International Teacher Education Conference 2014 1

International Teacher Education Conference 2014
• Specialise and imagine
• Explore and evaluate ideas
• Discuss
• Argue or defend a position
• Negotiate.
The challenge is how best to consider how best to set the conditions for these different kinds of talk to arise
and develop.
Another important aspect of the teacher’s role is to help children to use talk to think together in groups.
Inspired by Douglas Barnes’s (1976) classroom-based research on how productive group discussion can
contribute not only to the development of children’s language and reasoning skills but also their individual
learning, Dawes et al. (2000) have devised practical research-based guidelines designed to teach children
explicitly how to use exploratory forms of talk, such talk requires children not only to use language to explore
ideas and possibilities, share information and give reasons for their viewpoint but also to constructively and
respectfully, engage critically with each other’s ideas to ensure that all possible insights inform final agreement.
However, children need to be supported in establishing ground rules for talk and teachers need to actively model
how to talk effectively in groups. The value of talking partners cannot be overestimated in introducing this kind
of work. Indeed, the pair may be the essential context for the majority of child-to-child talk, having an explicit
set of rules for group talk enables children to self-regulate their talk while sometimes it can be useful to assign
key roles to individuals in groups in order to focus more on cooperation between members of a group. Alongside
rules. Children should hear and experience what exploratory talk means and learn to use the affordances of
dialogic talk.
Discussion
This paper, looked principally on classroom interactions, and in particular focusing on talk for learning. One
factor influencing this apparent issue in education is the pattern of teachers’ talk, this may be that teachers feel a
need to be in control of the discourse. In his study of questioning in an early years setting, Allerton (1993)
suggests that closed questioning ‘allows the teacher to retain control of interactions’ (1993, P.48). By contrast,
he found that children’s responses to open questions were longer, more divergent and more likely to be
controlled by the child. One impact of national strategies which outline in detail curriculum objective for each
year of primary education is that teachers are very focused upon their teaching objectives for each lesson and are
anxious to cover curriculum requirements. This can lead to a reluctance to relinquish control for fear that
curriculum objectives are not met. All too often, however, with the teacher in clear control of the talk domain
interaction is reduced to teacher talk with ‘gaps into which the students can insert responses’ (Francis, 2002,
p.29). As a consequence, whole class teaching is constructed principally around the teacher’s agenda, and is
more concerned with talk for teaching, than talk for learning.
Perhaps as a consequence of this desire to retain control, the question remains the principal initiator of a
discourse sequence in the classroom despite the considerable range of other verbal, non-verbal paralinguistic
forms which frequently initiate discourse in other social situations. In terms of promoting constructive
environments for the construction of meaning or understanding, factual or closed questions often act as
inhibitors which ‘generate relatively silent children’ (Wood, 1988), the more questions teachers ask, the less
children say.
Talk is essential to learning and needs to be taught. Teachers need to take into account the richness of talk to
build on it rather than ignore it. Language and talk are interconnected. How teachers plan for talk across the
curriculum have a significant impact on children’s social cultural and cognitive development. Language through
talk is both serious and celebratory.
Bibliography
Alexander, R. (2000) Culture and pedagogy, international comparisons in primary education. Oxford, Blackwell
Alexander, R. (2006) Towards Dialogic Teaching. York: Dialogos
Barnes, D. (2008) Exploring talk in schools. In Mercer, N and Hodkinson,S (eds) Exploring Talk in School
London: Sage.
Brierly, L., Cassar, I., Loader, P., Norman, K., Shantry, I., Wolfe, S. and Wood, D. (1992) Thinking Voices; The
Work of the National Oracy Project. London: Hodder and Stoguhton.
Edwards, D. and Mercer, N. (1987) Common Knowledge: The Development of Understanding in the
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