ABSTRACT

In the World Library of Educationalists series, international experts themselves compile career-long collections of what they judge to be their finest pieces – extracts from books, key articles, salient research findings, major theoretical and practical contributions – so the world can read them in a single manageable volume. Readers will be able to follow the themes and strands and see how their work contributes to the development of the field.

Language and the Joint Creation of Knowledge draws on the most prominent writing of Neil Mercer, covering his ground-breaking and critically acclaimed work on the role of talk in education, and on the relationship between spoken language and cognition.

The text explores key themes, relating theoretical ideas to research evidence and to practical educational situations that improve children’s lives. Offering students and researchers a clear, accessible and up-to-date account of a sociocultural perspective on the relationship between spoken language and cognition, it explains one of the key themes in Neil Mercer’s work – that humans have uniquely evolved the capacity to think together, or ‘interthink’.

Offering a crucial insight into the work of Neil Mercer, this selection showcases why his approach has become the dominant paradigm in educational research, and why it is increasingly influential in the psychology of teaching and learning. This unique collection of published articles and chapters, which represent the key themes and range of his research over the last 40 years, will be of interest to all followers of his work and any reader interested in the role of language in education.

chapter |9 pages

Introduction

chapter 1|18 pages

Community language and education

chapter 2|16 pages

Researching Common Knowledge

Studying the content and context of educational discourse

chapter 4|28 pages

Laying the foundations

chapter 5|19 pages

Language for teaching a language

chapter 6|18 pages

Developing dialogues

chapter 7|21 pages

Reasoning as a scientist

Ways of helping children to use language to learn science

chapter 8|31 pages

Sociocultural discourse analysis

Analysing classroom talk as a social mode of thinking

chapter 9|28 pages

The seeds of time

Why classroom dialogue needs a temporal analysis

chapter 10|18 pages

The analysis of classroom talk

Methods and methodologies

chapter 13|42 pages

The social brain, language, and goal-directed collective thinking

A social conception of cognition and its implications for understanding how we think, teach, and learn

chapter 16|27 pages

Dialogue, thinking together and digital technology in the classroom

Some educational implications of a continuing line of inquiry

chapter 17|26 pages

An Oracy Assessment Toolkit

Linking research and development in the assessment of students’ spoken language skills at age 11–12