Facilitating Classroom Discourse: Lessons from research

Classroom discourse allows for the negotiation of personal and cultural meaning (Forman, 996). This is consistent with and supports sociocultural theory, which posits that "learning is a form of participation in the activities of a community of practice and that learning is a discursive activity" (p. 128). Similarly, communication is critical for learning and "meaning postulates a quality or property of linguistic units that mediates between communicating people" (Dorfler, 2000, p. 99). But how does classroom discourse as a way of communicating affect learning? In mathematics, Sfard (2000; 2001) posited that new symbols are created through discursive activity. These symbols, she suggests, generate a need for mathematical objects influencing discourse and push students to think in new direction, thus creating new symbols.