Читать книгу Student Learning Communities - Нэнси Фрей - Страница 14

All living things communicate, but only humans do so in verbal and written forms. Discourse is an umbrella term for the extended verbal and written messages humans use to reason with one another. Forms of discourse include explanation, elaboration, evaluation, argument, and questioning—all of which are recognizable to us as cognitive structures. It's worth stressing that all forms of discourse are interactive and depend on the presence of more than one person. After all, explanation is purposeless if there is no one in need of the information; evaluation is pointless without someone else who will agree or disagree. Stated simply, a student cannot develop the ability to explain, to elaborate, to argue, or to question without opportunities to practice these cognitive structures with others through academic discourse.

Telling isn't teaching, and students cannot learn by listening alone. They need to try new knowledge on for size if they are to take possession of concepts and apply them to new and novel situations. Academic discourse is the means for this kind of experimentation.

The goal, then, is to provide learning opportunities that transfer the use of academic language from the teacher to students' collaborative learning groups. In practice, this means being deliberate about task design, providing the scaffolding students need to build the skills of discourse, and then gradually releasing the responsibility of student talk to the students themselves. Talking is one way that students come to understand the content, and, thus, opportunities for talking should be included in the instructional design of learning.

In the gradual release of responsibility instructional framework (Fisher & Frey, 2014), opportunities for student discourse abound, and this discourse facilitates learning.