A guest post by Dr. Yuchen Shi
East China Normal University, Shanghai
During my doctoral study at Teachers College, Columbia University, I conducted research with my advisor Dr. Deanna Kuhn to promote children’s and adolescents’ argumentation skills using a dialogue-based argument curriculum.
Significant gains
I was curious to explore the extent to which Chinese adolescents would adapt and respond to a curriculum that emphasises verbal communication, involving the exchange of arguments and counterarguments, ideally supported by evidence and reasoning.
The results were quite promising. We found that 7th grade Chinese students (aged 12-13 years) who participated in the intervention demonstrated significant gains in verbal and written argumentation skills. That study was conducted in 2017. Since then, I have carried out several intervention studies focusing on argumentation and dialogue in a range of Chinese elementary or secondary schools, seeking to get students to talk more – and talk better – in the classrooms and, hopefully, in their lives beyond school.
Missing steps
In fact, the importance of preparing children to become competent communicators is not new to the Chinese context. In the latest national curriculum standards rolled out in 2022, communication skills were emphasised as a core competence in several school disciplines.
For instance, in Chinese Language Arts, “successful use of language” is listed as one of four core competencies. This includes “being able to use language correctly and effectively to communicate in specific and diverse linguistic situations.”
Similarly, in Mathematics, “successful use of mathematics language to describe the real world,” which emphasises the use of disciplinary language to think and communicate effectively, is listed as one of three core competencies.
However, specific frameworks or concrete steps to meet these overarching goals were missing, which might leave practitioners unsupported as to how to design lesson plans and pedagogical approaches to help students develop these competencies.
Heavy lifting
Currently, I serve as the deputy director of a Classroom Analysis Laboratory at the Institute of Curriculum and Instruction in East China Normal University. In our laboratory, we have collected thousands of classroom videos from various grade levels in China that were recorded and forwarded to us by teachers. One of our tasks was to train artificial intelligence to automatically code and analyse a large number of videos, which allowed us to draw on many more videos than would be possible by human coders alone.
In many of the videos that we analysed, Chinese teachers were found to ‘do the heavy lifting’ of oral expression by talking eloquently but profusely, leaving students with little opportunity to speak at length in order to cogently express their viewpoints. In fact, in both elementary and secondary classrooms, we observed a lot of low-level “fill-in-the-blank” questions, often posed in a rapid-fire fashion that sought to obtain correct answers, which in effect short-circuited students’ deep cognitive processing.
While this type of questioning might be effective for teachers to gauge student understanding of content knowledge, it deprives students of the opportunity to participate in genuine communication in which participants are free to explore more open-ended questions related to curriculum content, or to make extended contributions to express and exchange divergent viewpoints.
Confucian hierarchy
While these classroom discourse patterns might be ubiquitous across cultural contexts, they are particularly pronounced in the Chinese context as the Chinese educational philosophy is built on a value system founded on Confucianism. These educational values include strict discipline, hierarchical relations between teachers and students, discouragement of direct questioning and confrontation, and unproblematic accumulation of knowledge transmitted from teachers to students.
Chinese teachers are often viewed as authoritative figures who need to be respected and never questioned. This cultural heritage might discourage students from openly expressing their own viewpoints or challenging others’ viewpoints, and consequently from forming a learning community in which talk is used as a social and cognitive tool to construct knowledge.
Initiation/Response/Evaluation
Since the turn of the 21st century, national reforms in curriculum and pedagogies have been repeatedly proposed in China, aiming to transform classroom teaching from being teacher-centered to being more student-centered. Some of these reforms advocate engaging students in collaborative and constructivist activities such as problem-based learning, inquiry learning, or discovery learning.
However, within these successive reforms, the development of students’ oral communication skills – the ability to articulate ideas eloquently and cogently, to listen to others respectfully and to incorporate other’s arguments into one’s expressions – has remained less emphasised.
In other words, the way students actually talk in classrooms has not necessarily changed much over the past twenty years, despite apparent changes in teachers’ design and enactment of classroom activities to incorporate more student-centred activities.
Most of the talk still taking place between a teacher and a student is following the Initiation/Response/Evaluation pattern, or is in the form of choral responses that are usually quite brief.
Even when students work in small groups, their talk might be of low quality, as they rarely received scaffolding from teachers as to how they might best communicate with group members; the emphasis tends to be put on getting the task done, rather than on treating small-group activities as an opportunity to develop oral skills.
Arguments and counterarguments
Despite these challenges, in the dialogue and argument interventions that I carried out in various elementary and middle schools in China, I was actually surprised by how teachers and students were amenable to changing their customary forms of classroom interaction to engage in authentic dialogues that involve open-ended questions, extended contributions from students, and the critical exchange of arguments and counterarguments.
While some of these interventions were conducted by myself as a researcher, other interventions were conducted by classroom teachers who received professional training and support from us both prior to and throughout the intervention. For those who may be interested, publications based on these works are listed below; they focus either on classroom talk between speakers or on students’ individual argumentative writing following classroom conversations.
‘Happy surprises’
We found that Chinese students, even at the elementary level, were indeed very much capable of supporting claims with evidence and reasons, of expressing dissenting voices that challenge their peers and even their teachers, and of using talk to reflect on, direct and regulate each other’s language use.
In addition, we found that teachers were quite susceptible to the principles of dialogic and argumentative teaching, although their pre-service and in-service training has rarely provided them with strategies to promote authentic dialogues in their classrooms.
When interviewed, participating teachers frequently reported their “happy surprises” when students were a lot more capable of articulating complex reasoning than they thought would be the case.
Teacher researchers and centralisation
However, as is the case with many intervention studies in other cultural contexts, once a study is concluded, teachers who are no longer supported by the research team might revert back to their traditional way of teaching; durable impacts are hard to make.
The promising news for the Chinese context is that in-service teacher training here is embedded in a centralised system, with ‘teacher researchers’ being a unique group of professionals who are responsible for overseeing and training teachers on a regular basis.
Teacher researchers are usually veteran teachers who are promoted to this position based on their excellent teaching and research skills. To make changes, we can first work with teacher researchers, who will then be responsible for making an impact on a large number of teachers.
Of course, changes never come easy; but to truly change how teachers and students talk in classrooms, a combined approach that includes policy changes at the top and practice changes at the bottom are needed. A centralised system might be particularly supportive of mobilisation at various levels.
A discourse-based argument curriculum for China
To conclude, findings from my own empirical studies – that Chinese students and teachers are able to adapt to, and profit from, the discourse-based argument curriculum – is important; it illustrates that the tendency to avoid confronting and engaging dissenting views – that may be a dimension of their cultural heritage – can be modified through talk interventions.
These results challenge an increasingly outmoded stereotype of Chinese teachers as only authoritative, and Chinese students as capable of gaining mastery only of teacher-provided knowledge. Chinese students are fully equipped to participate in dialogic and argumentative discourse, and in fact were observed to derive much satisfaction from such activities. If given the opportunity, they, too, can successfully engage in spirited verbal give-and-take of opinions.
Related publications on promoting dialogues and argumentation in China:
Shi, Y., Zhang, Z., & Cao, S. (2024). A case study of emergent leadership in whole-class discussion of controversial issues. Language and Education. Online.
Shi, Y. (2024). The effects of discourse goals on written arguments in elementary school students. International Journal of Educational Research, 126, 102375.
Shi, Y., Zhang, Z., Cao, S., & Liu, Q. (2024). Dialogic teaching of controversial issues: discursive moves to enact two-sided discussions. Language and Education, 38(2), 303-319.
Shi, Y., Shen, X., & Wang, T., Cheng, L., & Wang, A. (2021). Dialogic teaching of controversial public issues in a Chinese middle school. Learning, Culture and Social Interaction, 30, 100533.
Shi, Y. (2020a). Constructed dialogs reveal skill development in argumentive writing. Reading and Writing, 33(9), 2311-2335.
Shi, Y. (2020b). Talk about evidence during argumentation. Discourse Processes, 57(9), 770-792.
Shi, Y. (2019). Enhancing evidence-based argumentation in a Mainland China middle school. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 59, 101809.