Co-constructing and negotiating knowledge propositions in social studies discussion: Exploring an SFL-based framework for close analysis of discourse moves

In this article, we explore the affordances of a framework informed by systemic functional linguistics for nuanced analysis of both students’ and teachers’ discourse moves in classroom interaction. Drawing on classroom discourse data from a middle school social studies inquiry context, we highlight coding categories from the analytic framework that help us systematically identify how students develop disciplinary knowledge propositions with longer turns of talk, how they engage with others’ points of view in substantive ways that enable co-reasoning, and how the focal teacher contingently adjusts her discursive strategies to facilitate students’ knowledge construction. We discuss how this framework adds to existing analytic constructs and tools for researchers to examine academically productive student discourse while also allowing researchers to characterize how discourse patterns shift to serve varied instructional goals and student needs across learning activities.