ABSTRACT
This chapter explores a sociocultural perspective which places social interaction at the centre of learning. The term interaction is generally understood to mean the communication between teacher, students and between students themselves. The term discourse is concerned with the ‘text’, in other words, the classroom talk. Exploratory talk is a way of viewing the dual activities of ‘talk for learning’ and ‘learning to talk’. A large body of research stemming from a project called Thinking Together has established that students’ use of exploratory talk results in improvement in the quality of group work, group talk and individual attainment. A number of studies have developed frameworks, systems and coding to analyse classroom discourse as well as several research approaches and methodologies for the study of classroom talk. The framework is organised into modes, pedagogic goals and interactional features. The interactional features are further broken down into descriptions.
