enhanced recall and understanding, short answer writing degraded recall and
understanding.
The findings on small group work also suggest that only when discussion is
open and focused on the content is it successful. Nystrand found that what
he calls "collaborative seatwork . . . promotes neither ownership nor
coherent discussion" and had a negative correlation with learning. But
autonomous group work (which accounted for only 11% of group work in the
classes) was positively correlated with learning. And the higher the
degree of student autonomy, the more likely it was to be associated with
achievement.
As one reads the results, one wonders why US. English teachers continue
with instruction that produces so little student involvement. One answer is
historical. Today's teachers inherited a tradition of textbook recitation
from the nineteenth century, when teachers with little training relied on
textbook questions to structure the discourse of overcrowded classrooms.
Nystrand reviews studies dating from the 1860s, when one observer remarked,
"Young teachers are very apt to confound rapid questioning and answers with
sure and effective teaching." A 1909 comparison with European teachers
concluded European teachers "build up new knowledge in class" while
American teachers act as if they were chairing a "meeting, the object of
which is to ascertain whether [students] have studied for themselves in a
textbook." And a long series of studies suggests that things have not
changed much.
The book includes a fascinating chaper by Robert Kachur and Catherine
Prendergast that suggests more satisfying answers. The chapter presents
case studies of two of the teachers, which supplement the statistical
data-but also raise questions that at times call the researchers'
analytical categories into question. These case studies are structured
around an effective teacher/ineffective teacher comparison. The
ineffective teacher takes a "monologic" approach based on recitation, a
hunt for right answers-standard interpretations of the literary works.
Only 17 percent of her students participated constructively. Recitation
was associated with off-task behavior, and therefore discipline problems.
Rigidity leads to ineffective control, ironically.
However, the dialogic teacher (with "an amazing" 96 percent of students
participating constructively during class) actually uses many text-based
questions and "what is more surprising" (to the authors) inauthentic
questions. Yet these questions foster dialog because the teacher's goal is
not to teach right answers but a right "methodology of analysis"-that of
the discipline of literary criticism. It is thus only half the story to
suggest, as the authors do, that such dialogic teaching works because it
asks students to explore their "own dialogic horizons" [italics mine].
They are exploring the discipline, the "content" as dynamic activity rather
than as a static repository. The dialogic teacher provides instructional
scaffolding so that "control would be given over bit by bit, students
eventually would be responsible for conducting the activity of literature
analysis on their own, but not before they had some practice, or gone
through some 'dry runs,' as he put it." In a wider sense they are doing it
"his" way (the discipline's way) and not their "own" way. In this sense
the dialog is inauthentic, a dry run. But it can lead to further
involvement with not merely the texts, bu the discipline's ways with the
texts.
In a sense, the monologism/dialogism binary reinscribes a fundamental and
longstanding binary of child-centered versus discipline centered education,
which Dewey argued against many decades ago in favor of a transactional
approach, which would consciously and carefully balance the interests of
the learner with the demands of disciplines. Dewey's transactional approach
begins with the experience of the learners but ends with organized subjects
representing the already-formulated cumulative experience of the human
race-the content.
When Nystrand invokes an ideal of "fully dialogic instruction" with "a
conception of knowledge not as previously formulated by someone else, but
rather as continuously regenerated and co-constructed among teachers and
learners and their peers," he brackets the demands of the discipline, the
previously formulated knowledge-unless one considers academic literary
critics as "peers." And when he argues that "above all, dialogic
instruction depends for its success on what students bring to class," he
brackets what teachers bring to class as representatives of their
disciplinary traditions. To reform instruction, teachers do indeed need
what he calls a "mature" notion of literary response-but that is a
"disciplined" notion. And to understand the persistence and pervasiveness
of the problems his study so movingly dramatizes, we perhaps need to go
beyond "the classroom" to theorize the relation between the classroom and
the discipline of English.
These theoretical musings aside, this little book makes a very big
contribution to our understanding of classroom discourse, and to English
curriculum. It should be widely read and pondered and heeded by teachers,
researchers, curriculum-makers, and teacher educators. That US students
should endure another century or two of the English teaching Nystrand found
so pervasive is a frightening possiblity.
David R. Russell
Associate Professor
English Department
Iowa State University
Ames, IA 50011 USA
(515) 294-4724
Fax (515) 294-6814
drrussel who-is-at iastate.edu