ABSTRACT
In this chapter we examine how teachers can use dialogue to help children learn. To do so, we will draw on what is now a substantial body of findings from school-based research. Some of this we have carried out ourselves and some has been carried out by colleagues, but we will also make extensive use of the work of other researchers. The archetypal educational dialogue between a teacher and a learner is spoken, synchronous and face-to-face and it is that we will focus on here. To understand the ways that teachers and their students use spoken language in classrooms, it is important to appreciate that all kinds of dialogue, in all kinds of settings, depend on participants having some shared understanding of how to make an interaction happen. For the event to proceed smoothly, all participants must have compatible conceptions of what it is appropriate to say and do, and what it is not. These normative conceptions operate as implicit sets of rules for behaving in particular kinds of situation, which participants normally take for granted: they are ‘ground rules of conversation’ (Edwards and Mercer, 1987). In our early research on classroom interaction, the concept of ‘ground rules’ was used only in a descriptive way, to account for what we saw happening. In later research, as we will explain in due course, we began to see that these rules could be brought out into the open and examined critically not only by researchers, but by teachers and students too. In the interests of improving educational practice, they might even be changed.
