It is also enlightening that the excerpt shows that critical thinking can indeed be observed in the dialogue; interaction of critical thinking emerged naturally from students’ pair work. As Llinares et al. (2012) state, referring students’ personal experience may encourage the development of communi- cative functions. Hence, we can assume from this data that having the stu- dents think about the content as if it was their own experience could also trigger critical thinking in pair work. The students made questions for opin- ions based on their own experience (i.e., there should be an art category because she likes art), which encouraged critical thinking in the discussion.
This type of question based on the students’ personal experiences can be called personalised questions. It is also suggested in Musumeci (1996) that referen- tial questions “may act as links from the subject matter to the students’ per- sonal experience” (p. 299). Thus, asking personalised questions can be a useful way to foster critical thinking in student–student interaction because it can require higher-order thinking skills such as applying and creating (Anderson
& Krathwohl, 2001) based on an understanding of the content of the class.
As we saw in the excerpt where the pair work functioned well to have the students deepen their understandings of abstract concepts by asking person- alised questions, there are two points to note as premises to make a successful pair/group work. First, setting and sharing a clear goal of the class; in other words, establishing an essential question (in this class, “what are MI?”) served a crucial role because it could make students understand with ease where they are heading to. Thus, the students could deepen their understanding of the abstract concept collaboratively in the pair work without losing their direc- tion. Second, organising tasks in a proper way is important to lead the stu- dents gradually to have them understand abstract concepts. In Class C, we found the teacher arranged various tasks competently to be able to scaffold students’ understanding. These tasks could allow them to be autonomous learners who are highly engaged and collaborative, and to go beyond the teacher’s task arrangement. Therefore, the findings of this section suggest that a clear essential question and proper task organisation could foster students’
autonomy in student–student interaction to comprehend the academic concept.
well as student–student interactions, the essential question designed to lead students to the important concepts (McTighe & Wiggins, 2013) played an important role in eliciting more than one answer. The overarching essential questions, such as “What are the multiple intelligences?” and “How can we create an LGBT friendly campus environment?” were set by the teachers, and these questions were shared with the whole class (notes from third author’s teaching observation journal, 2018). They activated the teacher’s questions for which the answer was known, and showed that the students were thinking about new concepts and making meaning of what they learnt.
In student–student interaction, negotiated scaffolding of information was observed in confirmation checks in learning the new vocabulary. A significant finding was that students applied their individual experience and understand- ing and used personalised questions to create new knowledge which was not offered in the materials provided by the teacher.
Teacher–student Interaction The Input Session
Through learning about some concepts in psychology:
• the meta-cognitive questions facilitated the exploration of reasons for cer- tain opinions, triggering extended dialogic exchanges.
• under the overarching essential question, the teacher’s questions for which the answer was known worked well for scaffolding of new knowledge.
These findings resonate with Llinares et al.’s (2012) research that expanding feedback worked to co-construct the understanding of an issue. The peda- gogical implication is that, under the overarching essential question, the ques- tions for which the answer was known elicited more than one answer and facilitated an extended dialogue in understanding new content.
The Output Session
Through a problem-solving activity:
• Repeating the student utterance with a rising tone worked as a metacogni- tive question.
• A short utterance “So?” functioned as a meta-cognitive question.
• “So?” and “And?” functioned as negotiating follow-up questions, eliciting different perspectives held by the students.
The implication is that when the goal of the lessons is shared by the whole class, the short utterances, such as “So?” and “And?” prompted students to share their answers, allowing them to “explore, and thereby discover gaps in student understanding of subject content” (Mehisto & Ting, 2017, p. 15).
The data here resonates with dialogic teaching in which the practice is collec- tive, reciprocal, supportive, cumulative and purposeful (Alexander, 2010). In other words, teachers support students in making meaning, and they head together with the same goal of unpacking the essential question through their interactions.
Student–student Interaction
When scaffolding information with each other collaboratively within the CLIL class,
• The most frequent question type was questions for facts.
• Questions for opinion were asked to understand abstract concepts.
In creating a new concept, students applied their individual experience and understanding and asked personalised questions to tease out the concepts taught, and in doing so, they discovered an original idea to add another cat- egory to Gardner’s multiple intelligences (Gardner, 2006). Quite clearly, the students took their own initiative in deconstructing the meaning of the intel- ligences and in so doing, one student wondered why there was no art intelli- gence. The students were engaged in making meaning together through their group work and student engagement became the “engine of learning” (Genesee
& Hamayan, 2016, p. 6). Putting forward a new category, art intelligence, fits into “create” (Anderson & Krathwohl, 2001, p. 31), the highest category of the “cognitive process dimension and related cognitive processes” (Anderson
& Krathwohl, 2001, p. 31). Through the interaction in groups, in teasing out Gardner’s (2006) multiple intelligences, the students identified a perceived missing category, art intelligence, the category that they created by applying their own personal experience while being autonomous in discovering meaning.