  Classroom discussions in English Language Arts have a positive effect on
students' reading, writing and reasoning skills. Although prior work has
largely focused on teacher talk and student-teacher interactions, we focus on
three theoretically-motivated aspects of high-quality student talk:
argumentation, specificity, and knowledge domain. We introduce an annotation
scheme, then show that the scheme can be used to produce reliable annotations
and that the annotations are predictive of discussion quality. We also
highlight opportunities provided by our scheme for education and natural
language processing research.
