This contribution presents some findings of action research focused on implementation of dialogic teaching principles at lower secondary Czech schools.Dialogic pedagogy rests on the assumption that children learn best through participation in rich and challenging classroom discourse and therefore requires that all pupils be encouraged to participate in such activity (Lefstein, Snell, 2014).  Many researchers claim that the more students participate in educational communication, the better results they gain. Consequently, many researchers also show that a low level of participation presents a disadvantage to students (Black 2004, 2007; Heyd-Metzuyanim, 2013).

There are many indicators which enable to operationalize student participation, such as: (i) the lenght of time during which students speak (Molinari & Mameli, 2013); (ii) the linguistic complexness and length of their responses (Boyd & Rubin, 2002, 2006); or (iii) the presence of the triadic interaction in which more participants than just a teacher and a student spontaneously react to each other (Molinari & Mameli, 2013).

Yet, empirical evidence consistently shows that the degree of student participation in teaching at lower secondary schools is very limited. A number of international researches have postulated this view (Nystrand, 1997; Alexander, 2001; Burns & Myhill, 2004; Parker & Hurry, 2007; Kumpulainen & Lipponen, 2010) which has been found to describe even the Czech educational reality by Šeďová et al. (2012). The international findings show that the time length during which students speak does not exceed one third out of the overall spoken time in a class. Czech researches have reported that the ratio is even starker in the Czech Republic where the teacher’s speaking comprises 75 percent of the overall spoken time and pupils thus have only 25 percent to participate (Šeďová, Švaříček, & Šalamounová, 2012). It has further been reported that pupils only rarely ask questions, react to their peers or comment on what has been said. Rather, their participation is limited to providing short factual answers to the teacher’s questions. This means that in an ordinary class classroom discourse is used as a means of controlling knowledge instead of a means of its creation.

Consequently, on the one hand there is a theory of dialogic education which has been reported to produce positive results of participation in student learning. On the other hand, it has been found that the degree of student participation in ordinary teaching is very limited. Therefore, this contrast can be considered an impulse for change via action research.

In this study, we present an action research project studying classroom discourse that took place at the Department of Educational Sciences at Masaryk University, Faculty of Arts, in Brno, the Czech Republic. The core of this project consisted of a development programme for teachers focused on a change in communication methods in dialogic teaching. We observed eight teachers who took part in the programme between 2013 and 2015.  

The research questions which we ask in this contribution are as follows:

1)      Has the degree of student participation in the observed classes increased thanks to the inclusion into the programme?

2)      Are there differences in the degrees of student participation? If yes, what are their determinants?

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