Conference Agenda

This study investigates how classroom discourse fosters dialogic interaction in secondary English lessons, focusing on students’ speaking engagement and cognitive strategies. While dialogic teaching is widely recognized as enhancing reasoning, collaboration, and participation, there is limited research on how these interactions naturally occur in everyday English lessons. Alexander (2020) argues that dialogic teaching harnesses classroom talk to engage students’ interest, stimulate thinking, and support argumentation, treating dialogue as an essential learning tool rather than incidental to teaching. Wegerif (in press) frames dialogic education epistemologically and ontologically, emphasizing that knowledge emerges through interaction and dialogue, highlighting the need to examine authentic classroom talk to understand co-construction of ideas and cognitive development.

Research on classroom discourse supports the importance of participation in learning. Cazden (2001) shows that patterns of teacher and student talk shape engagement, and Walsh and Li (2016) highlight collaboration and co-construction as central to learning outcomes. Mercer (2004) proposes sociocultural discourse analysis, emphasizing language as a social tool for thinking, problem-solving, and knowledge construction. Applied research, such as Chow et al. (2023), shows that dialogic teaching interventions improve vocabulary and phonological awareness in young ESL learners, demonstrating how structured dialogue impacts learning. Yet there remains a gap in understanding dialogic interaction in routine secondary English lessons, especially in multilingual, non-Western classrooms. This study addresses this gap by examining features of classroom discourse, student participation, and cognitive strategies during everyday lessons.

The theoretical framework combines sociocultural theory (Vygotsky, 1978) and dialogic teaching frameworks (Alexander, 2020; Wegerif, in press; Mercer, 2004). Sociocultural theory views learning as socially mediated, where interaction with teachers and peers supports cognitive growth. Dialogic teaching frameworks identify features of productive talk, including exploratory dialogue, reasoning, uptake of peers’ ideas, and co-construction of knowledge. Together, these approaches enable analysis of micro-level discourse while situating findings within broader educational and cognitive theory.

To ensure the European and international relevance of this study, the findings and implications are positioned beyond the national classroom context. While the study is conducted in a secondary English classroom in Kazakhstan, the principles of dialogic teaching, patterns of classroom talk, and student cognitive strategies have applicability across European education systems and multilingual classrooms. Insights from this research can inform teacher professional development, classroom interaction practices, and dialogic pedagogy policies in other countries, highlighting strategies to enhance participation, reasoning, and collaboration in diverse cultural and linguistic settings.

Over the past decades, research on student engagement has expanded substantially, establishing engagement as a key construct for understanding academic achievement, school completion, and student well-being. Despite this extensive body of work, the field remains characterized by significant conceptual fragmentation. In particular, engagement, disengagement, disaffection, and related constructs are used inconsistently across theoretical traditions, and disengagement is frequently treated as the simple opposite or absence of engagement. This conceptual ambiguity complicates cross-study comparisons and limits the development of coherent theoretical explanations of school dropout.

The aim of this paper is to provide a critical theoretical review of how student engagement and disengagement have been conceptualized in the literature and to clarify their role in explanations of school dropout. The guiding research question is: How have engagement and disengagement been theoretically conceptualized in research on schooling, and how can their relationship be better understood in relation to dropout processes? This question is addressed through three interrelated analytical foci: (1) how major theoretical traditions define and frame engagement and disengagement; (2) where conceptual overlaps, tensions, and gaps emerge across these traditions; and (3) what unresolved theoretical issues remain in accounting for diverse trajectories leading to school dropout.

The paper examines key theoretical frameworks that have shaped research on engagement and dropout, including multidimensional models of engagement, motivational and self-system theories, person–environment fit perspectives, and dual-process approaches. Rather than reviewing these theories in isolation, the analysis focuses on their underlying assumptions about student participation, withdrawal, agency, and development over time. Within this framework, engagement is conceptualized as a multidimensional pattern of behavioral, emotional, and cognitive participation in school-related activities, while disengagement is treated as a distinct process characterized by withdrawal, negative emotional experiences, and maladaptive forms of participation. Crucially, engagement and disengagement are not assumed to be mutually interconnected; rather, they may co-occur, evolve differently over time, and interact dynamically with individual characteristics and contextual conditions. For this reason, particular attention is paid to the ways in which disengagement is conceptualized-whether as low engagement, as a qualitatively distinct process, or as a negative school-related condition-and to the implications of these choices for understanding dropout.

Building on this critical synthesis, the paper argues that much of the existing literature implicitly insufficiently capture the heterogeneity of students’ educational trajectories. The review highlights the potential of dual-process perspectives, especially when combined with multidimensional and developmental approaches, to address some of these limitations by conceptualizing engagement and disengagement as related but not mutually exclusive processes.