Wang, Pan, Miller, Cortina
Classroom
discourse is the primary medium through which teaching and learning occur.
Managed skillfully, it can provide an opportunity for students to develop
their understanding and to profit from the ideas of their peers and the
teacher. Yet it is difficult for teachers to be mindful of the nature and
distribution of classroom discourse at the same time as they juggle other
instructional concerns. It is possible to record, transcribe, and analyze
classroom discourse, but it is not possible to do this quickly enough to give
a teacher timely feedback. We report on the development and validation of an
automated system for recording and analyzing aspects of classroom discourse
that can result in timely feedback. Based on the LENA system, it aims to
identify three common discourse activities: teacher lecturing, whole class
discussion and student group work. The system consists of a speech processing
module (diarisation performed by the LENA system) and an activity detection
module that detects the discourse activities by using classification
analysis. Results showed that our automatic detection of discourse activities
converged well with those of human coders. The system enables timely and
relatively inexpensive generation of a classroom discourse profile, which
helps teachers to visualize and potentially improve their classroom discourse
management skills.