TOWARDS DIALOGIC TEACHING Rethinking classroom talk Fourth edition Robin Alexander University of Cambridge DialogosFirst edition published 2004 Reprinted 2004 Second edition published 2004 Reprinted with revisions 2005 (twice) Third edition published 2006 Reprinted 2006 (twice), 2007 (twice) Fourth edition published 2008 Reprinted 2008, 2009, 2010 (with revisions) Published by Dialogos UK Ltd, YO7 2AP, UK Copyright © Robin Alexander 2004, 2006, 2008 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying or recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library ISBN: 978-0-9546943-6-4 To order further copies of this publication, and for information about the author's work and related publications, go to: www.robinalexander.org.uki I Iv CONTENTS Introduction Dialogic teaching: the case and the evidence Introduction Learning to talk, talking to learn Communicative rights and cognitive challenge Initiatives and agendas Learning from other countries From interactive whole class teaching to dialogic teaching Extending the repertoire Talking and knowing Dialogue and assessment for learning Dialogue and citizenship Dialogue, personalisation and lifelong learning The new pedagogical nexus? Dialogic teaching: principles, repertoires and indicators Justifications Principles Repertoires (i): talk for everyday life Repertoires (ii): talk for teaching Repertoires (iii): talk for learning Repertoirs (iii): organisational contexts Indicators Into practice Evidence from the classroom The persistence of recitation Dilemmas not deficits Form and content Postscript: the indivisibility of learning through dialogue Support materials and further reading Support materials Wider perspectives Research surveys commissioned by the Cambridge Primary Review 55, 57 59INTRODUCTION In 2001, Blackwell published Culture and Pedagogy’, the account of a research project which over a four-year period took a colleague and myself into schools, classrooms, national ministries, local government offices, teacher training institutions and universities in five countries on three continents. In England, France, India, Russia and the United States we observed and videotaped children and teachers at work; we interviewed school heads, teachers, parents, community leaders, politicians, officials, teacher trainers and researchers; we talked with children; and we collected policy documents, schemes, lesson plans and examples of children’s work, adding large numbers of photographs for good measure The research was a comparative study. Its principal theme was the way a country’s culture and history shape the values and processes of public primary schooling, from the broad sweep of policy down to the day- to-day activities of teachers and children in classrooms. The study also sought to discover what English education might learn to its advantage from comparisons of this kind. Among the rich array of data which we brought back for analysis, the most exciting was the 130 hours of videotape, all of which was transcribed so that we could revisit and study in different ways the classrooms whose activities we had observed. This material was combined with a further body of recordings from earlier projects, giving us a complete project dataset of 166 lessons from over 100 schools. As the fieldwork progressed it became increasingly evident that the classroom talk we were hearing and recording was likely to be one of the most potent areas for comparison. Subsequent analysis of the videotapes and transcriptions confirmed this. A culture, after all, is mediated by its language; and it is through language, especially spoken language, that teachers teach and children learn. This was the theme which in its closing pages the book identified as being one of the more promising fruits of its international comparisons; and it was the theme that provoked particular interest among the various official and professional groups with whom the 1 Alexander, RJ. Culture and Pedagogy: international comparisons in primary education, Oxford UK and Malden MA: Blackwell 2001. The project (and its follow-up) were largely funded by the Leverhulme Trust.research was shared once Culture and Pedagogy was published: DfES, QCA’, Ofsted, the National Literacy Strategy, the Primary National Strategy, UKLA’, and many LEAs. The dissemination process led to further initiatives. Sponsored by QCA and the National Literacy and Numeracy Strategies (NLNS), three of us started work on a video and print pack which was intended to raise the profile and quality of those kinds of classroom talk which seemed likely to exert the greatest leverage on children’s learning and understanding.’ At the same time, NLNS began to introduce ideas from the research into its training and support materials, and QCA wrote ‘dialogic teaching’ into its revised guidance on Speaking and Listening, published in November 20035 Meanwhile, against the background of international achievement studies such as TIMSS, PISA and PIRLS, Ofsted decided to pursue questions raised in Culture and Pedagogy about the starting age for formal schooling and the educational experiences of those children who in England are firmly established in their primary education but in many other countries have not yet started school. That led, via further international fieldwork, to the Ofsted report The Education of Six Year Olds in England, Denmark and Finland. This study, too, suggested a need to rethink the dynamics and content of classroom interaction.‘ Next, the team responsible for the government's Primary National Strategy, perhaps in response to criticism that in the Strategy’s manifesto, Excellence and Enjoyment, oracy was barely mentioned,’ started to give it 2 Following the QCA dissemination seminar in July 2001 on pedagogical aspects of the Culture and Pedagogy research, QCA brought together this work and Ron Carter’s research on the grammar of spoken language at a larger conference a year later. The papers appear in QCA (2003) New Perspectives on Spoken English in the Classroom, London: QCA. 3 The UKLA paper is Alexander, RJ. (2008) ‘Oracy, literacy and pedagogy: international perspectives’, in Bearne, E,, Dombey, H., Grainger, T. (ed) Interactions in Language and Literacy in the Classroom, Milton Keynes: Open University Press, pp 23-35 4 QCA/DIES Teaching Through Dialogue, London: QCA/DIES. This pack was completed in 2002 and still remains unpublished, despite being used by the National Literacy Strategy and the Primary National Strategy (PNS) in their training programmes and conferences since then. Now, at the time of this new edition, it seems probable that the pack will be replaced by something more up to date - for the field is now moving very fast - and will be launched as part of a new PNS initiative. Meanwhile, in November 2005 QCA released a couple of the video clips from the 2002 pack in connection with its English 21 discussion. 5 QCA/DEES (2003) Speaking, Listening, Learning: working with children in KSI and 2, London: QCA/DfES. 6 Ofsted (2003) The Education of Six Year Olds in England, Denmark and Finland: an international comparative study, London: Ofsted. See especially paras 118-137. 7 DEES (2003) Excellence and Enjoyment: a strategy for primary schools, London: DfES. 8 Alexander, RJ. (2003) Still no Pedagogy? Principle, pragmatism and compliance in primary education, Cambridge: University of Cambridge Faculty of Education (also published in Cambridge Journal of Education 34(1), 2004),7 prominence in their training and materials. In doing so, they drew - albeit rather too selectively - on ideas about dialogic teaching presented in previous editions of this publication. During the same period, I started working with LEAs on their own dialogic teaching initiatives. The first of these, a project involving over 40 schools in North Yorkshire, is now in its fourth year. A similar project started a year later in Barking and Dagenham. In both initiatives, partly in response to the impact of the Culture and Pedagogy videos and transcripts, video is being used to support both professional development and project evaluation. Teachers videotape typical lessons at regular intervals during the year and set and review goals relating to the conduct of classroom talk on the basis of their analysis of what they see and hear. The tapes also record the baselines from which each participating teacher, and the LEAs collectively, move forward, and they enable participants to track and evaluate their progress. ‘These are early days for projects such as those in North Yorkshire and Barking and Dagenham, and while changes in teaching and children’s engagement are readily discernible as a result of this kind of intensive video-based intervention, their full impact on children’s learning and understanding is still being assessed.’ Yet the idea of dialogic teaching is fast catching on. Many local authorities and schools in England, Wales and, latterly, Scotland, have launched initiatives which draw on the ideas in this publication, and there is growing international interest. This is partly because people recognise the potential of dialogic teaching to address an aspect of pedagogy which, considering its importance for children’s learning, is surprisingly neglected - in Britain, undoubtedly, but perhaps in a number of other countries too; and partly because it resonates so strongly with evidence from other sources. Nor, although the work started in the primary sector, is it restricted to primary schools. The take-up from secondary schools increased markedly during 2005, while in more radical vein David Hargreaves and the Specialist Schools and Academies Trust have started exploring the place of dialogic teaching in ‘personalised’ pedagogies for lifelong learning which centre on student voice, mentoring and assessment for learning.” In the policy domain too, think-tanks such as IPPR have started considering the potential of dialogic teaching to address the continuing challenges of social and educational inclusion. 9 Alexander, RJ. (2003) Talk for Learning: the first year; Alexander RJ. (2004) Talk for Learning: the second year, Northallerton: North Yorkshire County Council; Alexander, RJ. (2005) Teaching Through Dialogue: the first year, Barking: London Borough of Barking and Dagenham. See also the final section of this publication. 10 Hargreaves, D.H. (2004 and 2005) Personalising Learning 2, 3 and 5, London: Specialist Schools Trust.8 Inall this, though, evidence must be regarded as paramount. It would be wrong to advocate changes to the culture and conduct of teaching as radical as those discussed here without a secure grounding in evidence from. both research and practice; and equally wrong for schools and national agencies to be swept along by a tide which, by failing to engage with the evidence, has more to do with fashion than principle, and whose resulting practice is far from dialogic. This is the sorry trajectory of so many ‘new’ educational ideas in recent decades and in the end it does a disservice to children no less than to the ideas themselves. Here, then, the publication's many evidential sources are detailed in footnotes, while Section V offers a rather briefer and more selective list of material for further reading and professional support. The publication ends by arguing that if the dialogic principle is valid for children’s learning it may be no less valid for professional learning and school improvement. This is hardly a novel insight, but it may be a necessary corrective to the rampant educational centralisation which Britain — and especially England — has experienced since 1997. For in a centralising culture policy is legitimated by compliance rather than argument and the mantra ‘evidence-based-policy’ all too often means its opposite - that policy is devised first and its authors then look around, selectively, for evidence to justify it. Both tendencies, of course, are the antithesis of dialogue. As its title indicates, Towards Dialogic Teaching represents work in progress and is not a final statement. This is its fourth edition and fourteenth printing in under six years, and what started in 2004 as a short booklet is now not only considerably longer but has generated a sequel which reaches beyond the classroom to examine, within a global framework, pressing questions about curriculum and educational values" - not to mention journal articles and book chapters, and a DVD in which teachers and children from the North Yorkshire project begin to enact some of the ideas explored here”. Indeed, the field as a whole is moving fast. So, for example, the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) funded a seminar programme on ‘Dialogue and Development! in mid-2006, while the words ‘dialogue’ and ‘dialogic’ appear with increasing frequency in the titles of research proposals. To help to advance these lines of enquiry, therefore - and of course in the spirit of that dialogue to which all of us in this field are committed - the author would like to hear what readers think about the issues with which this publication deals." M1 Alexander, RJ. (2008) Education as Dialogue: moral and pedagogical choices for a runaway world, Hong Kong Institute of Education with Dialogos, now reprinted in extended form in Alexander, RJ. (2008) Essays on Pedagogy, Routledge (see this publication, Section V). 12 North Yorkshire County Council (2006) Talk for Learning: teaching and learning through dialogue (DVD pack containing text and 24 lesson extracts), North Yorkshire County Council with Dialogos (see p 56) 13 Contact: [email protected]Il DIALOGIC TEACHING: THE CASE AND THE EVIDENCE Introduction Talk has always been one of the essential tools of teaching, and the best teachers use it with precision and flair. But talk is much more than an aid to effective teaching. Children, we now know, need to talk, and to experience a rich diet of spoken language, in order to think and to learn. Reading, writing and number may be the acknowledged curriculum ‘basics’, but talk is arguably the true foundation of learning. This section sets out the research basis for a kind of teaching in which talk is given the prominence which effective thinking and learning require It makes the case not for ‘speaking and listening’ - currently conceived in England’s National Curriculum as an aspect of the teaching of English - but for a distinctive pedagogical approach called dialogic teaching which reaches across the entire curriculum. For most of us, talking is easy. We just do it. It is also transitory: unless our talk is taped or transcribed, or has memorable rhetorical, poetic or emotive power, it soon fades to a remembered sensation or vanishes altogether. In contrast the written word is available for endless scrutiny after the event. Indeed, unlike speech there is not one reading ‘event’ but many, scattered over time and place and mediated by each reader and his or her consciousness and circumstances. For these and other reasons we may tend to be less reflective about what is said in our classrooms than about what is written. But there is the additional problem, in Britain at least, that considerably lower educational status is ascribed to talk than to writing, and this difference is constantly reinforced. After children have explored ideas through discussion, they are told ‘Now write about it’ When their learning and understanding are assessed, it is on the basis of what they have written. When parents or school inspectors look for evidence that children are making progress, it is the written work that they ask to see. Thus an educational culture has evolved in which writing is viewed as the only ‘real’ school work and as the most reliable medium for measuring pupils’ learning. This emphasis is by no means universal, and one of the important lessons of international research is that it is possible to teach effectively, and indeed to find one’s pupils at or near the top of international league tables of pupil achievement, by using teaching in which talk has considerable10 prominence, and in which talking and writing stand in a different relationship to each other than tends to be the case in Britain. So whatever other questions we ask when evaluating our teaching, two are fundamental: do we provide and promote the right kind of talk; and how can we strengthen its power to help children think and learn even more effectively than they do? If established research helps us to answer the first question, recent comparisons between British classrooms and those of other countries throw the second one into sharp relief, for they enable us to view our habitual ideas and practices, as it were, from the outside, and they provide us with different ways to tackle familiar challenges. What follows was prompted initially by findings from a comparative study of primary education in England, France, India, Russia and the United States which culminated in a detailed analysis of talk from classrooms in these five countries". However, the ideas presented here stem from much more than this one project. My own work in this field started with UK projects in the 1980s."* Researchers from several disciplines and countries have long been preoccupied by the place of talk in children’s development and education. Most of them recognise that genuine educational advance is achieved less by sensational research findings or headline-grabbing political initiatives than by painstaking effort and enquiry which respect and build on what has gone before. We shall see that cumulation is an important principle in the proper handling of classroom talk. It is also essential to research. Since talking, thinking and knowing are intimately connected, this is no coincidence. Learning to talk, talking to learn aching there are several strands with which we should be particularly concerned. 7 The first and foremost is psychological. Language and thought are 4 Ramco related, and the extent and manner of children’s cognitive x From the now substantial body of research on language, learning and development depend to a considerable degree on the forms and contexts of language which they have encountered and used. When children leam language,’ argues Michael Halliday, ‘they are not simply engaging in one 14 Alexander, RJ. (2001) Culture and Pedagogy: international comparisons in primary education, Blackwell, especially pp 391-528. 15 The large-scale evaluation of educational policy, practice and reform in Leeds (1986-91), which included sustained observation and analysis of classroom talk; and the ESRC CICADA study of classroom change and continuity (1990-92), at the core of which was a quantitative analysis of discourse. See: Alexander, RJ. (1995) Versions of Primary Education, London: Routledge, chapters 4 and 5.u type of learning among many; rather, they are learning the foundations of Tearning itself." But whereas teaching during the 1960s and 1970s was strongly Pagel influenced by the idea - attributed, perhaps unfairly, to Piaget - of the child i as a ‘lone scientist’ who develops cognitively by interacting with stimulating materials, from the 1980s this approach was increasingly Vagdtte) Srallenged by the Vygotskian view that the child’s cognitive development JOHN also requires it to engage, through the medium of spoken language, with \ adults, other children and the wider culture.” Development, then, is a social process as well as a biological one. Children"construct meaning not only from the interplay of what they ewly,encouter and wher dey, already know, but also from interaction with others. In tum, this interaction is critical not just for children’s understanding of the kind of knowledge with which schools deal — mathematics, science and so on — but also for the development of their very identity, their sense of self and worth. The ‘others’ with whom children interact assume a critical role in the process of cognitive ‘scaffolding’, a term first coined by Wood, Bruner and Ross in the 1970s in the context of mother-child interaction and now more commonly applied to what goes on ~ or does not - in classrooms. This is the use of carefully structured interventions to bridge what Vygotsky called the ‘zone of potential (or, in most translations, ‘proximal’) development’, or the gap between the child’s existing knowledge and ways of solving problems unaided and the understanding which can be attained only with the guidance of the teacher or a ‘more capable peer’. In other words, learning and development are not synonymous, as in the heyday of progressivism they tended to be regarded. It is true that children learn regardless of the intentions of their parents, carers or teachers, simply by being acutely alive to what is going on around them. But learning fo a specific cultural purpose requires intervention and support by others. Emphasising the critical role of interaction in this process, 16 Ww 18 Halliday, M.A.K. (1993) “Towards a language-based theory of learning’, Linguistics in Education, 5. Bruner, JS. and Haste. H. (1987) Introduction to Making Sense: the child's construction of the world, Routledge; Vygotsky, LS. (1962) Thought and Language, Cambridge MA: M.LT. Press. Goswami, U. and Bryant, P. (2007) Children’s Cognitive Development and Learning (Primary Review Research Survey 2/1a), Cambridge: University of Cambridge Faculty of Education. Vygotsky, L.S. (1962) Mind in Society: the development of higher psychological processes, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press; Bruner and Haste, pp 21-2. According to Joan Simon, who was a pioneering translator and disseminator of the work of Vygotsky, Luria, Leontiev and other Russian psychologists, ‘Zone of potential [or next] development’ is a more appropriate translation from the Russian than the more usual ‘proximal’. See Simon J. (1987) ‘Vygotsky and the Vygotskians’, American Journal of Education, August; also, for one of the most concise of Vygotsky's own accounts of his ideas, Simon, B. and Simon, J. (ed) (1963) Educational Psychology in the U.S.S.R. London: Routledge, pp 21-34. Mey2 Vygotsky even went as far as to argue that ‘the true direction of the development of thinking is not from the individual to the social, but from the social to the individual.’ While it is clear that this approach challenges the once popular view of the teacher as a hands-off ‘facilitator’, it is important to stress that it does not herald a return to the traditional model of teaching as mere telling or transmitting. Where both of the earlier models implied activity on one side of the teacher-pupil relationship but passivity on the other - active pupils and passive teachers in one, passive pupils and active teachers in the other - the new approach demands both pupil engagement and teacher intervention. And the principal means by which pupils actively engage and teachers constructively intervene is through talk. Such talk, as Daniels emphasises in his recent work on activity theory, must not be regarded as mere ‘interaction’, narrowly conceived and bounded by the immediacy of the learning task in hand. Classroom talk mediates not just teaching and learning but also the wider culture.” ‘As Bruner again argues, several lines of research — on intersubjectivity, on the nature of the human mind, on metacognition and on collaborative learning — all converge on the principle that children must think for themselves before they truly know and understand, and that teaching must provide them with those linguistic opportunities and encounters which will enable them to do so.” These ideas have been given a further boost by neuroscientific research. It is now understood that talk is necessary not just for learning but also for the building of the brain itself as a physical organism, thereby expanding its power. If, as has long been known, the first three years of life are critical to subsequent development, it is now recognised that the period between 3/4 and 10/11 - the primary phase of schooling, more or less — is ‘one in which the brain in effect restructures itself, building cells, making new fibre connections between cells, pruning old ones, developing the capacity for learning, memory, emotional response and language, all on a scale which decreases markedly thereafter. Between birth and adolescence, brain metabolism is 150 per cent of its adult level, and synaptogenesis (the 19 Vygotsky, LS. (1962) Thought and Language, Cambridge MA: M.LT. Press, p 10. On ‘scaffolding’ see: Bruner, JS. and Haste, H.E. (ed) (1987) Making Sense: the child's construction of the world, London: Routledge, pp 1-25; Wood, D., Bruner, J.S., Ross, G. (1976) ‘The role of tutoring in problem-solving’ Journal of Child Psychology and Child Psychiatry, 17, pp 89-100; Maybin, J., Mercer, N., Stierer, B. (1992) ‘ “Scaffolding” earning in the classroom’, in Norman, K. (ed) Thinking Voices: the work of the National Oracy Project, London: Hodder, pp 186-95. 20 Daniels, H. (2001) Vygotsky and Pedagogy, London: Routledge/Falmer. 21 Bruner, JS. (1996) The Culture of Education, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, pp 56-60.13 growth of brain connections) causes the brain’s volume to quadruple. Talk actively and vigorously fuels these processes. Moreover, the periods between birth and 3/4 and between 3/4 and 10/11 are those when the brain’s capacity to acquire language is strongest” Apart from underlining the imperative of talk in the home, and in pre- school and primary education, this finding raises a separate question about the way in Britain the learning of foreign languages is postponed until the secondary stage of schooling. By then it may actually be more difficult, not less, to learn a new language. Having said that, brain research also tends to dent the claim that there are all-or-nothing critical periods for learning. Though some kinds of learning are more effective during the early years, synaptogenesis can occur at any period of life and humans retain the capacity to learn, and to learn extensively and in complex domains, throughout their lives. Neuroscience also supports the Vygotskian critique of teaching as mere developmental facilitation, discussed above. In some domains - perceptual, certainly, and to a degree social too - implicit learning clearly takes place, but higher-order cognitive activities of the kind that characterise formal schooling require both conscious effort and direct intervention. As Goswami notes, responding sceptically to Blakemore and Frith’s views on ‘learning without awareness’: Children spend much of their day in classrooms, [but] their brains do not automatically ‘notice’ how to read or do sums. These skills must be directly taught. it seems much more likely that the power of learning without awareness is relevant to education via social cognition. These insights from emerging neuroscientific research are doubly helpful: first in confirming the importance of teaching as intervention rather than_mere facilitation; secondly, as an endorsement of teaching which ‘“apiltalises on the collective and interactive environment which classrooms offer. The boundaries may not be precisely delineated: indeed, that’s the point, for it seems evident that it is advantageous to the learner if we see implicit social learning and the explicit teaching of higher-order concepts as linked and mutually-supportive processes. In the account of dialogic teaching which we develop in this publication, the dynamics of talk matter no less than its content, while social and cognitive purposes go hand in hand. 22 Johnson, M. (2004) Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, 2nd edition, Oxford: Blackwell, 23 Kotulak, R. (1996) Inside the Brain: revolutionary discoveries of how the mind works, Kansas City: Andrews McMeel Publishing. 24 Goswami, U. (2006) ‘The brain in the classroom? The state of the art’ (Commentary on Blakemore and Frith’s The Learning Brain), Developmental Science. pp 467-9. 25 bid.Si dlog rah 14 Communicative rights and cognitive challenge The second strand of research is sociological - or, more specifically, sociolinguistic, for it is concerned with the kinds of language and language environments which classrooms actually provide, as opposed to what the psychological and neuroscientific evidence suggests they ought to provide. Ever since, during the 1960s, Douglas Barnes explored patterns of teacher-pupil communication in secondary schools* and Philip Jackson charted the consequences for children of the unequal relationship of teacher and taught,” researchers have been sensitive to the risk that, if we are not careful, classrooms may be places where teachers rather than children do most of the talking; where supposedly open questions are really closed; where instead of thinking through a problem children devote their energies to trying to spot the one ‘correct’ answer; and where the supposed equality of discussion is subverted by what Tony Edwards calls the ‘unequal communicative rights’ of a kind of talk which remains stubbornly unlike the talk which takes place anywhere else.” Clearly, if classroom talk is to make a meaningful contribution to children’s learning and understanding, it must move beyond the acting out of such cognitively restricting rituals. The third strand of enquiry links to the first two. Following the ORACLE observational research of Galton and Simon during the 1970s and later studies by Mortimore, Alexander, Bennett, Wragg, Pollard and others, we have built up an increasingly comprehensive picture of classroom life, especially in primary schools." Among the features on the debit side which seem particularly resistant to change are the relative scarcity of talk which really challenges children to think for themselves, and especially the low level of cognitive demand in many classroom questions; the continuing Prevalence of questions which remain closed despite our claims to be interested in fostering more open forms of enquiry; the habitual and perhaps unthinking use of bland, all-purpose praise rather than feedback of a_kind_which diagnoses and informs; the seeming lox of children working everywhere in groups but rarely as groups; the rarity of autonomous pupil-led discussion and problem-solving; and the tendency of classrooms to be places of risk and ambiguity rather than security and 26 Barnes, D., Britton, J., Rosen, H. (1969) Language, the Learner and the School, Penguin. 2 Jackson, P.W. (1967) Life in Classrooms, New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. 28 Edwards, A.D. and Westgate, D.PG. (1994) Investigating Classroom Talk, Falmer. 29 Galton, M,, Simon, B. (1980) Inside the Primary Classroom, Routledge; Mortimore, P. et al, School Matters: the Junior Years, Open Books; Alexander, RJ. (1995) Versions of Primary Education, Routledge; Bennett, N. et al (1984) The Quality of Pupil Learning Experiences, Lawrence Erlbaum, Wragg, EC. (1993) Primary Teaching Skills, Routledge.15 clarity,” in which children devise strategies to cope and ‘get by’ rather than engage." These findings are mirrored by those from the United States, where the question-answer ‘recitation script’ remains dominant and - to quote from Nystrand’s large-scale study in American middle and high schools - classroom discourse is . overwhelmingly monologic. When teachers were not lecturing, students were either answering questions or completing seatwork. The teacher asked nearly all the questions, few questions were authentic, and few teachers followed up student responses.” ‘Authentic’ questions are those for which the teacher has not prespecified or implied a particular answer. They are contrasted with the much more common ‘test’ questions in which the teacher retains absolute control over the answers and therefore the direction of the interaction of which individual questions and answers are a part. And crucially for the theme of this publication, Nystrand and his colleagues define ‘authentic’ questions as dialogic because they ‘signal to students the teachers interest in what they think and know and not just whether they can report what someone else thinks or has said.’* There is also the striking finding from earlier UK research that well- structured oral and collaborative activities maintain children’s time on task more consistently than do solitary written and text-based tasks, yet in many classrooms the latter predominate* Such findings have been filled out by research of a more specifically linguistic kind: for example, by Sinclair and Coulthard on the characteristic ‘IRF’ exchange of question, response and follow-up," by Dillon on questions, pseudo-questions and the answers they produce,* and by Neil Mercer on the repertoire of interactive techniques - recapitulation, elicitation, repetition, reformulation and exhortation - on which teachers daily draw ‘for building the future on the foundations of the past’” These patterns are deeply rooted. The 1990s CICADA and ORACLE II studies showed how the interactive core of primary teaching was largely 30 Galton, M. (1989) Teaching int the Primary School, London: Routledge. 31 Pollard, A., Filer, A. (1999) The Social World of Pupil Career, London: Cassell. 32 Nystrand, M. with Gamoran, A., Kachy, R. and Prendergast, C. (1997), Opening Dialogue: understanding the dynamics of language and learning in the English classraom, New York: Teachers College Press, p 33. 33 Ibid, p 38. 34 Alexander, RJ. (1995) Versions of Primary Education, London: Routledge, pp 157-8. 35 Sinclair and Coulthard in Coulthard, M. (1992) (ed) Advances in Spoken Discourse Analysis, London: Routledge. 36 Dillon, J.T. (1990) The Practice of Questioning, London: Routledge. 37 Mercer, N. (2000) Words and Minds: howw we use language to think together, Routledge.16 untouched by the 1980s revolutions in curriculum and assessment.* Later studies from Newcastle, Cambridge and Reading universities showed that though the introduction of the UK government's flagship National Literacy and Numeracy Strategies in 1998 and 1999 may have transformed the content and organisation of literacy and numeracy lessons in many English primary schools, they appear to have had much less impact on the deeper layers of classroom talk — especially those habits of questioning and feedback referred to earlier.” Thus, to quote - at some length, but the study merits this - from the investigation by Smith, Hardman, Wall and Mroz into the pedagogical impact of the National Literacy and Numeracy strategies: TUT he dere suggest that traditional patterns of whole class interaction have not been dramatically transformed by the Strategies .. {In the whole class section of literacy and numeracy lessons, teachers igdSspent the majority of their time either explaining or using highly Ge Structured question and answer sequences. Far from encouraging and extending pupil contributions to promote high levels of interaction and cognitive engagement, most of the questions asked were of a low cn level designed to funnel pupils’ response towards a required answer” So what'> the altemahve 7? Quantifying these tendencies, the authors go on: Open questions made up 10% of the questioning exchanges and 15% of the sample did not ask any such questions. Probing by the teacher, where the teacher stayed with the same child to ask further questions to encourage sustained and extended dialogue, occurred in just over 11% of the questioning exchanges. Uptake questions occurred in only 4% of the teaching exchanges and 43% of the teachers did not use any such moves. Only rarely were teachers’ questions used to assist pupils to more complete or elaborated ideas. Most of the pupils’ exchanges were very short, with answers lasting on average 5 seconds, and were limited to three words or fewer for 70% of the time." 38 Alexander, RJ., Willcocks, J., Nelson, N. (1996) ‘Discourse, pedagogy and the National Curriculum: change and continuity in primary schools’, Research Papers in Education, 11(1); Galton, M et al (1999) Inside the Primary Classroom: 20 years on, Routledge. 39 Hardman, F, Smith, F, Wall, K. (2003) ’ “Interactive whole class teaching” in the National Literacy Strategy’, Cambridge Journal of Education, 33(2), pp 197-215; Moyles, J. Hargreaves, L. et al (2003) Interactive Teaching in the Primary School, Maidenhead: Open University Press; Skidmore, D. (2002) unpublished paper from ESRC project on Teacher- Pupil Dialogue and the Contprehension of Literary Texts. Smith, E, Hardman, F, Wall, K., Mroz, M. (2004) ‘Interactive whole class teaching in the 40 National Literacy and Numeracy Strategies’, British Educational Research Journal, 30(3), p 408. 4 Ibid.wv ‘The recitation script, then, continues to rule, and it is on the deeper layers of teaching and learning talk, and the assumptions by which they are steered, that we most - and most urgently - need to work. Initiatives and agendas Yet the past three decades have undoubtedly witnessed a growing belief both that the quality of classroom talk is profoundly important and that its character and context need somehow to be transformed. While Douglas Barnes and his colleagues in the National Association for the Teaching of English were arguing the case which influenced the 1975 Bullock Report's account of oracy and its ideal of ‘language across the curriculum’,? Joan ‘Tough was working with teachers nationwide to develop a more structured approach to the analysis and fostering of children’s talk.* These initiatives, during the period before the National Curriculum, had a considerable influence on many who were then working in primary and secondary schools. The National Curriculum itself included speaking and listening as a separate attainment target and defined its parameters in some detail, but talk increasingly gave ground thereafter to the growing pressure of test-led assessment and the unhelpfully narrow concept of literacy which became associated with the 1990s ‘standards’ drive, especially with the arrival of the Blair government in 1997. ‘The job of primary schools’ Blair's Education Secretary David Blunkett repeatedly and atavistically intoned, ‘is to teach children to read, write and add up.’ ‘Standards’ and politics also contributed to the all-too-brief influence of the National Oracy Project between 1987 and 1993. Coining Andrew Wilkinson's term ‘oracy’, that project brought together various grassroots initiatives with the aim of fostering and improving talk for learning, and in this it eventually secured the involvement of over half of England’s LEAs." In the National Oracy Project, as with a line of work stretching from Barnes’s seminal classroom studies of the 1960s to the present, the imprints of Vygotsky and Bruner are very evident, and considerable emphasis is placed on using discussion to empower pupils both as thinkers and as active agents in their own learning, More recently still, the UK government's Foundation Stage Curriculum Guidance and KS3 Strategy have placed talk centre-stage, and #2 Barnes, D., Britton, J., Rosen, H. (1969) Language, the Learner and the School, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books; DES (1975) A Language for Life (Bullock Report), London: HMSO, especially chapter 10. 43 Tough, J. (1976) Listening to Children Talking, London: Ward Lock; Tough, J. (1977) Talking and Learning: a guide to fostering communication in nursery and infant schools, London: Ward Lock. 44° Wilkinson, A. (1965) Spoken English, Birmingham University Press. 45 Norman, K. (ed) (1992) Thinking Voices: the work of the National Oracy Project, Hodder.we 18 the KS1/2 Literacy, Numeracy and Primary Strategies have produced materials encouraging teachers to reflect more deeply on the ways they handle questioning in the context of ‘interactive’ whole class teaching, on making interaction sustained rather than fragmented during the group stages of these lessons, and on the value of paired and group discussion. The QCA/DIES Speaking, Listening, Learning materials, which are being used to support the government's Primary Strategy, go further still, and seek to exploit the ‘dialogic’ idea which is central to this publication. Regrettably, however, they do so in a way which is tokenistic rather than convinced, still less helpful. Thus the Speaking, Listening, Learning handbook, adopting the usual DfES practice - though no less reprehensible for that - of lifting chunks of text from elsewhere without acknowledgement, quotes this author’s definition of dialogic teaching in its glossary, scatters ‘dialogue’ and ‘dialogic’ through the text, but takes the idea no further than that.* The accompanying book of classroom activities introduces ‘ground rules for dialogue’ only in Year 4, term 1 (why not earlier?), then offers nothing more until Year 6, term 3, at which point ‘techniques of dialogic talk’ are exemplified by reference not to dialogue at all, but to ‘formal language and spoken standard English.’” DfES and QCA, it would seem, have missed the point pretty spectacularly. Given this latest episode in the sad history of official initiatives in the domain of talk, it would be prudent to be no more than cautious about the prospects of the current renewal of interest. It is not just the preference for appropriating the vocabulary rather than engaging with the ideas. As we see in the next section, public attitudes and the inherited educational culture still militate against the kind of breakthrough which is needed, especially when we compare England with other countries. What adds urgency to this agenda is that children’s access to opportunities for talk outside the school vary considerably, as do the quality and potency of the talk they encounter. The relationship of language, social background and education has been highly contentious ever since Basil Bernstein first explored it in the 1950s, and in today’s pluralist society we are properly cautious about allowing cultural difference to be defined as deficit. Yet research continues to identify culturally related differences between children’s early linguistic experiences which as clearly disadvantage some children as they empower others. For example, Hart and Risley show how by the age of four in the United States the child of professional parents will have had nearly twice as many words addressed to it as the working class child, and over four times 46 — QCA/DFES (2003) Speaking, Listening, Learning: working with children in KS1 and 2, Handbook, London: QCA /DfES. 47 QCA/DFBS (2003) Speaking, Listening, Learning: working with children in KS1 and 2, ‘Teaching objectives and classroom activities, London: QCA/DES, pp 9 and 11.19 as many as the child on welfare. The language experienced is qualitatively different, too: for the middle-class child in the same study, encouragement vastly outweighs discouragement; but for the child on welfare the ratio is reversed and the climate of adult reaction is an overwhelmingly discouraging one.* Such findings remind us that while talk is essential for the intellectual and social development of all children, for some of them the talk which they engage in at school is nothing less than a lifeline. Learning from other countries International research show how strikingly different are the status, character, context and uses of talk in many British (and American) classrooms by comparison, especially, with those of some countries in continental Europe”, where, for example: © Oracy is regarded as no less important than literacy. © The relationship between talking, reading and writing is clearly articulated, and talk is seen as intrinsic to literacy, not as separate from it. © There is a strong tradition of oral pedagogy, with sustained oral work in pusne most lessons, and indeed lessons which are oral from start to finish. This tradition goes back for decades, indeed centuries, and is therefore firmly embedded in the experience and consciousness of children, teachers and parents. ¢ Across the curriculum as a whole, there is a higher ratio than in British classrooms of oral to text-based learning tasks and activities. In British classrooms, written work tends to be seen as the only ‘real’ work and oral activity is viewed as a prelude to such work (‘now let’s write about it’) rather than as an end in itself. To underline the higher value set on oral activity, some formal assessment may also be oral, not just written. © The purpose of classroom talk is seen as mainly cognitive, whereas in Britain it tends to be seen as primarily social and affective - about developing children’s confidence rather than developing their thinking. The current emphasis on ‘communication skills’ provides a more instrumental view of talk, but still does not acknowledge its importance in building children’s powers to think and reason. 48 Hart, B,, Risley, TR. (1996) Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children, Brookes Publishing. 49 Alexander, RJ. (2001) Culture and Pedagogy, Oxford: Blackwell; Broadfoot, P, Osborn, M, Planel, C., Sharpe, K. (2000) Promoting Quality in Lenrning: does England have the auswer? London: Cassell; Reynolds, D., Farrell, S. (1996) Worlds Apart: a review of international surveys of educational achievement involving England, London: Ofsted; Luxton, R.G. (2000) Interactive Whole Class Teaching: a briefing note, London: London Borough of Barking and Dagenham; Osborn, M. Broadfoot, P. et al (2003) A World of Difference? Comparing learners across Europe, Maidenhead: McGraw-Hill.20 Interactions between teachers and individual children are often sustained over a sequence of several question-answer exchanges, whereas in British classrooms, in the interests of maximising participation by as many children as possible, interactions with individuals tend to be briefer, more random and scattered. © Questions are designed to encourage reasoning and speculation, not just to elicit ‘right’ answers, and children are given time to think things out, and indeed to think aloud (i.e. ‘wait time’ or our preferred term ‘thinking time’). Consequently, answers in continental classrooms may be more considered and discursive than in their British counterparts. e ‘Wrong’ answers are not glossed over, but are treated as stepping-stones to understanding. © Teacher feedback provides information and diagnosis on which the child can build, rather than judgement alone. Feedback is also more honest: in British (and American) classrooms it is common for a child’s contribution to be praised regardless of its appropriateness or quality, so as not to discourage the child. If overused in this way praise soon loses its capacity to do even that. As Black points out, ‘feedback given as rewards ... enhances ego - rather than task — involvement.’* sei) Teaching has pace, but without the clock-watching pressure which has Baht” come to be associated with the advocacy of ‘pacy’ teaching in England ry} We” by Ofsted and the government's rational strategies. This is because 4~ _ many continental FS seem to understand the difference between en Cubumemere iSafional or interactive pace and cognitive pace, or the speed of ‘inking and learning, which is the product of talk which is extended rather than abbreviated. An emphasis on pace per se may actually f frustrate understanding rather than promote it. 24) « Talk tends to display greater attention to discrimination and precision in Iss cgesrgpntocsbulary grammar and syntax, to volume clarity and expressiveness SAS nd to the development of the distinctive registers required for different subjects and social situations (the oral equivalent of writing genres).* 50 ‘Wait time’ was coined from Mary Budd Rowe by Courtney Cazden (Classroom Discourse: the language of teaching and learning, Heinemann 2001, p 94) and by the ‘Assessment for Learning Group at King’s College, London: Black, P,, Harrison, C., Lee, C., Marshall, B,, Wiliam, D. (2002) Working Inside the Black Box: assessment for learning in the classroom, London: King’s College School of Education. The problem is that ‘wait time’ does not tell us what the waiting is for, which is why I prefer ‘thinking time’. 51 Ibid, p 19. 52 Fora detailed discussion, with examples, of the contrasting principles of organizational, interactive and cognitive pace, see Alexander RJ. (2001) Culture and Pedagogy, pp 418-426. 53 Ron Carter of Nottingham University is elucidating the distinctive ‘grammar’ of talk, with important implications for the teaching of speaking and listening: Carter, R. (2003) ‘The grammar of talk: spoken English, grammar and the classroom’, in QCA (ed) New Perspectives on Spoken English in the Classroom, London: QCA, pp 5-13; QCA (2004) Introducing the Grammar of Talk, London: QCA.=) Abr adradan 7 wital lyst hadlet. Ae, . 21 y A A middle Frepuie, Bore — phiteeir pul. om Le) This contrasts with the all-purpose informal or ‘conversational’ ae 21eF ety which is more common in Britain and the United States, which may require the use of subject-specific vocabularies (as in the literacy and numeracy strategies) but may make few demands on the child beyond this. © The culture of classroom talk is more public and confident. Children talk clearly and loudly. They listen and they expect to be listened to. And the making of mistakes in front of other children is intrinsic to learning rather than a matter for shame or embarrassment. © Other aspects of teaching support talk, not least by securing and maintaining children’s attention and time on task. These include: classroom layout and pupil organisation; the structure and sequencing of lessons; the handling of time and pace; the context of routines and rules. © From the way they themselves use language it is clear that teachers believe that they have a responsibility to model talk at its best. From interactive whole class teaching to dialogic teaching If we return to the second of the two questions posed on page 10 (‘How can the power of talk to promote and enhance children’s learning be strengthened?’) we find that the rather different contexts and kinds of classroom talk which can be observed in many countries outside the UK, and which are summarised above, provide some important pointers. First, though, a cautionary tale about the hazards of international cherry picking. During the 1990s some people used evidence from classrooms in central Europe and the Pacific Rim to press for much more whole class teaching in English schools, believing that it was this practice - and the direct instruction with which it is often (but not inevitably) associated - which was responsible for the high educational standards and spectacular economic growth which these countries achieved.™ In fact, direct instruction through whole class teaching is the commonest teaching approach worldwide so it correlates as strongly with low educational standards and low per capita GDP as with high. As a way of discovering the magic ingredient x in high educational performance, indeed, this particular correlational exercise is inadmissible. And as if to underline this, the economies of some of the Pacific Rim countries whose pedagogy, we were told, was one of the keys to their prosperity, promptly 54 See, for example, Reynolds, D. and Farrell, S. (1996) Worlds Apart? A review of international surveys of educational achievement involving England, London: Ofsted; Reynolds, D. et al (2002) World Class Schools: international perspectives on school «effectiveness, London: Routledge Falmer.2 crashed. As President Clinton might have said, had he been talking about education rather than the economy, ‘It's the culture, stupid.’ Thus, while the corrective was useful at a time when many British teachers still viewed whole class teaching as irredeemably old-fashioned or authoritarian, we need to understand that shifting to whole class teaching of itself guarantees nothing, whether we are concerned with the quality of learning or the quality of classroom talk. The challenge of talk is in fact a generic one: we need to work hard at it in all the contexts in which it is used = whole class, group and individual. Putting it another way, the organisational component of whole class teaching — the teacher talking to the class as a whole ~ is less significant for children’s learning than the discourse and values with which this organisational arrangement is ~ or more commonly is not ~ associated. For whole class teaching can encompass talk which ranges from the exhilarating to the mind-numbingly boring. It can engage and enthuse for life, or it can utterly and permanently alienate, especially when it is supported by those two traditional props to teacher authority, sarcasm and pomposity.* This fundamental caveat about whole class teaching has yet to be fully understood. The editors of a paper I wrote for a QCA publication advocating dialogic teaching introduced it, incorrectly, as an appeal for Yialoo-whole class dialogue.’ They did the same with a paper by Neil Mercer, wt much of whose recent work has concentrated not on whole class teaching but on small-group collaborative discussion.” ‘Interactive whole class take place in any organisational context. It commands attention to the power UL Mb teaching’ has become, wrongly, the default term. Dialogue, in contrast, can of talk in teaching and learning wherever it is used. The problem extends beyond the label to its practical application. In many English primary school classrooms, notwithstanding, insistent VY government advocacy of interactive whole class teaching and national pounds of public money, research such as that of Smith, Hardman et al me strategies for literacy and numeracy which are costing many millions of (quoted earlier) shows that the interaction remains stubbornly low-level cognitively and dominated by ‘test’ questions. Here, then, recitation continues to rule. No less worryingly, one of the principal criteria of interactive whole class teaching as officially promulgated, that it should ‘maintain a good 55 56 For a critique of the Reynolds and Farrell report, and of the wider advocacy of interactive whole class teaching as educational panacea, see Alexander RJ. (1998) Other Primary Schools and Ours: hazards of international comparison, University of Warwick: CREPE. See editorial introductions to the papers by Alexander and Mercer in QCA (2003) New Perspectives on Spoken English in the Classroom, London: QCA, pp 3, 26, 64. See also, on small group discussion, Dawes, L., Mercer, N. and Wegerif, R. (2000) Thinking Together: fa programme of activities for developing thinking skills at KS2, Birmingham: Questions Publishing Co.