ABSTRACT
The Russian psychologist, Vygotsky, argued that the social practice of formal schooling should help children understand the connections among their implicit experiences (“bigger”, e.g., everyday concepts) and explicit cultural categories (“greater volume”, e.g., academic concepts). The application of Vygotskian theory to current research requires a connection to recent developments such as learning through participation and dialogic pedagogy. By examining the activities of mathematicians and scientists, educators are recommending that classrooms incorporate productive disciplinary engagement. Theoretical notions such as dialogic pedagogy are explained through examples of teacher talk moves such as re-voicing and expansive framing. These talk moves are illustrated using examples from research conducted in dialogic mathematics and science classrooms. How teacher talk moves help students make sense of the concepts and practices of those disciplines by connecting their prior knowledge to abstract, explicitly defined academic concepts is the aim of our argument. The chapter ends with a discussion of the features of classroom discourse required to balance the cognitive challenges of implicit and explicit speech, particularly for students from cultural backgrounds different from their teachers.
