Vocal participation and attentive listening in teacher-led classroom discussions: The role of prior achievement level, situational experiences and motivation

Research on dialogic pedagogy has predominantly focused on effects of intervention programs and the teacher's perspective, with little consideration of how different students perceive, experience and participate in them and what drives their (non-)participation. In the present study, we distinguish between two complementary, yet distinct aspects of classroom dialogue participation: vocal contributions to reasoned discussion and attentive, active listening. Participants were 409 upper elementary students from 18 intact, heterogeneous language arts classrooms whose teachers voluntarily participated in an intervention program to promote dialogic classroom discussions. We gathered objective measures of students' individual prior achievement level, with a specific emphasis on identifying low achievers. We also collected subjective student self-reports on their own participation (both listening and talking), on their experiences during such classroom discussions (sense of impact and agency and perceived teacher support), and on two established motivational constructs (achievement goals and sense of belonging). Compared to their classmates, low-achieving students reported lower measures of both types of participation, but did not perceive receiving less teacher support during classroom discussion activities. Furthermore, Structural Equation Modeling revealed that both vocal participation and attentive listening were positively associated with a student's sense of impact and agency during discussions, perceived teacher support, and mastery goals. Attentive listening was also predicted by gender, and vocal participation by achievement level differences. However, individual performance-approach orientation and sense of belonging did not add substantively to participation differences. Implications for pedagogy, research and theory on dialogic pedagogy are discussed.