pedagogy

"From a perspective of social constructivism, literacy is shaped by social practices (Moje, 1996) and serves the purpose of knowledge construction in a discipline (Moje, 2008). To help students become “geographically literate” (Dolan, 2019) entails equipping them with skills to make sense of and critique geographical data presented in multimodal formats (Roberts, 2014) by creating more space for geographical dialogue in the classroom. This paper first discusses the relationship between talk and students’ ability to analyse and account for geographical data. Using the evidence of a questionnaire survey, it examines the impact of Talk Moves in supporting dialogic teaching in 3 Singapore’s secondary geography classrooms. Statistics show that Talk Moves helped students improve their analytical skills for geographical data and their ability to articulate answers in a geographical manner. However, more support could be provided to enhance students’ classroom participation and their writing based on geographical data."