My doctoral thesis will research from the perspective of the university teacher, the nature and occurrence of interactional, dialogic discourse in face-to-face teaching, and the factors that support its emergence. Specifically, it examines how university teachers’ verbal practices and interactional strategies foster exploratory talk, conceptualized as a shared, dialogic mode of thinking that models disciplinary reasoning and processes of knowledge construction for students.

Research material data comprises teaching and interview material collected from four Finnish university teachers (two men and two women) representing two faculties, who provided lecture-based instruction during the academic years 2023-2024. All courses were meant for bachelor-level students. Basically I videorecorded at the very beginning of the course, around at the mid-point, and then at the end of the course – this was the minimum – in order to be able to see the development in relations between the teacher and the students, but also among students themselves.

A total of 19 lecture sessions were video-recorded and subsequently transcribed for analysis. The data of lectures includes 24 hours, 59 minutes, and 49 seconds of videorecorded material, amounting to 1,142,310 characters, 156,444 words, and the equivalent of 279 A4 pages.

In addition, each instructor participated in two semi-structured interviews, conducted before and after the lecture course. The audio-recorded interview corpus consists of 8 interview sessions, totaling 5 hours, 16 minutes, and 11 seconds of audio material, corresponding to 258,144 characters, 39,731 words, and 66 A4 pages of transcribed text.

Altogether, the full data contains 30 hours and 16 minutes of recorded material, comprising 1,400,454 characters, 196,175 words, and 345 A4 pages.

The starting point for my study has been what is frequently referred to as sociocultural theory, according to which language is a way of thinking that is both individual and collective. The analysis is based on Vygotsky’s sociocultural (or, cultural-historical; Vygotsky, 1978) thinking, in particular on the essential role of the language but also the concepts of the zone of proximal development (ZPD) and scaffolding. The analysis is also guided by Bakhtin’s (1981) notions of dialogism and multivoicedness. The background material for the study consists of previous studies of the impact of interactional dialogical speech used by teachers to foster learning, the development of common knowledge, and student motivation for learning. From the previous studies, Mercer’s (2000) differentiation of cumulative and exploratory talk is used as the theoretical framework as well, complementing aspects from Alexander’s (2008; 2020) dialogic teaching and Wells’s (1999) view of inquiry as collaborative knowledge-building.

Mercer (2000) distinguishes three kinds of talk between a teacher and learners, and between learners: disputational talk (heavy disagreement, even disputes), cumulative talk (building solidarity by uncritically adding ideas) and exploratory talk, in which participants critically but constructively engage with ideas, give reasons, and invite justification. Exploratory talk is collaborative and accountable: it advances reasoning through shared warrants and explicit evaluation of claims. Exploratory talk is marked by visible reason-giving, joint evaluation, and co-ownership of conclusions; in the episode, whose analysis I offer as paper, the teacher’s strategies move the interaction along precisely this trajectory in the direction of exploratory talk.

This focal episode is a brief university classroom exchange in which a student tentatively articulates distinctions among certain key terms of the lecture and the discipline, and the teacher responds by validating, elaborating, and recontextualizing these distinctions with reference to the debates of the discipline she teaches.

The study will bring some new information about the university teacher’s operations in dialogic discourse. There are only few researches on this topic specifically from the perspective of university pedagogy. See, however, Atwood et al. (2010). 

The research method for the analysis is theory-based content analysis, and the phenomenon researched will be studied qualitatively at the level of microanalysis. My methodology could be called abductive, as the research material guides and helps to form the analytical framework. I also lean to some extent on socio-cultural discourse analysis (Mercer), which can be done both qualitatively and quantitatively. There are three important elements in this analysis: language as a mediational tool for shared and collective cognition, grounded in a sociocultural theoretical framework (Vygotsky); a qualitative methodological approach – when needed, with complementary quantitative components – enabling the systematic analysis of interactional and discourse level phenomena. And thirdly, classroom-based spoken interaction occurring in face-to-face instruction, including teacher–student exchanges – when needed, including as well as peer-to-peer student discourse. The units of analysis are chosen in the framework of teacher-student dialogue, which engage the teacher and a student or several students, and is indicated by linguistic signs, e.g. “I think that”, “This was new to me…”, “I had never thought that…”, as part of a longer chain of speakers, or e.g. questions. In case of exploratory talk, on the surface structure of the language there is visible reason-giving, joint evaluation, and co-ownership of conclusions. In addition to Vygotsky, Mercer, Bakhtin, Alexander and Wells, whose thinking is behind the research, there is an article by Sherrie Atwood, William Turnbull, and Jeremy I. M. Carpendale titled “The Construction of Knowledge in Classroom Talk” published in "The Journal of the Learning Sciences" in 2010. In their article those scholars do research on the learning of college students of the first and fourth year. In this connection the article by Antti Rajala, Jaakko Hilppö, Lasse Lipponen, “The emergence of inclusive exploratory talk in primary students’ peer interaction” can be mentioned. It was published in "International Journal of Educational Research" in 2012, their research material is from school context, but they modify Mercer’s three categories of talk in the way that I did in my own Master thesis in 2018.

There are a few actions in Teacher A’s teaching in the episode to be presented that support the dialogue developing towards exploratory talk. First, she takes up the student’s framing and revoices conceptual distinctions in disciplinary terms. She validates the student’s contribution as an inquiry rather than a right/wrong answer (Alexander, 2008; Mercer, 2000). Second, when she emphasizes multiplicity and contestation, typical for academic critical thinking, Teacher A resists premature closure of the dialogue and keeps the epistemic space open – to the student in question but certainly also to any other who would like to join the dialogue. This is an essential condition for exploratory talk (Bakhtin, 1981; Mercer, 2000). Third, she gives reasons making explicit why and how various terms used in the discipline are justified and/or contested by various scholars (Mercer, 2000; Alexander, 2020). Fourth, in doing this, she introduces the student, with his fellow students, to “scholars” and their thinking, and through that, to community-of-practice norms (Wells, 1999). In the episode, Teacher A’s final comment invites ongoing inquiry beyond the episode, after and outside the classroom event. Thus, the talk (spoken language) becomes a disciplinary apprenticeship, modeling and exposing how scholars decide and give meanings in context (Wells, 1999). From the whole of research material, of which I will present one example, I hypothesise that the activities of university teachers and teaching methods promoting dialogical interaction and activating students’ shared thinking can produce exploratory talk. In exploratory talk, the teacher and students think together via the dialogical features of spoken language. In teaching situations, exploratory talk can generate questioning and reasoning and, as a result, also new insights and knowledge.

Alexander, R. (2008). Towards dialogic teaching: Rethinking classroom talk (4th ed.). Dialogos. Alexander, R. (2020). A dialogic teaching companion. Routledge. Atwood, Sherrie, William Turnbull, and Jeremy I. M. Carpendale. (2010). “The Construction of Knowledge in Classroom Talk”, The Journal of the Learning Sciences 19:258–402. Bakhtin, M. M. (1981). The dialogic imagination: Four essays (M. Holquist, ed.; C. Emerson & M. Holquist, trans.). University of Texas Press. Mercer, N. (2000). Words and minds: How we use language to think together. Routledge. Rajala, Antti, Jaakko Hilppö, Lasse Lipponen. (2012). “The emergence of inclusive exploratory talk in primary students’ peer interaction”, International Journal of Educational Research, 53: 55–67. Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes (M. Cole, V. John-Steiner, S. Scribner, & E. Souberman, eds & trans.). Harvard University Press. Wells, G. (1999). Dialogic inquiry: Toward a sociocultural practice and theory of education. Cambridge University Press.