ABSTRACT
This chapter highlights the crucial role that classroom conversations can play in building the inner language that students use in their minds for understanding academic texts. It focuses on the inner language of comprehending, which is more or less a subset of inner speech that is used to understand written texts. The chapter helps us to focus on specific strategies, while at the same time staying aware of the overall purpose that of building students' inner language to prepare them for understanding challenging texts. It presents several research-based approaches and models for setting up and maintaining effective whole class and small group conversations and briefly posits ways in which the conversations help students to internalize thinking processes and language that are helpful for comprehension. By taking a look at a handful of effective approaches for using conversations in the classroom, the chapter reflects on how they might serve to shape students' inner language choices for comprehending.
