Contributions of Classroom Discourse to What Content Students Learn During Curriculum Enactment

This case study investigates how classroom discourse contributed to what content students learned during a Grade 8 social studies unit taught in two different classrooms. It used a purposive sample and entailed 8 weeks of nonparticipant observation of each teacher-class enactment of a unit about ancient Egyptian society. Field notes and lesson transcripts were coded to inductively identify kinds of messages, forms of discourse, patterning of forms of discourse associated with curriculum events, and system of discourse for each enactment of the unit. There were significant quantitative differences between and within classrooms in the content recalled from curriculum events. These content-learning differences were associated with the forms of discourse used within curriculum events and the system of classroom discourse that evolved during a unit.