Discourse Patterns and Communicative Approaches for Teaching Nature of Science

Abstract

This study aims to determine discourse patterns and communicative approaches utilised for teaching the nature of science (NOS) using an explicit–reflective approach. This study was conducted as part of a research project aiming to support teachers’ classroom practices through a long-term professional development program focusing on teaching NOS. Discourse analysis was used to determine classroom discourse patterns and communicative approaches. Audio and video recordings of classroom lectures conducted by 8 of the 22 teachers participating in the project were used for analysis. A total of 505 minutes of teacher–student dialogue was recorded and subsequently analysed. The results indicated that teachers used three different discourse patterns (triadic, chain, and adjacency pair) and three different communicative approaches (interactive–dialogic, interactive–authoritative, and non-interactive–dialogic) for teaching NOS using the explicit–reflective approach. The most common discourse pattern was the triadic pattern (initiation–response–evaluation), and the interactive–authoritative approach was the most common communicative approach. These findings contribute to the literature in terms of increasing the efficiency of using the explicit–reflective approach by considering classroom discourse to teach students NOS.