MESHGuides

One way to facilitate the development of a supportive environment where children can articulate their ideas freely is through the negotiation of ‘ground rules’ for talk. The Thinking Together website (Dawes, 2010) has some very useful resources for encouraging children to consider how talk is used in classrooms and activities for developing ground rules for talk with your students.

https://thinkingtogether.educ.cam.ac.uk/resources/

The importance of language to learning is evident even from children’s earliest interactions with their carers. Hart and Risley (1995) argued that the amount and quality of the dialogue that young children experience at home is one of best predictors of their eventual academic attainment. The conversational style of carers has been shown to be critical to children’s long-term retention; children have more organised and detailed memories if their carers frequently use elaboration and evaluation (Reese, Haden & Fivush, 1993).

Recent research has explored how the interactive whiteboard (IWB) can be used to encourage dialogue with primary and secondary children across subject areas (Hennessy, Warwick, Brown, Rawlins & Neale, 2014). An overview of the project can be found here:

http://dialogueiwb.educ.cam.ac.uk/about/

The ‘resource bank and templates’ section of the project website provides a variety of ideas for IWB activities designed to promote dialogue:

The first stage in developing a more dialogic approach to learning and teaching would be to consider the type of language that is already in use in your classroom. One way of doing this would be to undertake a ‘talk audit’. Produced by ‘The Inquiry Project’, the talk audit identifies four ‘goals’ for productive discussions and nine associated ‘talk moves’ in the form of a checklist. This enables teachers to examine how frequently such talk moves are used in their classroom.

From a sociocultural perspective, there is an important relationship between language and cognitive development. Vygotsky (1962, 1978) was one of the first theorists to recognise the importance of social interaction and language in cognitive development. For Vygotsky, language is both a cultural tool (for the development and sharing of knowledge) and a psychological tool (for the development of individual thought).

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Research into the interaction between Classroom Dialogue and digital technology is a burgeoning field of study. Much of the research undertaken on the influence of digital technology on productive Classroom Dialogue is informed by a sociocultural perspective (Major, Warwick, Rasmussen, Ludvigsen & Cook, 2018) introduced previously.

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Evidence suggests that school students’ academic performance is influenced by the quality of educational dialogue in both small-group and whole-class situations (Howe & Abedin, 2013).