Abstract: Abstract Emergent leadership was examined in 8 groups implementing Collaborative Reasoning (CR) discussions in 4 fourth-grade classrooms from a primary school in mainland China. Children’s leadership moves were coded from 63 free-flowing, open-format discussions transcripts, and each of the 8 groups have 8 discussions separately (one discussion transcript was missing). The transcripts encompassed 22 hours and 38 minutes with 6178 turns for speaking, which were evaluated to belong to one of 13 leadership functions: Turn Management, Voting Organization, Remind Ground Rules, Initiation Task, Spontaneous Responses and Encouraging/Acknowledgement, Remind, Asking for Clarification, Topic Control, Asking for Reasons, Thinking out-loud, Challenging, Summing up. Comparison of the number and kind of leadership moves made by the children showed that there were emergent leadership moves in each of the 8 collaborative reasoning discussion groups, but only two groups leaders emerged in 2 out of the 8 groups, while 1 primary leader emerged in one group and leadership responsibilities was shared among three children in another group. Compared with the previous research about the emergent leadership among the American primary students in CR discussion, the leadership patterns of Chinese children were similar with that of American children, but the frequency of leadership moves of Chinese fourth graders were much lower than that of their peers from American. To better understand how the different leaders grew in their groups, those group leaders of the two groups and their interaction with the teacher and other students were investigated in details. The result showed that the frequency and kind of leadership moves of the primary leader followed the patterns of her teacher, which increased with the progression of the discussions at the beginning and stabled at a low level at the end, suggesting that the emerging leaders were learning how to lead from her teacher. Encouraging and acknowledgement from the teacher played a big role in the growth of student leaders. Analyses of the three leaders sharing the leadership responsibilities indicated that these students who were descripted by their teacher as talkative and who were regard as having good ideas, exhibited more leadership than other children. This study confirmed our hypothesis that the Collaborative Reasoning discussions provided an environment conducive to the emergence of child leaders and the acquisition and refinement of leadership schemas. Features of Collaborative Reasoning discussions—specifically, the teacher providing social and intellectual space, open participation, and mastery orientation—enable children to have more control over group dynamics. As time proceeds, child leaders gradually take over aspects of leadership conventionally performed by teachers and organize the discussion in an effective way. The findings in the present study had important implications for classroom implementations to develop children’s leadership in China.

Key words: Key words：Collaborative Reasoning Discussion, primary students, leadership, qualitative analyze

摘要： 摘 要 本研究以四年级学生为研究对象，通过话语分析，探究了八个无领导小组八次讨论过程中领导力的萌芽状况及其影响因素。结果发现，小学生可自发出现领导力行为，但只有两个小组会涌现出明显的领导者，并表现为独立领导和协同领导两种不同模式。对学生和教师行为的综合分析显示，学生领导力的形成与教师示范、反馈及同伴互动存在密切关系，这对学生领导力的培养具有重要的启示意义。

关键词: 关键词：协作推理讨论, 小学生, 领导力, 质性分析