Facilitating academic text-based discussions in initial teacher education: Evaluating specialized knowledge Alejandra Meneses a, * , Evelyn Hugo b , María de los  Angeles García a , Magdalena Müller a a Facultad de Educaci on, Pontificia Universidad Cat olica de Chile, Av. Vicu~ na Mackenna 4860, Macul, Santiago, RM 7820436, Chile b Facultad de Letras, Pontificia Universidad Cat olica de Chile, Av. Vicu~ na Mackenna 4860, Macul, Santiago, RM 7820436, Chile highlights  Decomposition of text-based discussion into tasks to assess specialized knowledge.  Differences were observed in pre-service teachers within courses on decision-making.  Performance on decision-making and noticing a discussion varied across courses.  Curriculum design is crucial to support the learning of text-based discussions. article info Article history: Received 23 April 2017 Received in revised form 21 September 2017 Accepted 28 September 2017 1. Introduction Ensuring that students comprehend complex texts that explain abstract themes with academic language is one of the goals that schools must achieve if they want their students to be able to access crucial information in today's world (Levy & Murnane, 2013). Text- based discussions have been proposed as an effective reading ac- tivity to facilitate comprehension of academic texts since produc- tive dialogue serves as a mechanism to engage students in reasoning and encourage participation. Likewise, this activity offers students the scaffolding they need to construct coherent repre- sentations of the texts they read (Kucan & Palincsar, 2013; Kucan, Palincsar et al., 2011; McKeown, Beck, & Blake, 2009; Murphy, Wilkinson, Soter, Hennessey, & Alexander, 2009; Nystrand, Gamoran, Kachur, & Prendergast, 1997). Although research has been conducted regarding the effectiveness of interventions in school contexts, less has been done to understand the expertise that in-service teachers require in order to put this dialogue-based approach into action (Kucan, Hapgood, & Palincsar, 2011; Kucan, Palincsar et al., 2011). Furthermore, teacher education has shifted towards practice- based teacher preparation (Ball & Forzani, 2009, 2010; Darling- Hammond & Hammerness, 2005; Grossman & McDonald, 2008; Grossman, Compton, Igra, Ronfeldt, Shahan, & Williamson, 2009; Grossman, Hammerness, & McDonald, 2009). Two principal changes are behind this pivot from theory to practice. First, a repertoire of core practices has been defined, including among others, developing explanations using models, facilitating produc- tive discussions. These core practices are defined as activities essential to fostering ambitious teaching (Ball & Forzani, 2009, 2010; Grossman, Compton et al., 2009; Grossman, Hammerness et al., 2009). Second, core practices are learned through the peda- gogies of practice. Accordingly, teachers are more likely to acquire practices relevant to their careers if they do so through modeling, rehearsing, and enacting (McDonald, Kazemi, & Kavanagh, 2013). And, although the core practices are described free of context, learning them requires making them specific to a subject matter (Ball & Forzani, 2010; Kucan, Hapgood et al., 2011). Within subject-specific core practices, the activity of facilitating text-based discussions of academic texts has already been decomposed to determine the specialized knowledge necessary to effectively enact the practice, especially for in-service teachers (Kucan & Palincsar, 2013; Kucan, Hapgood et al., 2011; Kucan, Palincsar et al., 2011). However, the specialized knowledge needed to enact this subject-specific practice in a teacher education program has been decomposed but not evaluated, much less in the context of teacher preparation in Latin America, a region charac- terized by severe educational inequalities. Thus, the purposes of this study are: (1) to decompose the subject-specific practice of facilitating text-based discussions of academic texts into the key * Corresponding author. Pontificia Universidad Cat olica de Chile, Facultad de Educaci on, Av. Vicu~ na Mackenna 4860, Office 01, Macul, Santiago, RM 7820436, Chile. E-mail addresses: amenesea@uc.cl (A. Meneses), eshugo@uc.cl (E. Hugo), angeles.garcia@uc.cl (M.  A. García), mbmuller@uc.cl (M. Müller). Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Teaching and Teacher Education journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/tate https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tate.2017.09.019 0742-051X/© 2017 Published by Elsevier Ltd. Teaching and Teacher Education 69 (2018) 119e130