Verbal interaction among teachers and elementary learning-disabled students engaged in directive and interactive prereading strategies

Abstract

Interactive teaching approaches have been documented as viable and effective methods of comprehension instruction. This study identified the components characteristic of interactive and directive teaching. The language employed by teachers and learning disabled (LD) students engaged in one of three interactive strategies or a directive strategy are described and compared with student performance. A written summary and a multiple choice comprehension test served as dependent measures. Subjects were upper elementary bilingual, LD students and their teachers in eight self contained or resource classrooms. Classes were randomly assigned to one of four instructional conditions: (a) semantic mapping, (b) semantic feature analysis, (c) semantic syntactic feature analysis, or (d) direct instruction. Teacher utterances were coded according to general, directive, and interactive teaching functions. Student utterances were coded according to prior knowledge categories including elaborate, specific, restrictive, and response, and other. Results reported indicate findings regarding classroom interaction, condition effects, and theoretical tenets. Teacher and student interaction patterns revealed (a) no difference in the amount of teacher talk across assigned conditions, (b) "no response" as the most frequent student response to teacher utterances, and (c) the most student to student conversation occurred in the semantic feature analysis and the semantic syntactic feature analysis condition. Condition effect findings reported significant difference on prior knowledge and cohesiveness of written summaries. Student performance on the multiple choice test exhibited no significant difference on vocabulary items. Theoretical divergence was represented by interactive and directive teaching functions that were most differently used. These differences characterize interactive and directive instruction. Findings indicate that learning disabled students are capable of benefiting from interactive instruction; and, teachers engaged in interactive instruction employ teaching functions that encouraged student participation in classroom discussion.