For children learning English as an additional language, dialogic teaching supports both learning content and learning language. Engaging language learners in dialogue offers special challenges, however. This article describes an instructional approach that focused on engendering purposeful and cumulative talk, supported by metalanguage from functional grammar. The metalanguage enabled pupils' exploration of an author's language choices to examine how the feelings of a character in a story are presented. Records of talk were captured in writing to serve as resources for fostering further talk and to support pupils in a final written task that responded to a key question in focus throughout. We illustrate the dialogic engagement with and about text, supported by a focus on language choices, that, in turn, supported the kind of collaborative talk that is often hard to achieve with language learners.