Dialogic approaches based on active student participation, open, respectful discussion, exploring and critiquing different perspectives are increasingly found to support student learning. However, the specific productive forms of teacher-student interaction have rarely been studied systematically. A recent large-scale project explored the…

While there is now a considerable body of work on teacher identity in the area of language education, much less attention has been given to the question of the extent to which student teachers are enabled to construct identities that are consonant with the opportunities and challenges of current multilingual classrooms. Drawing on a recent…

Teachers' attitudes towards children's languages and culture have been shown to be instrumental in children's developing self-esteem and academic achievement. Attitudes and the frequently attendant local policies about languages beyond English (LBE) in schools therefore need to be clear for children, as negative or contradictory discourses can…

Dialogic approaches to pedagogy have received increased attention in educational research in the past decades. Despite the substantial body of research on the quality of classroom talk, the secondary education context still remains less explored. The aim of the paper is to contribute to our understanding of dialogic practices in this context with…

Research into classroom dialogue suggests that certain forms are especially productive for students' learning. Despite the large number of studies in this area, there is inadequate evidence about the prevalence of the identified forms, let alone their productivity. However, scarcity is widely presumed. The overall aim of the study reported in this…

In this article, we examine a faith teacher's reflections on faith literacy teaching and learning and how they shaped his pedagogy in the context of Hindu/Saiva religious instruction classes for students of Sri Lankan Tamil heritage. The data are part of a larger multi-site three-year team ethnography of children's faith literacy learning in…

Collaborative problem solving, when students work in pairs or small groups on a curriculum-related task, has become an increasingly common feature of classroom education. This paper reports a study of a topic which has received relatively little attention: how teachers can most usefully intervene when students are working in a group, but have…

Global migration has had significant impact on the traditional configuration of the classroom role set. The language teacher may be teaching a group of learners with highly mixed interests, abilities, learning histories and exposures to the target language, while the language learner may be confronted with so many different models of the target…

This paper describes research on dialogue between teachers and pupils during primary school science lessons, using talk from two classrooms to provide our examples. We consider whether teachers use dialogue to make education a cumulative, continuing process for guiding the development of children's understanding. Case studies of two teachers,…

The view that a child-centered approach to curriculum and classroom organization in primary education provides a conducive environment for second-language acquisition is endorsed in England's National Curriculum. A small study is reported that suggests not all teacher-pupil interaction promotes second-language acquisition. (Contains 24…

Analyzes two examples of classroom discourse between a teacher and a small group of students in English primary schools. Both transcripts are extracts from discussions that took place during guided reading sessions. Drawing on concepts from the work of the Bakhtin Circle, argues that one of the sequences exemplifies "pedagogical…

Examined teacher-child and child-child talk collected as part of a longitudinal, ethnographic study of life in a vertically-grouped multilingual class in an inner-city first school in the North of England. Reveals the complex, subtle processes involved in the interactive negotiation of meanings between teachers and learners and the joint…