ABSTRACT
The potential benefits of the talk that occurs when children converse with adults or with other children about their reading has been indicated in a number of studies. Snow shows that parent-child reading interactions enhance understanding of differences between interpersonal speech and decontextualised book language. In spite of the marginalisation of the practice of hearing individual children read brought about by the National Literacy Strategy, many schools still devote time to this task, often delegating it to trained or untrained assistants and volunteers. At first sight, the individual reading conference would appear to be a promising context for rich conversation. Children made very few life-to-text links or evaluative comments, and when they did so, adults tended to hasten the child's attention back to word level decoding. The child has been looking at an illustration in a book about birds showing an X-ray photo of a chick embryo in the egg, and the teacher has compared it to a human embryo.
