This study examines the impact of dialogic teaching as core pedagogy in the higher education context. It investigates how instructional design informed by Alexander's dialogic principles and educational linguistics encouraged pre-service teachers and in-service teachers to develop professional capabilities to first recognise and then harness the power of talk for reflective learning. A discussion-based pedagogic strategy called Literature Circles was used to help reframe critical understanding of literary texts and prompt meta-awareness of dialogic teaching. One group of participants in the study was a final year cohort of pre-service teachers in a Bachelor of Education (Primary) degree at an urban university in Australia. Another group of participants were teachers in a primary school who were reviewing their use of Literature Circles. The third group of participants the school students who took part in the Literature Circles. Qualitative data from video interviews and/or focus group discussions with the three groups of participants were triangulated. Coding of data was achieved by content analysis, cross-correlating close linguistic analysis with an analytic framework based on Alexander's five principles to create categories for the identification of perceptions about dialogic teaching. Findings from the study show that the linguistic lens provided new insights to dialogic teaching at all levels of education.