ABSTRACT
The nature of the conversation will clearly be different if children have less skill in the target language. This chapter focuses on findings and theories from first- and second-language learning to look at language learning in a very special kind of classroom setting, a small group, and reading-comprehension lesson. Research which addresses these diverse questions may find that dialect-speaking children, children from poverty, and perhaps even children who are learning English as a second language in school may not need to spend time tediously reading lessons and for their help in coding and counting behaviors. The high degree of responsiveness and linguistic relatedness of both teacher and student utterances show that these reading lessons are truly conversational in nature. Though the teacher and the students may be mutually unaware that language teaching is happening, these reading lesson conversations are truly language learning opportunities.
