Full length articleAre student engagement and peer relationships connected to student participation in classroom talk?
Section snippets
Introduction and theoretical background
This study continues the long tradition of researching the educational effects of classroom talk. It is grounded in sociocultural theory, in particular as presented by Vygotsky (1978), who believed that speech and thought were closely related and that children could internalize and integrate what they have been able to express in language. This thesis implies that as more opportunities for talk are created, learners are able to internalize knowledge more quickly and the process is of a higher
The present study
The aim of this study is to contribute to the understanding of the relationship between student participation in classroom talk, student engagement, and peer relationships in the classroom. We wanted to test whether student engagement in class and good relations with peers in class might enhance participation in classroom talk. To our knowledge, a study with this focus has not yet been conducted. The research was undertaken in a natural classroom environment with a sample of 639 ninth-grade
Sample
The sample for this study consisted of ninth-grade students (ISCED 2A) who were involved in the CSI's reading literacy testing. This test was a national sample survey conducted in 163 schools of the total of 4221 Czech middle schools. From this sample, we selected schools from three Czech municipalities. In total, we approached 23 schools, of which two schools refused to participate in the research. Twenty-one schools, with all their ninth-grade classes (32 total), were included in the study.
Descriptive statistics
Major characteristics of key variables entering the analyses, such as means, standard errors of means, and standard deviations, are shown in Table 2.
The fist column of Table 2 shows that 487 students were included in the multilevel models. The discrepancy in relation to the entire sample was due to the fact that only students who participated in classroom talk at least once during the two observed lessons were included (see the conditions above). Because we sought to identify the predictors
Discussion
This study investigated the differences in student participation in classroom talk. We consider this a crucial issue because previous research has indicated that students who participated in classroom talk more also achieved better results (Larrain et al., 2019; Ing et al., 2015; Sedova et al., 2019; Webb et al., 2014;). By examining participation, we are looking into how learning opportunities are distributed. Our aim was to explore the relationship between student participation in classroom
Acknowledgements
This article is an output of the project On the Relationship between Characteristics of Classroom Discourse and Student Achievement (GA17-03643S) funded by the Czech Science Foundation.
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