To Örebro University

1) An overview/summary of the paperThis paper is part of the larger project 'Understanding Curriculum Reforms - A Theory-Oriented Evaluation of the Swedish Curriculum Reform Lgr 11'. Mainstream classrooms of today are characterized of standardized curriculums, but also of diversity in relation to student’s multilingual and cultural backgrounds as well of a plurality of texts offline and online. Students with different backgrounds, needs and resources, are in the middle school years facing demands of coping with more compact texts of subjects content, including more of specific academic language (Gibbons, 2009).

Drawing on data from two Swedish grade six classrooms in the subjects of social sciences, this paper focuses on the repertoire of teaching talk and especially the issue of used and posed questions.

The aim is to identify what characterizes the register of teaching talk and to explore how this relate to and affect student´s own learning talk, and possibilities of participation within education.

2) Theoretical and methodological approaches (as applicable)This study draws on Alexander's (2001) methodological framework regarding teaching talk and learning talk together with Cummins (2001) framework for successful academic learning, which highlight conditions and possibilities essential for all students learning, despite variation in language backgrounds. Students’ possibilities of learning talk means altogether an active use of language and subject content such as asking different kind of questions and acting upon different kind of answers (Alexander, 2001; Cummins, 2001).

The data encompasses video recordings of 24 lessons from two different classrooms in two different schools and municipalities in Sweden, which altogether means 21.5 hours of video recordings. Further, interviews with students and teachers have been conducted. Both classrooms are characterized of being culturally and linguistically diverse.

3) Key findings and/or conclusionsThe identified possibilities of teaching talk comprise to a high extent of instruction, monologue and recitation/ rote, which often blend into one another. This case study, and the result of the larger study as a whole, reveals how pseudo-enquiry questions are used rhetorically, being embedded in teaching talk of mainly recitation and instruction. The use of pseudo questions and also of how the teachers are steering away from ‘dilemmas” that appear through the subject content as well as through the students own authentic questions about the same content, reveals an uncertainty of dealing with diversity. Altogether this refers to conditions and possibilities for students to master literacy within and about subjects content, and in relation to democratic values of the curriculum.

4) The significance of the paperThis paper sheds light on in what ways the curriculum is enacted and broken down into tasks and activities through the repertoire of teaching talk, which will be related to the larger comparative classroom study as a whole and in relation to both pedagogy as act and pedagogy as discourse (Alexander, 2009).