ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the need to adopt a “dialogic approach” for understanding the development of literacy in primary school children in a comprehensive and novel fashion. It analyses much needed bridges between, on the one hand, contemporary dialogic perspectives on teaching and learning and, on the other, research which analyses literacy as a situated sociocultural practice. The chapter describes some methodological tools for analysing dialogic interactions in educational settings in a detailed and systematic fashion. It reviews some research that analyses particularly the multimodal nature of literacy. The chapter utilises “dialogue” as a purely descriptive term to refer to verbal communication between people and “dialogic” as a theoretical concept to refer to productive forms of communication with singular qualities. Dialogic interactions harness the power of language to stimulate and extend students’ understanding, thinking and learning. P. Linell expounds a comprehensive sociocultural theory of “dialogism” as a general epistemology for cognition and communication, based partly on the works of M. Bakhtin.
