Orchestrating productive classroom talk in Swiss second grade mathematics classrooms

Productive classroom talks provide a variety of learning opportunities including the collaborative construction of mathematical meaning. To support the orchestration of productive classroom talk, teachers can use specific conversational strategies called "talk moves". Positive relations between the number of productive talk moves, discourse quality, and learning success have been demonstrated, but mostly at the secondary school level and in English-speaking countries. There are very few findings from elementary school in German-speaking countries. The present study makes the first step towards closing this gap by analyzing classroom talk in mathematics second grade classes in Switzerland (n = 22). The dataset includes recordings of mathematics lessons as well as students' pretest and posttest performance in mathematics. The results show that teachers varied in their use of productive talk moves and that some talk moves such as reasoning moves were preferred, depending on the teacher. In addition, the number of productive talk moves was positively related to both the number of justifications students provided and their learning success. Implications for the use of productive classroom talk in elementary school mathematics lessons are discussed.