Book Description

Abstract: This dissertation examines the participation of one Chinese teacher and five 13 to 15 year-old Chinese heritage students in a classroom in a Chinese community school during group discussions about narrative texts. In this study, the teacher used Collaborative Reasoning (CR) (Anderson, et al., 2001) to help the Chinese heritage students extend their discussion repertoires and achieve a deeper understanding of narrative text in the target language, Chinese. The purpose of this study was to explore whether and how CR helped students to use discourse features that index high-level thinking during their discussions about Chinese stories and to use multiple sources of information and kinds of reasoning while making arguments. This study also explored how the students incorporated what they learned from the discussions into their reading to attain a deeper understanding of the text. A combination of case study and single-subject experimental design was used in this investigation. The findings indicated that the participation structure and patterns of discourses in CR discussions were different from those in non-CR discussions. The participation structure and discursive patterns in CR discussions allowed more students' voices to be heard, responded to, and extended. The change in participation structure and discursive patterns also changed whose knowledge was valued in the exchange of ideas. The teacher and students used more discourse features that indexed high-level thinking after CR was introduced; their discourse showed a higher incidence of exploratory talk, uptake, authentic questions, high-level-thinking questions, affective response questions, and elaborated explanations. The students' discourse also evidenced multiple kinds of knowledge sources, such as self experience, general knowledge, and knowledge from previous reading/lecture/discussion to support their arguments, and multiple kinds of reasoning, such as evaluation and generalization. The discourse analysis also revealed that after CR was introduced, the teacher's utterances were highly responsive to the students' remarks. Results of analysis of students' performance in the oral tasks indicated that there was little or no difference in students' reading speed, accuracy, and retelling between non-CR and CR sessions. However, results showed that the students gradually reduced their dependence on Pinyin tools after the implementation of CR and increased in the usage of metacognitive reading strategies in the reading of Chinese stories. Results also indicated that, after CR was introduced, the students incorporated more counter arguments in their statements when they were asked to restate their positions and opinions after the discussions. The findings suggest that the adoption of CR in a Chinese heritage school setting may alter the participation structure of classroom discussion and encourage students to engage in high-level thinking and to use multiple sources of knowledge and kinds of reasoning when discussing text.