Abstract

This study explored the relevance of teachers’ classroom discourse, specifically ‘socio-motivational talk’, for the development of students’ help seeking, clarification seeking, and persistence habits. Five different types of ‘socio-motivational talk’ for learning of eight teachers were analysed from 24 hours of video-recorded Literacy lessons carried out in eight Year 4 classrooms in the UK and Chile. The types of teachers’ talk analysed were: ‘Talk for mastery’, ‘talk for performance’, ‘talk for self-efficacy’, ‘talk against self-efficacy’, and ‘talk for collaboration’. In addition, the self-regulatory behaviours (help seeking, clarification seeking, and persistence) of a total of 48 eight to nine year-olds, taught by these teachers, were measured while observing their independent engagement in a series of cube assembly tasks. Multilevel regression analysis was applied to predict effects of teachers’ ‘socio-motivational talk’ on the students’ self-regulation. Results showed that teachers’ ‘socio-motivational talk’ predicted students’ help seeking, clarification seeking, and persistence behaviours in challenging tasks carried out outside classrooms and that differed from everyday learning tasks. In particular, ‘talk against self-efficacy’ (communicating disappointment with performance) predicted higher levels of help seeking. ‘Talk for mastery’ (valuing improvement) and ‘talk for collaboration’ (valuing collaboration and mutual respect of ideas) separately predicted higher levels of clarification seeking. Finally, while ‘talk for mastery’ tended to predict higher levels of persistence, ‘talk for performance’ (valuing performance free of errors) tended to predict lower levels of this behaviour. Findings will be discussed in terms of how in naturalistic conditions self-regulation may develop to fulfil socially afforded ‘culturally adaptive functionalities’ (CAF).