Abstract
This study clarifies how students listen to others in classroom situations with differing task structures, based on
Bakhtin’s principle of "internal dialogue" with other’s words. Utterances by two frequent speakers in two fifth grade
classrooms were analyzed. The results of the two case studies were as follows. First, the two students listened to
others while connecting their prior knowledge or their own experiences to these utterances during discussions that
focused on acquiring and sharing specific knowledge. Second, in discussions involving interacting with each idea and
elaborating each understanding, Student A listened to others relate their own understanding of the text, considering the
flow and theme of the discussion, whereas Student B seemed to have problems in "dialoguing" simultaneously with the
utterances that formed the flow of the discussion and with the words of shared texts, in addition to others’ utterances.
Third, this research suggests that the ways in which teachers respond, as well as the existence of shared texts, affect the
students’ acts of listening in situations with the same task structures.
