Introduction

Throughout Parts 1 to 3 we have seen that underpinning many researchers’ interest in exploring and conceptualizing educational dialogues is the idea that we need to understand how better to support teachers and learners’ collective endeavours, such that we can promote effective opportunities for, and design strategies to support, productive interaction. This desire to create effective opportunities for dialogue in educational settings has brought about a significant shift in research. Increasingly, in addition to studying how certain forms or modes of interaction may promote learning, researchers are also asking how dialogue can be supported and resourced. They are also asking how efficacious forms of dialogue might be learned, in order to ensure that talk in educational settings becomes a valuable opportunity for learning. This concern to promote productive educational dialogues appears to reflect a belief that the quality of talk in educational contexts is profoundly important and yet its character and context need somehow to be transformed (Alexander 2005; see also Mercer and Hodgkinson 2008).