ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on adumbrating a few of the complexities, in the hope of moving toward better ways to support practitioners, while also alerting researchers to the multiple dimensions they need to take into account when studying instruction that involves classroom discourse. It also focuses on explicate challenges to shed light on what it takes to successfully implement classroom discussion, and inform researchers who need to understand these dimensions to design and interpret research on classroom instruction. The chapter reviews some strands of the literature on classroom discourse to describe a set of dimensions that are important for teacher practice and development, and for researchers who seek to better understand certain forms of classroom discourse. It provides a broad framework, into which the available empirical work on classroom discourse can be slotted. The chapter highlights both the history of the preference for discussion-based formats and the evidence supporting their effectiveness.
