In my current research I am investigating how a tutor's attitudes towards talk and interaction, especially by students, influences their instructional practices in university seminars^[i].  I am interested particularly in classroom talk which is dialogic – that is, talk which is reciprocal (students and teachers listen actively to each other), collective (students and teachers address tasks together), supportive (students speak without fear of embarrassment), cumulative (students and teacher build on each other’s ideas) and purposeful (teacher uses talk in pursuit of educational goals) (Alexander, 2006). Research suggests that dialogic talk supports deeper learning of content (Hardman, 2016) and helps to shape knowledge through processes such as hypothesizing and debating (Barnes, 2010).

To get a picture of the diversity in talk and instructional practices in seminars across disciplinary areas, consider first of all the excerpts below taken from two seminars at a university in the UK.

Excerpt A: Business seminar

T:        So does anyone remember from yesterday... If our income is over a certain percentage then it has to be separately reported. Does anyone remember that percentage? It was in the lecture yesterday

S:         Twenty

T:        Twenty percent yeah very good yeah; so the first thing is to basically say well do we meet the criteria? And then if that’s correct then we go on to the next step.

Excerpt B: Sociology seminar

The two excerpts reveal differences in terms of the types of questions asked (closed vs open), the length of student response (one word vs elaborate), and tutor response (praise vs comment). According to some scholars, only Excerpt B illustrates dialogic talk, through its open questions and feedback comments (Hardman, 2016).

I was invited to observe and record seminars in six different disciplines across the university to further explore the classroom talk in seminar events. As I transcribed each seminar, I realized that not only did seminars differ vastly in terms of routines and classroom talk, but that many of these differences could be due to the subject discipline involved and/or tutor attitudes. I wondered more specifically why tutors use talk differently, and whether there is a ‘right’ way to use talk.  Handbooks on teaching in higher education abound, most of them giving generic advice for how to manage small group learning, often with reference to seminars. The advice for teaching staff typically focuses on how to organise students and how to ask questions; but having observed these different seminars, I realised that there was a lot more to achieving dialogic interaction than asking the right questions. It seemed to me that I needed to explore the tutor’s attitudes towards talk and dialogue and the missing link in the current research was the tutor’s perspectives on the seminar talk.

Boyd and Markarian (2015) problematise the rigid definitions of dialogic talk described above and use the term ‘dialogic stance’ to describe the teacher’s attitude towards dialogue. In their description, dialogic stance involves listening to students, seeking out contributions from students who may be struggling, and using a variety of linguistic resources to scaffold and guide students more effectively in the interaction. This may be through open questions and follow-up comments, but it may also be through closed questions, active listening and using humour. Their term ‘dialogic stance’ prompted me to question whether we could use the term ‘stance’ to refer to the position a tutor takes towards talk, and how this attitude influences the opportunities for dialogic interaction in a seminar.

To explore attitudes, I invited each of the tutors to a stimulated recall interview where s/he reflected on sections of the recorded seminar. This was fascinating as through their reflective accounts tutors revealed orientations about the value of dialogic talk in their seminars.  To exemplify, consider the following excerpt from an interview. The tutor is relatively inexperienced, having taught for only a few months.  Four students (out of a possible 25) attended this particular seminar. While reflecting on an extract in which she was asking all the questions, the tutor talked about her discomfort with having to direct the dialogue:

M:     But even in a big seminar, do you not still have to direct it, to a certain extent?

T:      Yes, I do a little bit. But because I’ll be, kind of, going between groups, perhaps just dropping in to make sure they’re on track, they’ll have a bit more time to-  Because I think the students,  I think that, whatever I say must be (xxx) that is the right answer, or something like that. So, maybe they’re less willing to just, I don’t know, explore ideas or, sort of, have a bit more of a debate because they’re looking to see what I’m going to say.

What assumptions about tutor’s attitudes towards talk does this excerpt reveal? Lefstein’s (2010) framework of dialogic dimensions was particularly useful to explore tutors’ stance towards dialogue. He outlines three dimensions in teachers' understandings of dialogue:

• Meta-communicative: dialogue as interactional structure. This conceptualises dialogue as interactional forms such as question and answer routines, Initiation-Response-Feedback patterns, rules of talking and routines of talk. A meta-communicative view of dialogue is exemplified by Mercer’s Ground Rules for exploratory talk.

• Ideational: dialogue as cognitive activity. This dimension views talk as a tool for thinking.  An example of talk for thinking is accountable talk (Michaels, O’Connor, Hall & Resnick, 2013) and educational talk which structures thinking such as exemplification, justification and argumentation (Barnes, 2010).

• Interpersonal: dialogue as relation. This dimension views dialogue as openness to others and respect for others’ views.

You might want to read the interview extract above and consider the tutor’s dialogic stance in the light of these dimensions. I am finding the analysis fascinating, and so far preliminary findings suggest the following:

• Tutors have varying dialogic orientations, but they are not static and often change at different stages of the seminar
• Dialogic stance is context dependent
• Tutors experience ‘dialogic tensions’. For example, they may have a orientation which values dialogue as a form of empowerment, but refrain from enacting this due to institutional constraints (e.g. the large number of students in the seminar)
• Data-led, or evidence-based tutor reflections open up conversations about dialogue and talk in HE seminars, as well as offering an effective professional development tool.

So to answer the question in the title of this post: yes it matters. The tutor’s dialogic stance will influence instructional practices and classroom talk. One exciting consequence of the research described has been the power of data-led reflection through audio recordings and transcripts. The tutors used the interviews to reflect on their practice and use of talk and interaction, and this is an area for future work in academic development.  But as well as attitudes, what also matters are institutional constraints, and other pedagogical tensions which arise in any higher education teaching context.