Abstract:

Facilitating dialogic interactions has been widely recognised as an important pedagogical approach for promoting learners' reasoning, conceptual understanding, and scientific thinking in science classrooms. Through dialogic interactions, teachers elicit learners' thinking and ideas, probe their reasoning, and build on their responses to support deeper understanding of scientific concepts. However, developing these dialogic teaching practices remains challenging for Physical Sciences pre-service teachers (PSTs), particularly because opportunities to practice and refine classroom discourse and conversations are often limited to traditional teacher education contexts. Emerging immersive technologies such as Virtual Reality (VR) offer new possibilities for creating simulated teaching environments where pre-service teachers can rehearse and develop instructional practices in a safe and controlled environment. This study explores how Physical Sciences pre-service teachers implement dialogic interactions during micro-teaching activities in a VR classroom, particularly in the Learning Analytics for Virtual Reality (LAViR) classroom employed in this study. The main aim of this study is to explicate how Physical Sciences PSTs use classroom talk to elicit, probe, and develop learners' thinking during micro-teaching at a South African public university. The research was conducted with a purposively selected cohort of 10 third-year Physical Sciences PSTs at a South African public university who participated in VR-based micro-teaching sessions as part of their teacher education programme. A qualitative case study research design was employed intensively examine VR microlessons presented by the participants Qualitative data were collected though document analysis of lesson plans, lesson observations of spectator video-recorded lessons, and reflective conversations through semi-structured interviews. This data was analysed using reflexive thematic analysis to identify patterns in how PSTs implemented classroom conversations and dialogue during instruction in a LAViR classroom. Findings indicate that the LAViR micro-teaching environment provided opportunities for pre-service teachers to engage in dialogic teaching practices, particularly through questioning strategies aimed at eliciting learners' prior knowledge and probing their reasoning. Notably, the three types of dialogic patterns, namely, learner-to-learner dialogue, teacher-to-learner dialogue and whole class participation were visible in the VR classroom during the micro-teaching activities. However, it was also evident that other pre-service teachers experienced challenges in using learners' responses to elaborate, probe further and facilitate sustained dialogic interactions that promote deeper conceptual understanding of scientific concepts. The study highlights the potential of the LAViR classroom and VR environments in supporting practice-based teacher education while also identifying areas where personalised and targeted scaffolding may be needed to strengthen pre-service teachers' dialogic teaching practices competencies, preparing them for real-world classroom contexts. This research contributes to the growing body of knowledge on the integration of immersive technologies such as VR in teacher education programs by providing insights into how VR-based micro-teaching can support the development of dialogic teaching practices in science education.

Keywords:

Dialogic talk, micro-teaching, physical sciences, pre-service teachers, virtual reality.