| Research has shown that dialogic instruction is a desirable method of curriculum delivery. Dialogic instruction encourages students to integrate cognitive and behavioral processes, thus leading to a broader transferable skill set. This study presented an overview of dialogic instruction related to various accepted learning theories, an examination of constructivism as the theoretical framework of dialogism, and a review of the literature on the nature of college writing instruction. This descriptive study examined the perceptions of students and teachers of dialogic instruction in community college writing classes. Also studied was the alignment of student perception and teacher intent. An intact questionnaire instrument, the College Course Activities Questionnaire (CCAQ), created and revised by Steele (1969, 1981), was used to assess and quantify student and teacher perceptions. The roles of age and gender also were examined. Data included demographic information and scores from the CCAQ. Data were collected from a convenience sample of 83 students and 5 instructors at a 2-year community college located in the Midwestern United States. It was concluded that students and teachers had a favorable perception of the dialogic instructional methods used in the English composition classroom. Data indicated that the students preferred dialogic writing instruction to the traditional monologic lecture style that they had experienced in previous classes. The researcher concluded that an alignment did exist between actual classroom conditions (students' perceived real) and teachers' intended conditions (teacher's ideal). Age and gender played no significant role in students' perceptions; however, because of the small subgroup size, the results should be interpreted with caution. |
