ABSTRACT
The importance of talk to children's learning is now well established and over the last twenty years a substantial body of research has provided us with evidence of how children use talk to learn, and of the classroom practices which can best support such learning. It would seem that evidence from classrooms and research on the brain tells us that learning or making meaning is shaped by a culture's toolkit and ways of thought. This way of thinking about learning has come to be known as the socio-cultural model. This chapter extracts from children's talk to show how the use of binary opposites and rules of classification can promote effective learning through collaborative talk. It suggests that learning strategies which enable children to handle information effectively are of immense importance as we enter the 'information age'. The power of classification as a learning tool is highlighted in the next example of children's talk.
