ABSTRACT
This chapter reports on the introduction of dialogic learning, as demonstrated in classroom discussion, into a final-year economics program at an Australian university. The rationale for using dialogic learning was to ensure the academic success of an increasingly important student cohort in Australian university education, second-language international students. Despite calls for university education in Australia to engage students in more interactive learning environments (Biggs, 1996, 2003; Trigwell, Prosser, & Waterhouse, 1999; among others), any formalized non-virtual dialogic negotiation of meaning often plays a minimal role, if indeed any role at all. It will be shown, by way of a case study, that by using extensive discussion the students were offered an environment which both encouraged their explorations of meaning and was tolerant of their learning difficulties. The particular aim of this approach was to provide a remedy for students’ need to copy model answers. As such, the students were able to explore uncertainties, seek clarifications, and to confirm interpretations. The chapter examines, in particular, the students’ attempts to negotiate the meaning of an economic model via their questions to the economics lecturer and class colleagues as they prepare to write a short-answer assignment. The chapter will show the kinds of linguistic strategies undertaken by the lecturer in response to the students’ questions and the impact these strategies had on the students’ learning and appropriation of meaning. The case study reveals that while the students’ learning was a highly collaborative process, any increments in understanding were overall devolutionary. Rather than moving toward new dimensions of abstract and metaphorical language to explain and exemplify economic phenomena, the lecturer necessarily shifted from theoretical syllogisms to more common-sense narratives to illustrate real-world economic activity. The data indicate these shifts were in response to the students’ confusions evident in their
questions. In their responses, the data reveal an interesting transition in the students’ explanations; that is, they shifted between attempts to explain the theoretical principles and more congruent reasons indicating partial progress in their appropriation of the discourse. The study argues that without the assumed background knowledge, the complex nature of hypothetical causal explanations as a beginning point in the lecturer’s explanations was confounding for the students. The linguistic analysis indicates that the classroom discussion offered the students opportunities, a praxis, to remediate their background knowledge, even partially. In Vygotsky’s (1986, p. 150) terms, the students’ gradual control of meaning meant they were able to move beyond a mere “parrotlike repetition of words to cover up a vacuum.” This is evidenced by the advantages they took to pose questions and doggedly seek reasons. The article concludes by considering the effectiveness, or otherwise, of dialogic learning as a learning methodology for this student cohort. The contributions of this study are, first, to offer critical insights into how “doing economics” by way of discussion occurred. Rather than making intuitive assumptions about students’ background knowledge, or how a student’s cultural and linguistic background will be an automatic impediment to their learning, these findings reveal the realities of these students’ confusions with the meanings of the discourse. And second, the study demonstrates how the students were able to clarify their understanding in guided cooperative learning environments before undertaking their written assignments. In order to have theoretical validity, the analysis of the spoken data uses the multistratal resources of systemic-functional linguistic theory to analyze these strategies, in particular, the analytic categories for asking questions, as developed by Hasan (1991). The advantage of adopting this approach lies in its view of language as constructing meaning. As Halliday (2004, p. 21) explains, all of the components of language are variants of a single motif: the organization of meaning in the grammar. Thus, the examination of the meanings sought in the students’ questions and those provided in the lecturer’s responses are acknowledged as being realized by the reciprocal relationship between lexis and grammar (lexicogrammar), semantics (or system of meaning), and the context (discourse). The discussion will take account, particularly, of the shifts in meaning in the students’ questions and in the lecturer’s responses. The study reported here is part of a more extensive research project on dialogic learning. For the sake of brevity, one student cohort from the original study will be the focus of this discussion. The particular cohort comprised five newly arrived Chinese-Malaysian students enrolled in a business degree program. They were all completing the final stage of a “twinning program,” an arrangement between the Australian university and an educational institution in Malaysia. The students had undertaken their first two years of study in Malaysia and then completed their final year in Australia. To ensure the success of this arrangement economically and
academically, all twinning program students were offered an elective subject for one semester in the form of an academic support program, the Business Communication Program (BCP). The curriculum provided intensive support in two compulsory subjects in their core degree programs: economics and accounting. The study proceeds from the proposition that any confusions these students experienced, and their need to copy model texts, were due to a lack of assumed background understanding of discipline theory, particularly in economics, rather than any intentional plagiarism or “violation of academic integrity.” Their impoverished background knowledge can be examined empirically in their language. The view taken, then, is that copying or mimicry, adopting a Vygotskian (1986, p. 94) perspective, is considered to be a natural transition from students’ intermental to intramental understanding as they acquire “the echoes and reverberations” of historical public discourses (Bakhtin, 1986, p. 91), particularly those considered to be unnegotiable authoritative discourses, such as economics. These experiences are shared by many students, but made more difficult for students whose academic as well as personal experiences are outside the main educational context. As such, this study lies within a social and linguistic rather than a psychological orientation toward tertiary education.
