This chapter presents a detailed study of patterns of verbal interaction in a
classroom context. In doing so it extends an important previously developed construct for
analysis of productive talk for learning originating within the collaborative learning and
intelligent tutoring communities, namely that of transactivity. Specifically, our focus is on
argumentation and consensus building processes, which are key processes employed
through language by communities in order to define themselves, maintain themselves, and
evolve. We motivate the use of this construct for analysis of classroom discussions,
describe our analysis framework with examples, and discuss current directions related to
automatic analysis of classroom discussions using our transactivity based framework.
Keywords: Transactivity, accountable talk, sociocognitive conflict, discussion for
learning, collaborative learning, classroom discourse, discussion based learning,
articulation of reasoning, discourse analysis, conversation analysis.
