Dialogic pedagogy the importance of dialogue in teaching and learning

Dialogic pedagogy the importance of dialogue in teaching and learning, conyexr of dialogue interactiona statistical spoken dialogue systemresolve secondperson references in dialoguean isu dialogue system exhibiting reinforcement learninginformation state update dialogue systemspredicting userinitiated dialogue contributions in hciinformationstate based dialogue systemmixed initiative in dialogueadviser dialogues1 evidence for sufficiency of restricted language sinnatural language interfacesthe structure of useradviser dialogues

Dialogic Pedagogy

Series Editors: Professor Viv Edwards, University of Reading, Reading, UK and

Professor Phan Le Ha, University of Hawaii at Manoa, USA

Two decades of research and development in language and literacy education have yielded a broad, multidisciplinary focus Yet education systems face constant economic and technological change, with attendant issues of iden-tity and power, community and culture This series will feature critical and interpretive, disciplinary and multidisciplinary perspectives on teaching and learning, language and literacy in new times

Full details of all the books in this series and of all our other publications can

be found on http://www.multilingual-matters.com, or by writing to Multilingual Matters, St Nicholas House, 31-34 High Street, Bristol BS1 2AW, UK

Names: Skidmore, David (Language teacher) editor I Murakami, Kyoko, editor Title: Dialogic Pedagogy: The Importance of Dialogue in Teaching and Learning/Edited

by David Skidmore and Kyoko Murakami

Description: Bristol; Buffalo: Multilingual Matters, [2016] I Includes bibliographical references and index

Identifiers: LCCN 2016022322 I ISBN 9781783096213 (hbk : alk paper) I ISBN

9781783096220 (pdf) I ISBN 9781783096237 (epub) I ISBN 9781783096244 (kindle) Subjects: LCSH: Dialogue analysis I Language and languages-Study and teaching I

Language teachers-Psychological aspects I Conversation analysis I Pedagogical content knowledge I Dialogism (Literary analysis)

Classification: LCC P95.455.D473 2016 I DDC 401/.4-dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016022322

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue entry for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN-13: 978-1-78309-621-3 (hbk)

Multilingual Matters

UK: St Nicholas House, 31-34 High Street, Bristol BSl 2AW, UK

USA: UTP, 2250 Military Road, Tonawanda, NY 14150, USA

Canada: UTP, 5201 Dufferin Street, North York, Ontario M3H 5T8, Canada

to the printer concerned

Typeset by Nova Techset Private Limited, Bengaluru and Chennai, India

Printed and bound in Great Britain by the CPI Books Group Ltd

Contents

David Skidmore and Kyoko Murakami

David Skidmore

5 Classroom Discourse: A Survey of Research 83

David Skidmore

Transformational Solutions to the Dilemma of

7 The Small Group Writing Conference as a Dialogic Model

Appendix 7.1 Frequency of Active and Dialogic Indicators

8 Giving Learners a Voice: A Study of the Dialogic 'Quality' of

Three Episodes of Teacher-Learner Talk-in-interaction in

9 Authoritative Versus Internally Persuasive Discourse 153

David Skidmore

10 Once More With Feeling: Utterance and Social Structure 170

David Skidmore

Further and Further Apart: Rehearsed Improvisation 176

11 How Prosody Marks Shifts in Footing in Classroom Discourse 186

David Skidmore and Kyoko Murakami

Conclusions: The Implications of Prosodic Analysis for

Our Understanding of Classroom Discourse 199

12 Prosodic Chopping: A Pedagogic Tool to Signal Shifts in

Xin Zhao, David Skidmore and Kyoko Murakami

David Skidmore and Kyoko Murakami

'Mother, Any Distance Greater Than a Single Span': An

Excerpt From an Episode of Plenary Discussion 223

'He Wants His Own Space': Analysis of Teacher-Student

Claiming Our Own Space: Polyphonic Dialogue 233

Appendix: Conversation Analysis Conventions Used for

Contributors

Dr Michelle Brinn has worked in the field of early years education for 25

years Currently an Assistant Leader of Learning in a large international school in Bangkok, she has taught and lectured in Poland, Malaysia, England, Wales and Northern Ireland Her interest in dialogue arose due to a desire to enhance communication between home and school within international education, wherein vastly different expectations regarding learning may exist This desire prompted a doctoral research project with the University

of Bath, the initial stages of which are discussed within this chapter

Professor Harry Daniels is Professor of Education at the University of

Oxford He has directed research for more than 40 projects funded by ESRC, various central and local government sources, The Lottery, The Nuffield Foundation and the EU Much of his recent research draws on cultural histori-cal and activity theory approaches to learning and organisational change, focusing on professional learning, processes of social exclusion and practices of collaboration in a variety of educational, medical and emergency settings He

is also: Adjunct Professor, Centre for Learning Research, Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia; Research Professor, Centre for Human Activity Theory, Kansai University, Osaka, Japan; and Research Professor in Cultural Historical Psychology, Moscow State University of Psychology and Education His CV witnesses an extensive publication list including a series of internationally acclaimed books concerned with sociocultural psychology

Julie Esiyok is a classroom teacher and a member of her school's Middle

Leadership Team She holds a BA (hons) in Linguistics, a Postgraduate Certificate of Education and a MA in Education from the University of Bath Her school-based research has so far focused on feedback through writing conferences, wait time and teacher-to-teacher coaching She is keen to explore how language and silence can be used effectively in schools to improve teaching and learning

Jean Baptiste Kremer has a BA in English and German from the University

of Hull, and qualified as an English teacher in Luxembourg in 1982 In 1990

ix

he was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to teach French in Wisconsin, USA for a year From 2005 to 2015 he led the English Teacher Education pro-gramme at the University of Luxembourg After graduating with a Master's degree in Education from the University of Bath in 2014, he became general coordinator of teacher education in Luxembourg He is currently working for the Luxembourg Ministry of Education

Dr Kyoko Murakami is an Associate Professor at the Department of Psychology, University of Copenhagen Her research involves examining lan-guage use and social relations configured and reconfigured in social and cul-tural practices It draws on discourse analysis, discursive psychology and cultural psychology and related areas in the social sciences The topics of her recent publications include the discursive psychology of remembering and reconciliation (2012), an ethnography of battlefield and prison camp pilgrim-ages by British veterans (2014), and family reminiscence as memory practice (2016) With her educational research colleagues, Dr Murakami explores dia-logic spaces in both formal and non-formal education settings - group work

in higher education and the experiences of international students in the internationalisation initiative of a Danish university

Dr David Skidmore is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Education at the University of Bath He has published widely in the fields of dialogic peda-gogy and inclusive education, has held research grants from the ESRC and other bodies, and has supervised a number of doctoral studies in these areas

Dr Xin Zhao is a Teaching Associate at the Information School at the University of Sheffield She obtained her PhD from the Department of Education at the University of Bath, UK Her PhD research investigates the functions of conversational prosody of classroom talk-in-interaction in the field of second language learning Her research interests include dialogic pedagogy, sociocultural theory and internationalisation

1 Dialogic Pedagogy:

An Introduction

David Skidmore and Kyoko Murakami

Freire's Theory of Dialogic Pedagogy

Credit for initiating the theory of dialogic pedagogy belongs to Paulo Freire His perspective is outlined in his seminal work, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Freire, 1993 [1970]), and further developed in other books such as Pedagogy for Liberation, jointly authored with Ira Shor (Freire & Shor, 1987) In most of the rest of this book, we draw more directly on dialogism, a theory

of language associated with the Bakhtin Circle (Brandist, 2002), than on Freire's work However, it is appropriate to acknowledge at the outset that without Freire there would be no theory of dialogic pedagogy, and his think-ing has been enormously influential on the tradition of critical pedagogy that has emerged out of his pioneering work We do not, therefore, see the perspec-tive developed in this book as counterposed to Freire's vision, but as comple-mentary to it We have drawn on different theoretical sources to undertake a dialectical development of a view of pedagogy which has its origins in Freire's work The understanding of language as socio-verbal interaction which derives from Bakhtinian dialogism enables us to pay close attention to pat-terns of teacher-student communication in naturalistic classroom conditions,

to scrutinise them in fine detail and to illustrate alternative modes of tion to the dominant form of teacher-led recitation It would be wrong to suggest that Freire ignored this level of analysis in his own work, and indeed

interac-he has many suggestions to make which translate quite directly into ties to be explored in the concrete practice of teaching However, later research has investigated classroom discourse empirically and revealed an in-depth picture of typical modes of interaction in this context and ways in which this can be challenged, in a manner which was implicit but sometimes left under-developed in Freire's more theoretical work We begin, though, with a brief overview of some of the main aspects of Freire's pedagogic theory, so that readers who are not already familiar with it will be able to trace the connec-tions between his work on dialogic pedagogy and our own position

possibili-Freire's work developed in the context of adult literacy education in Brazil at a time when there was a high rate of illiteracy among the adult population He was forced to leave the country following a military coup in

1964, and continued to develop his pedagogic theory during a long period of exile, first in Chile and later in the United States In Pedagogy of the Oppressed,

he drew a distinction between the 'banking concept of education' and lem-posing education', which has much in common with the outlook on teaching and learning which we discuss in the rest of this book In the bank-ing concept of education, according to Freire, 'knowledge is a gift bestowed

'prob-by those who consider themselves knowledgeable upon those whom they consider to know nothing' (Freire, 1993 [1970]: 53) In problem-posing educa-tion, by contrast, the teacher enters into dialogue with her/his students, acknowledging them as fellow beings capable of consciousness and inten-tionality, and treats them as co-investigators into the nature of reality Freire's description is worth quoting at length (Freire, 1993 [1970]: 64-65): Banking education attempts, by mythicizing reality, to conceal certain facts which explain the way human beings exist in the world; problem-posing education sets itself the task of demythologizing Banking educa-tion resists dialogue; problem-posing education regards dialogue as indispensable to the act of cognition which unveils reality Banking educa-tion treats students as objects of assistance; problem-posing education makes them critical thinkers Banking education inhibits creativity and domesticates (although it cannot completely destroy) the intentionality

of consciousness by isolating consciousness from the world, thereby ing people their ontological and historical vocation of becoming more fully human Problem-posing education bases itself on creativity and stimulates true reflection and action upon reality, thereby responding to the vocation of persons as beings who are authentic only when engaged

deny-in enquiry and creative transformation Problem-posdeny-ing education affirms men and women as beings in the process of becoming- as unfin-ished, uncompleted beings in and with a likewise unfinished reality

In fact, for Freire, in dialogic pedagogy, the strict opposition between teacher and students is transcended, so that it becomes more appropriate to speak

of the 'teacher-student' thinking with 'students-teachers' (Freire, 1993 [1970]: 61)

Freire develops the theory of dialogic pedagogy further in A Pedagogy for

Liberation (Freire & Shor, 1987) Here he offers the following definition of dialogue:

Dialogue is a moment where humans meet to reflect on their reality as they make and remake it Dialogue seals the relationship between the cognitive subjects, those who know, and who try to know Dialogue

is the sealing together of the teacher and the students in the joint act of knowing and re-knowing the object of study (Freire & Shor, 1987: 98-100)

In the discussion with Shor presented in this book, Freire stresses that it is a mistake to think of dialogic pedagogy as a mere technique, a teaching method that can be mechanically transposed to any setting Rather, it should

be seen as an epistemological position, founded on an understanding of knowing as a social activity, albeit one that has an individual dimension; at the same time, it is a political practice, since it embodies a challenge to tra-ditional forms of teacher-student relations, in which the teacher is the one who 'knows' and transfers this knowledge into students' minds by telling them what s/he knows For Freire, this kind of teacherly authority socialises students into passivity, whereas dialogic pedagogy invites them to partici-pate actively in reshaping their own understanding of reality, and demon-strates in practice the possibility of an alternative mode of communicative practice in the classroom or other learning setting (Freire & Shor, 1987: 46)

At the same time, Freire is clear that the relationship between students and teacher in a dialogic classroom is not one of equality (Freire & Shor, 1987: 92) Generally speaking, the teacher has greater experience of the activity of education, and may have a wider range of knowledge, both of the world and

of disciplinary content, on which to draw For Freire, this means that the teacher has a leadership responsibility; s/he is the leader of the learning pro-cess, but also 're-learns' the material with the students in the course of teach-ing them Likewise, the dialogic classroom (or other group learning environment) is not a free for all in which anything goes The teacher exer-cises authority in steering the development of the collective learning activity, and if a student takes advantage of the openness of the discussion to disrupt dialogue (for example, by verbally bullying other students or insulting the teacher), then the teacher will chastise them Nevertheless, the teacher's authority rests on a different basis from that of the authoritarian teacher who demands obedience to their every word and discourages questioning of

or challenge to the determinate knowledge that they present The dialogic teacher's authority has a democratic character, and requires them to demon-strate in practice their competence in directing the learning process to stu-dents It is earned on the basis of experience rather than compelled in advance

of mutual engagement, and rests on the basis of a respect for the other that bridges the gap between their different social positions The democratic nature of the teacher's authority also means that not everyone has to speak

in the course of a dialogic lesson Students will make a contribution when they have something to add to what has already been said, but they should not be forced to respond for the sake of it (in contrast to the norm in teacher-led recitation lessons, when the teacher typically nominates the next student speaker, who must then answer the question asked by the teacher) Finally,

Freire and Shor favour a model of the curriculum which starts from the everyday knowledge that students bring with them to the classroom, and validates reflection and critical examination of their experience of the world outside the classroom as a point of departure for the learning process (Freire & Shor, 1987: 48, 107) The dialogic method can be used in areas of the curriculum which have traditionally relied heavily on a textbook-centred, body-of-knowledge transmission approach For example, physics students can be asked to research the cosmological views held by workers, people in the streets or members of their local neighbourhood community, and com-pare these with their own understanding, as an entry into reflecting on the historicity of scientific theories and their place in society Dialogic pedagogy need not be confined to subjects like literacy education or the humanities The strengths of Freire's work lie in its clear commitment to a revolution-ary political perspective and his insistence that, through a critical, problem-posing educational praxis in which the educator is a 'teacher-student' working alongside and with 'student-teachers', dialogic pedagogy can enable the oppressed to penetrate the veil of mystifying ideology and derive inter-ventions that bring about real social change As noted above, he has many practical suggestions to offer which are of service to educators trying to work

in this way under the unfavourable conditions we often encounter in funded schools and colleges in a capitalist society, where dialogic pedagogy necessarily involves 'swimming against the stream' We hope that in what follows, by drawing extensively on the wider dialogic theory of language developed by scholars in the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s, we can add another dimension to the theory of dialogic pedagogy which Freire initi-ated, thereby building on and developing the legacy of his thought

under-What is Dialogism?

Dialogism is a philosophy of language which places central importance on the reality of socio-verbal interaction in understanding the kind of phenom-enon that language is It is most associated with the work of Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975), a Russian literary scholar, although important aspects of the theoretical perspective find their most fully developed statements in the writ-ings of other members of the Bakhtin Circle, and sometimes in work by other authors who were not formally connected with this network (Brandi st, 2002) According to this outlook, before it is anything else, language is a tool for communication Every concrete instance of language use involves an address

to some other participant in the act of communication, whether that be a friend, partner or work colleague to whom we are speaking directly in a face-to-face encounter, or the implicit readership of a written text that might have been set down centuries ago by an unknown hand There are of course many degrees of immediacy and distance between these two extremes, and a wide

range of possibilities in the number of people who might be involved in the communicative exchange Everyday speech is commonly exchanged between two participants in a transient social encounter that happens in the here-and-now and is then gone for ever, in the sense of there being no lasting record of what is said On the other hand, one thinks of the Voyager spacecraft, launched in 1977 and now heading into interstellar space, which carries a record containing audio recordings of spoken greetings from Earth in many different languages, from ancient Akkadian to Wu, a modern Chinese dialect There is no knowing if or when this message will ever reach beings capable of interpreting it, but the very act of encoding speech produced by humans rather than random noise implies an attempt at communication, premised on the possibility that there might be 'someone out there' who would recognise the dialogic character of this artefact, i.e that it represents someone else trying to say 'hello'

In Chapter 2, Skidmore presents some of the core concepts of dialogism

as a theory of language and its place in the workings of society He sises in particular the implications of these ideas for pedagogy and the prac-tice of education, with a particular focus on the sphere of language education Since the translation and discovery of much of Bakhtin's work in the English-speaking West in the 1970s and 1980s, the secondary literature on dialogism has become voluminous and is constantly growing It is not our purpose in this book to attempt to deal with the many different interpretations of this tradition that have been put forward in the disciplines of cultural studies, literary theory, social psychology and linguistics (Bell & Gardiner, 1998; Hirschkop, 1999; Morson, 1981) Our aim is a more limited one: to develop

empha-a theory of diempha-alogic pedempha-agogy thempha-at is rooted in the insights of the founding texts of this tradition of thought This does not depend on the rather tenuous evidence about whether Bakhtin ever wrote directly on the topic of educa-tion (Matusov, 2004) Dialogism as a philosophy of language is broader than Bakhtin's work, and if we are to tease out its significance for educational praxis, we need to delve deeper into the tradition than simply identifying the scattered allusions to instruction that can be found in his writing In spite of the limited scope of this book, our coverage of the concepts developed in this body of work is necessarily selective It is in the spirit of dialogism to recog-nise that any individual text, such as this one, is only one contribution to an unfinalised discussion about approaches to pedagogy We hope that, never-theless, it will provide a sufficient idea of the flavour of this philosophy to provoke readers to explore the works referred to for themselves

Prosody

Much educational research has studied typical structural features of room discourse, such as the three-part sequence of teacher question-student

class-answer-teacher feedback found in schoolrooms throughout the world However, research into the prosody of teacher-student dialogue is in its infancy, and we are pleased that Chapters 10-13 of this book carry some of the first empirical studies of how this important phenomenon functions in pedagogic talk Prosody has been described as the music of speech (Couper-Kuhlen & Selting, 1996a; Wennerstrom, 2001) The term corresponds to our common-sense idea of 'tone of voice' and refers to parameters of the speaking voice which vary dynamically during face-to-face interaction Chief features include: intonation; loudness; and temporal phenomena such as rhythm,

tempo, and pauses (Couper-Kuhlen & Selting, 19966; Szczepek Reed, 2006) Figure 1.1 presents a visual model of how speech varies continuously along these parameters It is organically linked to the dialogic theory of language through the related concept of evaluative accent (Voloshinov, 1973 [1929]),

according to which every utterance conveys a value judgement, an evaluative orientation towards its (referential) theme (marked most obviously in speech

by intonation) This connection is further discussed in Chapters 2 and 10 Prosody is integral to spoken communication and conveys an extra dimension of meaning beyond what is articulated through the words alone (vocabulary and syntax) Research shows that speakers use prosody for a number of communicative purposes, including: to place emphasis on new or important items of information in an utterance; to lend coherence to shared discourse, indicating how turns by different participants are tied together

into a cohesive, jointly assembled text; and to express their constantly shifting emotional stance towards the interaction-in-progress, for example the degree

of enthusiasm or interest they feel for the current topic of discussion (Szczepek Reed, 2006; Wennerstrom, 2001) Speakers show acute sensitivity

to one another's prosody in spontaneous dialogue and use prosody as a resource to convey subtle nuances of expression; for example, when conversa-tion is flowing smoothly, there tends to be a regular rhythm of stressed syl-lables which is maintained across turns by different speakers and, conversely,

a breakdown in this rhythm often signals a difficulty or difference of spective which needs to be negotiated (Wennerstrom, 2001) Researchers working in the field of conversation analysis (CA) were among the first to draw attention to the significance of prosody for the accomplishment of social actions through talk-in-interaction (Sacks, 1992; Sacks et al., 1974; Schegloff, 1998; ten Have, 1998), and most recent work draws on the findings and system of transcription developed in this tradition (Couper-Kuhlen & Ford, 2004; Couper-Kuhlen & Selting, 1996a; Ford et al., 1996)

per-The studies presented in this book demonstrate that prosody is a vital, if hitherto neglected, resource for accomplishing intersubjective understanding

in teacher-student dialogue under classroom conditions Among other tions, speech prosody can signal how the teacher is modelling the tentative, reflective tone of exploratory talk, or 'thinking aloud' (in contrast to the authoritative tone of sequences of test questions designed to elicit the 'cor-rect' answer); it can be used to invite a student to elaborate on their initial contribution to a discussion by making the reasoning behind their view explicit; it is critical to the successful accomplishment of turn taking in both whole-class and small group discussion, for students and for teachers; it can

func-be used to establish an episode of 'playful' exchange, in which the teacher enters into the spirit of a student's classroom joke, and to switch back from this to 'serious' work-talk; and changes in prosody constitute an important boundary marker between different formal activities within a lesson, e.g from open discussion in which students are invited to participate verbally, to instruction giving, when they are expected to listen and take note Most fundamentally, it is largely through the prosodic aspects of speech that the achievement of shared understanding between teacher and students (or between students themselves, in small group discussion), is signalled, for example in the co-construction of turns at talk where the rhythm and pace

of utterances flow together to constitute a jointly assembled stretch of course Conversely, mismatches in prosody can be a sign of discursive diffi-culty, for example when a pause before a student responds to a question indicates a reluctance to speak, perhaps because of a conceptual uncertainty,

dis-or perhaps because s/he is unsure what kind of response the teacher is ing for (such as a short recall answer or a longer, open response clarifying their opinion) These matters lie at the heart of successful pedagogy since, from a dialogic point of view, the coming together of the teacher's and

look-students' understanding of the topic in hand is vital to the purpose of guided learning in formal education

The Scope of the Book

The purpose of this book is to explain and illustrate the importance of dialogue in teaching and learning When the teacher enters into dialogue with students, it is possible for the two parties to build up a shared under-standing of the educational activity in hand Dialogue between students, when properly orchestrated, also enables them to explore and deepen their command of concepts and capabilities introduced in formal schooling and

to bridge the gap between their existing knowledge and the goals of a ticular sequence of instruction The dialogic approach can be contrasted with monologic views of teaching, in which the teacher is seen as the pos-sessor of knowledge of which students are ignorant, and which depend heavily on the teacher telling students what they are presumed not to know, then questioning them to see if they can remember what they have been told A detailed overview of the contents of the book is set out chapter

par-by chapter in Section 5 below; here we provide a brief outline of its scope and structure

Chapters 2, 3 and 4 set out the theoretical groundwork for approaching the topic of dialogue in education They present and discuss core concepts from three distinct but interrelated sources for thinking about the role of dialogue in pedagogy: dialogism, the view of language and consciousness

developed by members of the Bakhtin Circle in the Soviet Republic in the 1920s and 1930s; the sociocultural theory of obuchenie, often translated as instruction, but better understood as designating the dialectic of the teach-ing-learning process, as formulated by Vygotsky and developed by Davydov; and the theories of dialogue and its potential for the construction of inter-subjective understanding put forward independently by Bohm and Buber Chapter 5 surveys a number of seminal works in the field of classroom discourse research, while Chapter 6 reviews more recent research specifically concerned with dialogic approaches to pedagogy These chapters provide a bridge between the theoretical focus of the opening chapters and the original empirical studies of talk and learning in that follow in Chapters 7-13 These later chapters make use of theoretical ideas about dialogic pedagogy to explore the kind of learning work exhibited in transcripts of group discussion recorded in naturalistic classroom conditions The first three of these explore dialogic pedagogy in the context of English as a foreign language (EFL) and literacy education: the small group writing conference as a model of dialogic feedback in a primary school English class (Chapter 7); the dialogic quality

of talk in a secondary EFL classroom established by a student teacher's use

of questioning (Chapter 8); and the possibility of encouraging children to

retell a story in their own words in the context of small group guided reading discussion in a primary school in England (Chapter 9)

Chapters 10-13 make use of the analytic lens supplied by CA to focus specifically on the contribution of prosody, or tone of voice, to the achieve-ment of shared understanding between teacher and students in classroom settings Chapter 10 discusses the connection between prosody and learning

in an extract from a teacher-led whole class discussion of the meaning of a poem in a secondary English literature lesson in the UK; Chapter 11 exam-ines this phenomenon in an episode of 'thinking aloud' modelled by the teacher, also in a secondary English lesson; while Chapter 12 shifts to the context of a lesson in EFL in a high school in China, again looking at the pedagogic function of prosodic devices in an episode of teacher-led classroom talk Finally, Chapter 13 compares the results of analysing the same passage

of teacher-student talk from a secondary English lesson in the UK, first by using the techniques of discourse analysis, and secondly by using CA to display prosodic features of the speech; this shows that paying attention to speech prosody can reveal aspects of the construction of intersubjective understanding in the classroom that it would be difficult to recognise by relying solely on looking at the structure of the discourse, for example how the teacher can incorporate divergent interpretations of a poem into a whole class discussion without becoming bogged down in disputation about which view is 'correct'

Overview of the Book

Chapter 2, entitled 'Dialogism and Education', provides a theoretical

underpinning of the work compiled in the book In this chapter, Skidmore reviews a selection of the key concepts involved in dialogism as a social theory of language, and discusses the ramifications of these ideas for educa-tion and pedagogy He explicates dialogism and its relevance to education research under these different themes: (1) dialogue and creativity; (2) speech and consciousness; (3) different languages: heteroglossia; and (4) many-voicedness: polyphony Yakubinsky first developed the concept of dialogic speech (Yakubinsky & Eskin, 1997 [1923]), and distinguished between monologue (such as religious liturgy) and other kinds of speech which have different degrees of dialogicality (such as everyday conversation) He con-nects monologue with social power, and stresses the creative potential of 'automatic' speech, or improvised dialogue, for developing new ideas and making novel connections between existing ideas In Marxism and Language (Voloshinov, 1973 [1929]), Voloshinov sees individual consciousness as the product of social interaction mediated through speech, a position very simi-lar to Vygotsky's in Thinking and Speech (Vygotsky, 2004 [1934]) Voloshinov argues that language is realised in the exchange of spoken utterances in

dialogue, and that these utterances always voice some kind of evaluation (or 'accentuation') of the topic under discussion His work enables us to see how, when the teacher enters into dialogue with the class, this reshapes the kind

of consciousness being socially produced in education, providing an tunity for both parties to explore the extent to which a common understand-ing of the topic is shared The concept of heteroglossia was coined by Bakhtin

oppor-to refer oppor-to the way in which different styles of speaking are used by different sub-groups within a given linguistic community (Bakhtin, 1981 [1934-1935]) He critiques the idea of a standard language (such as standard English)

as an ideological notion The linguistic diversity which is intrinsic to any speech community gives rise to a cultural pluralism which has potential educational benefits; dialogue with the unfamiliar broadens the mind Bakhtin also introduced the musical metaphor of polyphony (Bakhtin, 1984 [1929]) This refers to the plurality of voices and minds that are party to any social encounter, including such educational activities as a classroom lesson

in a school or a university seminar In educational settings, it reminds us that the teacher needs to listen to her/his students as well as to talk to them, since

it is only by so doing that s/he can know 'what is going on in their heads'

By modelling a dialectic of enquiry in how they respond to learners, the teacher may be able to stimulate a 'microdialogue', an inner exchange in the mind of the student, which enables them to go beyond their familiar thoughts and accepted ideas and incorporate new knowledge into their own cognitive activity It follows that dialogic pedagogy involves an element of improvisation on the part of both teacher and students, which turns the lesson into an emergent encounter between the co-developing conscious-nesses of both parties in search of an enhanced shared understanding of the topic at hand Teachers must enter into dialogue with students if we are to change their minds or, rather, support them in changing their own minds When translating concepts from another language, there is often no one-to-one correspondence between the sense of words on which we can rely This can lead to a very different understanding of concepts such as dialogue, dialectic and instruction In Chapter 3, Harry Daniels addresses the debate

on dialogue and dialogic in the sociocultural research community At the heart of the Vygotskian understanding of obuchenie (trans instruction) is a dialogic conception of pedagogy, which encompasses not only a dialectical understanding of the social relations of schooling, but also of conceptual development Daniels insists that both aspects present educators with sig-nificant challenges For example, teaching-learning is more appropriate as the translation of obuchenie, in that it refers to all the actions of the teacher in engendering cognitive development and growth (Davydov, 1995) According

to Sutton (1980), the word means both teaching and learning, and refers to both sides of the two-way process, and therefore fits in a dialectical view of

a phenomenon made up of opposites Daniels emphasises that dialogic action between teacher and learners is necessary if 'instruction' is to give rise

inter-to cognitive development For Daniels, this development is best characterised

as a dialectical process Depending on the history of their development and their social positioning in the discourses of the classroom, different learners may be in need of different forms of dialogic exchange if they are to make progress This poses a further dilemma for teachers in terms of classroom interaction in that the teacher is also the learner who is trying to understand the consequences of the teaching they practise Daniels argues that resorting

to transmission-based pedagogies is not the answer if democratic solutions

to mass education are sought

In extending the concept of dialogue from a sociocultural view of tion, Chapter 4, entitled 'The Conceptions of "Dialogue" Offered by Bohm

educa-and Buber: A Critical Review' acknowledges the growing significance of social constructivist paradigms such those as outlined by Vygotsky (1962) and Bruner (1986) within current debate about theories of education One consequence for educational research has been an increased examination of the social relations and interaction that take place not only within the class-room, but also between home and school A clear understanding of theoreti-cal perspectives surrounding 'dialogue' is therefore an essential prerequisite

to an analysis of dialogue in practice This chapter reviews two different theories of 'dialogue' and explores their relevance for education The perspec-tives discussed are those of Bohm (1996) and Buber (1947), both of whom developed independent philosophies of dialogue outside the context of edu-cational research and pedagogic practice and see it as a primary human con-cern This chapter explores their work on dialogue and considers its relevance

to current educational theory and practice It illustrates their significance for education by examining initiatives to increase the effectiveness of home-school communication in a large international school in Bangkok where chil-dren are exposed to a variety of very different cultural expectations about behaviour and relations with teachers and adult caregivers

Chapter 5 provides a broader framework and background for the

subse-quent empirical work (reported in Chapters 7-12) with a survey of classroom discourse research Skidmore begins by revisiting Sinclair and Coulthard's seminal work Towards an Analysis of Discourse: The English Used by Teachers and

Pupils (Sinclair & Coulthard, 1975) This established the nature of the tial teaching exchange', the initiation-response-feedback (IRF) sequence The systematic framework for analysing teacher-led classroom discourse devel-oped in this study remains an indispensable starting point for understanding how teachers and students learn to perform a lesson as a genre of social interaction He then discusses From Communication to Curriculum (Barnes,

'essen-1992), in which Barnes draws distinctions between: exploratory talk and final draft talk; school knowledge and action knowledge; and transmission and interpretation models of teaching and learning This is a classic book which puts forward the case for altering the predominant patterns of class-room interaction to make a much greater place in lessons for exploratory talk

in small groups as a means for enabling pupils to participate actively in the shaping of knowledge Following this, Skidmore examines Learning Lessons (Mehan, 1979) Here Hugh Mehan reports the findings of a study of social organisation in the classroom, and introduces several key concepts, e.g the topic-related set (TRS); teacher elicitations, including the widespread initia-tion-response-evaluation (IRE) sequence; and the turn-allocation apparatus

in classroom discourse The findings of the study showed that students need

to learn to produce responses which are both academically correct and actionally appropriate in order to demonstrate communicative competence

inter-in the classroom Finter-inally, Skidmore reviews Cazden's inter-influential book

Classroom Discourse: The Language of Teaching and Learning (Cazden, 2001) In

this work, Cazden draws on Vygotskian theory to argue that classroom course can function as a scaffold for student learning In this process, respon-sibility for task completion passes progressively from the teacher to the student through an intermediate phase of joint, guided practice She also draws attention to the importance of spontaneous improvisation in the per-formance of lessons, a feature of skilled pedagogy neglected in more mecha-nistic models of 'effective' instruction

dis-In Chapter 6, Skidmore provides a critical review of the existing research

into pedagogy that draws on the theoretical ideas of Bakhtin on the dialogic nature of language This body of research has stressed the educative potential

of teacher-student interaction, which enables students to play an active part

in shaping the agenda of classroom discourse The review covers four als: (1) dialogic instruction, characterised by the teacher's uptake of student ideas, authentic questions and the opportunity for students to modify the topic (Nystrand, 1997); (2) dialogic inquiry, which stresses the potential of collaborative group work and peer assistance to promote mutually responsive learning in the zone of proximal development (Wells, 1999); (3) dialogical pedagogy, in which students are invited to retell stories in their own words, using paraphrase, speculation and counter-fictional utterances (Skidmore, 2000); (4) dialogic teaching, which is collective, reciprocal, supportive, cumu-lative and purposeful (Alexander, 2004) These proposals are commonly con-cerned with the ritualistic nature of the predominant patterns of teacher-student interaction exposed by empirical observation studies Furthermore, they tend to emphasise the importance of maximising active student participation in classroom talk as a means of enhancing intersubjec-tive understanding The review in this chapter is aimed at uncovering some unresolved questions and issues and identifying future research directions and lines of enquiry

propos-Chapters 7-12 are based on empirical work that draws on the concept of dialogic pedagogy, the central theme of the book These chapters make a direct link between the theories of dialogue and pedagogic practice Starting

with Chapter 7, Julie Esiyok investigates the small group writing conference

as a dialogic model of feedback In this chapter, she reports a small-scale case

study of writing conferences in an English class in an International School and illustrates how the writing conference offered dialogic learning opportu-nities where the students and the teacher give feedback on poems drafted by the students and discuss how to go about improving them The study found that small group writing conferences were helpful in encouraging some stu-dents to revise their writing It also found that when the teacher is not speaking and assigning speaking turns, the students engaged in more explor-atory talk and jointly developed solutions to the revision of the writing The teacher's role in the conferences is noteworthy She acted as a dialogue part-ner, making it clear that her suggestions were not imposed on the students The students had greater control and voice in the process, and the amount of talk they engaged in, although not equal, was greater than that found in a typical IRE sequence of talk Furthermore, the study concludes that revisions made by two of the participants were superior to those they would normally have made using written feedback

In Chapter 8, Jean Kremer shows how, through a dialogic stance, the

teacher can positively affect the learner's linguistic and cognitive development

by creating affordances of language use and self-expression The study has as its main aim an analysis of the dialogic 'quality' of a student teacher's talk during an EFL lesson The investigation focuses on four episodes which are taken from key moments during the lesson to map dialogic progression and learner participation using CA The findings indicate that an eclectic choice

of dialogic methodology contributes to setting up a more dialogic framework

of participation The teacher's initial, more monologic 'tone' proves essential

in establishing a platform of confidence among interactants, which quently allows for dialogic progression and a gradual shift in footing to take place The chapter also reveals that the inherently unpredictable nature of dialogic pedagogy requires a repertoire of talk strategies as well as improvisa-tional skills An implication of this study for teachers is the need to under-stand the importance of the quality of talk in the EFL classroom and to set up useful benchmarks to define good practice Giving learners a voice in the lan-guage classroom is the prerequisite for deeper language learning to take place

subse-In Chapter 9, Skidmore analyses two examples of classroom discourse

with regard to literacy Both are excerpts from discussions between a small group of primary school students and their teacher on the topic of short texts

of narrative fiction Based on contrasting findings emerging from the sis of the two excerpts, he raises theoretical questions about what forms of verbal interaction between students and teacher might best contribute to the development of the students' independent powers to engage in literacy prac-tices Drawing on concepts from the work of the Bakhtin Circle, he argues that one of the sequences exemplifies 'pedagogical dialogue', in which some-one who knows and possesses the truth instructs someone who is ignorant

analy-of it and in error He interprets the second sequence as an instance analy-of nally persuasive discourse', in which students are encouraged to retell the

'inter-story in their own words, rather than reciting it by heart This analysis suggests that the discursive micro-economy of the classroom has its own relative autonomy While recitation may be its 'default' script, alternative, more participatory modes of organisation are available He concludes that, because talk about literary texts is a non-algorithmic form of knowledge, a dialogical pedagogy is better suited to enhancing pupils' independent powers

of comprehension than are approaches which emphasise recitation

Chapter 10 ventures out to draw on three theoretical sources on the relationship between language use and social structure In explicating the concepts of symbolic capital (Bourdieu), social semiotic (Halliday) and ide-ologeme (Medvedev), Skidmore explores the significance of speech prosody

as an integral part of speech communication, and suggests that the utterance needs to be seen as a complex whole in which the structural and dynamic elements of speech are functionally combined Skidmore illustrates this posi-tion through the analysis of a sequence of naturalistic dialogue, highlighting aspects of prosodic orientation between speakers and discussing its semiotic significance Skidmore suggests that the mediating concept of speech genre can be used to understand how fluent conversation has both a structured and

an improvisatory character He suggests that the activity of producing an utterance in everyday speech may be seen in terms of a musical analogy as performing a variation on a traditional theme

In Chapter 11, Skidmore and Murakami extend the conclusions of Chapter 10 to a specific case of prosodic phenomena observed in teacher-student dialogue in an English lesson at a secondary school in England Features of prosody are made visible in using CA notation and the analysis

is focused on Coffman's theoretical concept of footing Within an episode of teacher-led plenary discourse, prosody (e.g intonation, volume and pace) is used to signal shifts in footing between different kinds of pedagogic activity Identified shifts are: (i) teacher-led IRF discussion; (ii) the teacher's model-ling of exploratory talk; (iii) a shift to instruction giving This study draws implications for teaching in terms of teacher's modelling of exploratory talk

In Chapter 12, Zhao, Skidmore and Murakami explore further the gogical value of prosody in classroom teaching and learning Informed by Erikson's theory of academic task and social participation structure, which places participation at the core of learning development, they examine the function of speech prosody during the co-construction of classroom talk in teacher-led discussions in an EFL classroom in a secondary school in China, e.g features such as pauses, volume, intonation and speech rate They argue that prosody can function as a pedagogical tool to accomplish changes in classroom academic task and social participation structure They also show that the triadic IRE sequences are presentational in nature and can scaffold students in their participation during a shift among different classroom tasks

peda-Chapter 13 revisits the research tradition of classroom interaction

pio-neered by Sinclair and Coulthard' s Towards an Analysis of Discourse (Sinclair &

Coulthard, 1975) Skidmore and Murakami reappraise their contribution to the study of classroom discourse Despite a well-established tradition of research and theory that stresses the importance of talk in promoting learn-ing among school students in classroom lessons (Cazden, 2001; Edwards & Westgate, 1994; Mehan, 1979), pedagogic practice continues to follow the monologic format described by Bakhtin in his account of 'pedagogical dia-logue': 'someone who knows and possesses the truth instructs someone who

is ignorant of it and in error' (Bakhtin, 1984 [1929]: 81; Skidmore, 2006) Building on the discourse analytic approach developed by Sinclair and Coulthard, the authors go on to re-analyse the same extract using CA (Hutchby & Wooffitt, 1998; Maxwell Atkinson & Heritage, 1984; Sacks, 1992) as the guiding methodology They argue that CA makes visible the complex and intricate dynamics of classroom discourse and shows that the teacher in plenary discussion works on tasks more significant than the simple checking of students' understanding by asking questions and evaluating their answers While the framework for discourse analysis proposed by Sinclair and Coulthard shows the monologic character of teacher-led discourse in the IRF sequence, CA reveals the unfolding, dynamic nature of the plenary session as

a jointly constructed interaction between the teacher and the students

(pp 269-422) Austin, TX: University of Texas Press

Bakhtin, M.M (1984 [1929]) Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics (ed and trans C Emerson;

introduction by W.C Booth) Manchester: Manchester University Press

Barnes, D (1992) From Communication to Curriculum (2nd edn) Harmondsworth: Penguin

Bell, M.M and Gardiner, M (eds) (1998) Bakhtin and the Human Sciences London: Sage

Bohm, D (1996) On Dialogue London: Routledge

Brandist, C (2002) The Bakhtin Circle: Philosophy, Culture and Politics London: Pluto Press

Bruner, J.S (1986) Actual Minds, Possible Worlds Cambridge, MA: Harvard University

Press

Buber, M (1947) Between Man and Man London: Routledge

Cazden, C.B (2001) Classroom Discourse: The Language of Teaching and Learning (2nd edn)

Edwards, A.D and Westgate, D.P.G (1994) Investigating Classroom Talk (2nd edn) Lewes:

Freire, P and Shor, I (1987) A Pedagogy for Liberation: Dialogues on Transforming Education

Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey

Hirschkop, K (1999) Mikhail Bakhtin: An Aesthetic for Democracy Oxford: Oxford

Mehan, H (1979) Learning Lessons: Social Organisation in the Classroom Cambridge, MA:

Harvard University Press

Morson, G.S (ed.) (1981) Bakhtin: Essays and Dialogues on his Work Chicago, IL: University

of Chicago Press

Nystrand, M., with Gamoran, A., Kachur, R and Prendergast, C (1997) Opening Dialogue: Understanding the Dynamics of Language and Learning in the English Classroom New

York: Teachers College Press

Sacks, H (1992) Lectures on Conversation Oxford: Blackwell

Sacks, H., Schegloff, E.A and Jefferson, G (1974) A simplest systematics for the tion of turn-taking for conversation Language 50 (4), 696-735

organiza-Schegloff, E.A (1998) Reflections on studying prosody in talk-in-interaction Language and Speech 41 (3-4), 235-263

Sinclair, J.M and Coulthard, R.M (1975) Towards an Analysis of Discourse: The English Used

by Teachers and Pupils Oxford: Oxford University Press

Skidmore, D (2000) From pedagogical dialogue to dialogical pedagogy Language and Education 14 (4), 283-296

Skidmore, D (2006) Pedagogy and dialogue Cambridge journal of Education 36 (4),

503-514

Sutton, A (1980) Backward children in the USSR: An unfamiliar approach to a familiar problem In J Brine, M Perrie and A Sutton (eds) Home, School and Leisure in the Soviet Union (pp 160-191) London: George Allen & Unwin

Szczepek Reed, B (2006) Prosodic Orientation in English Conversation Basingstoke: Palgrave

Macmillan

ten Have, P (1998) Doing Conversation Analysis: A Practical Guide London: Sage

Voloshinov, V.N (1973 [1929]) Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (trans L Matejka

and I.R Titunik) New York: Seminar Press

Vygotsky, L (1962) Thought and Language Cambridge, MA: MIT Press

Vygotsky, L.S (2004 [1934]) Problems of general psychology: Thinking and speech In R.W Rieber and D.K Robinson (eds) The Essential Vygotsky (pp 9-148) New York:

Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers

Wells, G (1999) Dialogic Inquiry: Towards a Sociocultural Practice and Theory of Education

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Wennerstrom, A (2001) The Music of Everyday Speech: Prosody and Discourse Analysis

Oxford: Oxford University Press

Yakubinsky, L.P and Eskin, M (1997 [1923]) On dialogic speech Publications of the Modern Language Association 112 (2), 243-256

2 Dialogism and Education

David Skidmore

Dialogue and Creativity

The beginnings of the dialogic theory of language can be found in an early article by the Russian linguist Yakubinsky (Yakubinsky & Eskin,

1997 [1923]) Yakubinsky's work represents the first attempt to develop a theory of dialogue and dialogic interaction as the basis for the study of language It predates the work of Bakhtin and Voloshinov on this topic, and anticipates many of their most important ideas In brief, Yakubinsky emphasises the naturalness of dialogue and contrasts this with the artifi-ciality of monologue He argues that monologue is allied to power and authority, and suggests that it precludes the speaker's psychological growth, since it does not allow for any response by listeners In contrast, dialogue is characterised by its constant interruptibility He points out that, during the interval between one utterance and another, a participant

in dialogue must simultaneously attend to their interlocutor's utterance and prepare their response He describes this as the 'apperceptive moment'

in speech reception: our understanding of another's utterance is grounded

in our turn of mind, our existing mindset, which is in turn governed by the entire history of our prior experience of interaction, or 'apperceptive mass', in Yakubinsky's terms:

The more our apperceptive mass resembles our interlocutor's tive mass, the better and easier we receive and understand his speech, which may be highly elliptical and teeming with allusions Conversely, the more the interlocutors' apperceptive masses differ, the more difficult mutual understanding becomes (Yakubinsky & Eskin, 1997 [1923]: 253)

appercep-We may feel that 'apperceptive mass' is not a happy expression; perhaps 'complex' or simply 'stance' would be a better way to capture the idea But the point Yakubinsky is formulating is a significant one: the degree to which two speakers' perspectives or outlooks on life are matched governs how well they understand one another, and affects (or finds expression in) the relative terseness or explicitness of their discourse This insight essentially

17

anticipates the concept of 'speaker alignment' in conversation analysis (CA) and the sociology of everyday life (Goffman, 1981)

Yakubinsky grounds his argument about the dialogic nature of language

by pointing out that human speech activity manifests functional diversity Speakers employ different types of speech and fashions of speaking according

to factors such as the conditions of communication (differences in the social environment, such as the home versus the workplace); the forms of communi-cation (e.g face-to-face talk versus writing); and the goals of communication (e.g utterances designed to inspire, to persuade, to reprove, etc.) Yakubinsky's classification here recalls Halliday's concept of register (Halliday, 1978)

He goes on to discuss different forms of speech utterance, distinguishing between the extremes of monologue (such as a speech in a courtroom) and dialogue, as represented by everyday unpremeditated conversation He argues that between these two extremes lies a whole range of intermediate forms, such as the more or less ritualised exchange of greetings in a formal cere-mony, which we might call 'monologic dialogue', and deliberate discussion, which typically has a more clearly defined topic and sense of purpose than everyday conversation, but may be less formalised in structure and more unpredictable in outcome than the discourse found on ceremonial occasions,

or the kind of highly organised meetings used to conduct institutionalised public business in the workplace

Yakubinsky's argument here is particularly salient to the question of the modes of discourse found in education For example, his distinction between degrees of dialogicality in the forms of speech helps us to recognise how small group discussion in the classroom has some of the spontaneous character of informal conversation, but is framed by a definite purpose and scope which are usually set by the teacher A highly didactic style of pedagogy, on the other hand, such as that found when the teacher cross-examines the class with a sequence of questions designed to test their recall of answers got by rote, may have a superficial appearance of dialogue, since there is a real exchange of utter-ances between different speakers, but this conceals the fact that the sequence

of topics, pace of interaction and selection of speakers is wholly vested in the teacher; it thus constitutes a good example of 'monologic dialogue'

Lecture Recitation

Teacher-led plenary discussion

+

Small group discussion

In his article, Yakubinsky concentrates on the properties of the direct form of dialogue, of which informal everyday conversation is the prototype

He shows that the visual channel of communication is of vital importance

in this context, incorporating such aspects of behaviour as facial expression, gesture and bodily movements This 'pantomime' character of face-to-face conversation is crucial to the exchange of meaning between participants, as

we see from the way in which people often convey a powerful reaction by means of facial expression alone, e.g a frown versus a smile; and from the way in which a speaker will often 'change tack' in the course of an utterance

in response to such an expression Yakubinsky also highlights the vital tribution of other aspects of the auditory channel in face-to-face communica-tion, apart from the words themselves, i.e the intensity, intonation and timbre of voice, which combine to produce what we know as a 'tone of voice' Not only does one speaker adopt a certain tone of voice to convey a particular emotional nuance or shade of meaning, but the 'temperature' of the whole dialogue varies according to the mutual accommodation or diver-gence between the tones of voice employed by the different participants Everyone knows the experience, for example, of how a disagreement can escalate into a row, or the infectiousness with which laughter can spread among a group of talkers, and likewise, the sense of coolness that affects an interaction if one speaker's attempt at levity is met with blankness or unmoved solemnity on the part of the other Yakubinsky describes how we 'tune into' another speaker's utterance from the very first words spoken, what he calls the 'apperceptional' quality of the utterance (e.g its hostile or sympathetic character), largely established through the tone of voice and non-verbal signals, which call forth an answering stance on our own part to which we wish to give voice, often before we have heard more than a small fraction of the words the other speaker actually utters in the course of their turn at speech

con-For Yakubinsky, dialogue has primacy over monologue in the sense that

it is a universal form of communication; all human interaction, he argues, strives to be dialogic We can see this from the way in which interrupting,

or answering back, comes naturally to us, whereas special conditions need to

be orchestrated in order to allow a group of people to listen to someone else's monologue, e.g the organisation of a meeting with a chairperson and recog-nised procedures for gaining the floor Yakubinsky emphasises the connec-tion between authority and monologic forms of speech, saying, 'One listens

to those who have power or authority' (Yakubinsky & Eskin, 1997 [1923]: 250) For this reason, the process of monologisation is typically accompanied

by ritual and ceremonial ways of behaving (cf religious ceremony and cial proceedings as well as business and political meetings) Again, this brings

judi-to mind the interaction order of the classroom where, cusjudi-tomarily, the teacher exercises authority over the conduct of discourse by nominating stu-dent speakers, and where for long periods of time students are expected to

listen in silence while the teacher transmits knowledge through extended verbal monologue

Finally, Yakubinsky compares dialogue as realised in spontaneous to-face conversation with monologue, whether spoken or written He notes the condition of constant interruptibility which is characteristic of speakers' turns-at-talk in dialogue, and draws attention to the fact that the pace of dialogic speech is faster than the pace typical of monologue (where the speaker does not normally have to worry about being interrupted) In part, this faster rate of speaking is a floor-holding strategy designed to communi-cate that the speaker's utterance is not yet finished In addition, when we act for the time being as the listener in a dialogue, we not only have to attend to and make sense of what the other speaker is saying, but also to prepare our response, our next turn-at-talk The combination of these two circum-stances, the fast pace of speaking and the requirement to prepare our next turn while listening to another's speech, makes for formal simplicity in dia-logic utterances in comparison to monologic speech or writing, according to Yakubinsky To put it simply, under the pressure of immediacy that we expe-rience in conversation, we are usually so concerned to get our message across that we do not have time to worry much about refining its form; it is more important to say the right thing than to say the thing right, i.e correctly or with the fullness and precision that we look for in written communication

face-In dialogue, we speak 'off the cuff', with the creativity of spontaneous improvisation, whereas in writing we have time to go over, revise and polish our first attempt to produce something more fixed and permanent This process of redrafting accounts for the relative compositional complexity of monologue compared with dialogic speech

Yakubinsky's remarks here recall Barnes's distinction between atory talk and 'final draft' talk in education (Barnes, 1992) Barnes argued that it was important for teachers to make space in the classroom for small group discussion activities, in which students had the opportunity to come

explor-to grips with new ideas in a less formal context of communication, as a preparation for the very public arena of whole class discussion, in which the teacher's authority is very much to the fore, and when student contributions are often subject to immediate evaluation by the teacher for their use of cor-rect academic terminology - a risky situation for a student to 'have a go' at

if they are not quite sure of their grasp of the subject Yakubinsky's insistence

on the primacy of improvised dialogue in the collective creation of meaning

is salient here He offers the following definition of 'automatic speech': The term speech automatism applies to speech as a simple volitional activ-ity that uses familiar elements (Yakubinsky & Eskin, 1997 [1923]: 255) For him, spontaneous, unrehearsed talk that is improvised on the spur of the moment provides the motor that drives language change, through the ad hoc

innovations thrown out by speakers to streamline communication Monologic forms, like the printed word, are by comparison inherently conservative We might extend this argument to apply to the case of language development and concept formation at the intersubjective level, as well as to the large-scale historical phenomenon of language change across a whole society It may be that the imperfections, slips and tentative locutions characteristic of exploratory talk in small group discussion in the classroom are an important part of creating the attitude of mental permeability that is needed for devel-opmental learning to occur: the sense that one's mind is open to enquiry in this realm of knowledge This connection between creativity and spontane-ous discussion is further explored in Chapter 7

Speech and Consciousness

The most fully developed exposition of the dialogic theory of language is found in Voloshinov's book-length work, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, originally published in Russian in 1929 (Voloshinov, 1973 [1929])

For Voloshinov, an adequate theory of language is vital for the successful study

of ideology, a traditional concern in Marxism from its inception (Marx, 1970 [1932]) He argues that an understanding of ideology depends on an under-standing of signs, language being the semiotic medium above all others; that

is, 'the domain of ideology coincides with the domain of signs' (Voloshinov,

1973 [1929]: 10) Language is ideologically neutral in the sense that it can be the bearer of any ideological message whatsoever; it is not tied to a particular field or system of ideology in the way religious symbolism or ritual is Like Yakubinsky, he identifies everyday conversational speech as the major substan-tive area of study with which those interested in the relation between lan-guage and ideology should concern themselves He goes on to say that dialogic speech of this kind is the material of consciousness (our inner life, or inner speech) Discourse is an objective, material phenomenon which occurs in outer experience, and consciousness can arise only in 'the material embodiment of signs' (Voloshinov, 1973 [1929]: 11) Indeed, for Voloshinov, the spoken word

is an essential accompaniment to all conscious activity As he puts it:

Individual consciousness is not the architect of the ideological structure, but only a tenant lodging in the social edifice of ideological signs (Voloshinov, 1973 [1929]: 13)

super-Thus, he concludes, the study of ideology cannot be carried out without the development and application of an adequate sociological method for the study of spoken interaction

Voloshinov justifies his emphasis on the need for close attention to people's everyday speech habits by pointing out that 'the word is the most

sensitive index of social changes' (Voloshinov, 1973 [1929]: 19) Anticipating one of Bakhtin's later arguments, he introduces the concept of speech genre, saying that each social group has its repertoire of speech genres A speech community comprises different classes using the 'same' language to commu-nicate and, because of this, there is a constant struggle for meaning in discur-sive interaction, a struggle which refracts the economic struggle between social classes The ideological nature of discourse means that it cannot be treated as a transparent medium for the transmission of value-free knowl-edge, since differently oriented inflections, associated with the different standpoints of different social groups, intersect within the verbal sign At the same time, it is just this struggle for inflection, what Voloshinov terms the 'multiaccentuality' of discourse, which imparts vitality and dynamism to a living language The ruling class, he argues, always tries to standardise lan-guage use, i.e to remove it from the sphere of conflicting social value judge-ments; but this is trying to hold back the tide, since social change is a continuous feature of class society, never more so than under capitalism We can readily think of examples that illustrate the ideological struggle over lan-guage use that Voloshinov is describing In the UK, for example, there are regular debates in the media about the alleged decline of English, the failure

of schools to teach the rules of grammar, and the need to reinforce the mony of 'standard English' over regional, class-based and intergenerational variation in usage

hege-From his stress on the social nature of language, Voloshinov proceeds to draw some conclusions about the nature of mind He argues that inner speech, our experience of consciousness, needs to be understood as inner dialogue, as a continuously emergent exchange between possible socio-ideological points of view Our most private thoughts have their posited social audience He also takes to task the structuralist theory of language associated with the work of Saussure (de Saussure, 1974) For Voloshinov, Saussure's dichotomy between the synchronic and diachronic study of lan-guage embodies a dualistic discontinuity between the history of language and the system of language (langue, which Saussure defined as the object of

study in linguistics) The emphasis on the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign, seen in one of Saussure's favourite analogies comparing language to the abstract symbols of algebra, suggests an image of language as a fixed, closed system, ignoring the ideological meanings that give the linguistic signs their content Voloshinov believes that the structuralist view of language as a stable system comes from the historical domination of Western linguistic thought by philological concerns, i.e the study of dead languages In fact, Voloshinov argues, language is changing continuously; historically, it 'pres-ents the picture of a ceaseless flow of becoming' (Voloshinov, 1973 [1929]: 66) Furthermore, if we think of social human beings engaged in the concrete activity of speaking to one another, then what is important to the speaker and to their interlocutor is not the supposedly stable, fixed identity of a

linguistic sign, but precisely its changeable and adaptable quality, the tial it has to be filled with a particular meaning in a specific context:

poten-In actuality, we never say or hear words, we say and hear what is true or false, good or bad, important or unimportant, pleasant or unpleasant, and so on Words are always filled with content and meaning drawn from behaviour or ideology (Voloshinov, 1973 [1929]: 70)

Voloshinov coins the concept of the ideological impletion of words to describe the process whereby speakers populate words with ideological meaning in practice, in the context of a specific act of speech communication This leads him to the conclusion that it is utterances, not words or grammatical struc-tures in the abstract, that are the real units of discourse There is more to the matter than this, however, since any given utterance is 'but one link in the continuous chain of speech performances' (Voloshinov, 1973 [1929]: 72) Voloshinov proceeds to analyse in more detail the nature of verbal inter-action in the exchange of utterances between speakers He posits as a dis-tinctive feature of the utterance the important concept of evaluative accent: every utterance, he argues, conveys a value judgement, an evaluative orien-tation towards its referential theme; this evaluation is marked most obvi-ously in speech by intonation (cf the concept of prosody, explained in the Introduction and Chapters 10-13, current volume) Meaning as created through dialogue is always saturated with such value judgements Voloshinov connects this with the idea of the 'evaluative purview' of a social group, i.e the things that have importance for members of that group; this purview is generated through the process of ideological struggle Historical changes in linguistic meaning can thus be seen as a matter of re-evaluation One thinks, for example, of the struggle to define the usage of the English word 'gay' as a positive term for the sexuality of homosexuals and lesbians, where no such term previously existed Because the society that comprises a speech community is stratified and therefore conflictual, Voloshinov argues that meaning is never settled and fixed once and for all, but rather that there is a 'constant struggle of accents in each semantic sector of existence' (Voloshinov, 1973 [1929]: 106) The preceding theoreti-cal discussion of the nature of language allows Voloshinov to put forward the following general definition:

Language is a continuous generative process implemented in the verbal interaction of speakers (Voloshinov, 1973 [1929]: 98)

social-If this seems obvious to us, we should note how different it is from the turalist view of language embodied in Saussure's definition of langue as an abstract system of signs in which the meaning (value) of each sign is wholly determined by its relationship with other members of the sign-system

struc-Saussure's linguistic theory explicitly excluded spoken interaction (parole)

from the field of study, and thereby detached language from the sphere of social activity, in which it has its being and outside of which it cannot exist Voloshinov's outlook leads him to see the act of understanding another as fundamentally dialogic in nature, i.e as an active, responsive process in which we attempt to match a speaker's utterance with our own 'counter-utterance' He sums this up with a telling analogy:

Meaning is the effect of interaction between speaker and listener duced via the material of a particular sound complex It is like an electric spark that occurs only when two different terminals are hooked together (Voloshinov, 1973 [1929]: 102-103)

pro-Again, we notice how different this theory of meaning is from that implied

by Saussure's favourite analogy in which he compares language to a game of chess For Saussure, it was essential to maintain an absolute dichotomy between synchronic and diachronic approaches to the study of language, and any given synchronic state of the language existed outside history; language change, in this view, is a series of discontinuous self-contained states of the system and the history of previous 'moves in the game' is irrelevant to the current conjuncture of pieces on the board There is no room in this theory for an active struggle for meaning in the course of verbal interaction, still less for making any connection between a concrete episode of dialogic exchange between speakers and the ideological outlook of different social groups Voloshinov's concern with the centrality of the sign echoes Vygotsky's thinking on the relationship between language and thought, as described for example in his discussion of the way in which human activity differs from animal behaviour by virtue of being mediated by the sign, allowing humans

to break the tendency to react directly to stimuli and develop indirect, ally based ways of regulating their own behaviour (Vygotsky, 1978: 40) Likewise, his theory of consciousness as inner dialogue is very close to Vygotsky's views on mind as inner speech (Vygotsky, 2004 [1934]: 85; and see Daniels, Chapter 3, current volume), though it is fair to say that Voloshinov's theory emphasises the dialogic nature of interaction and, hence,

cultur-of consciousness, more explicitly than Vygotsky's As far as pedagogy is cerned, Voloshinov's analysis of the ideological nature of different speech genres anticipates later insights into the nature of teacher-dominated class-room discourse, for example in the work of Mehan and Cazden, who dem-onstrated that one of the prime lessons that students must learn when they

con-go to school is the nature of the classroom interaction order and the authority

of the teacher to control turn taking and the selection of topics for sion, and to evaluate the adequacy of student contributions (Cazden, 2001; Mehan, 1979) Perhaps his most important insight, however, is the theoreti-cal concept of evaluative accent This enables us to understand how every act

discus-of communication is embedded in the world discus-of ideology and is predicated on the class-based and conflictual social order of which we are members In drawing attention to the importance of intonation in speech, Voloshinov anticipates the analysis of the communicative function of prosody in CA and the linguistic analysis of natural speech (Couper-Kuhlen & Selting, 1996; Szczepek Reed, 2006; Wennerstrom, 2001), offering a vital insight into the intrinsically social nature of language and the primacy of speech in under-standing how language works

His emphasis on understanding as a fundamentally dialogic act, ied in his metaphor of the electric spark, is illuminating for the theory of pedagogy Adapting this metaphor, we can say that pedagogy can only be considered successful when it elicits that leap of semiotic charge between the teacher and learner; when, in other words, students are potentiated as a result of the act of teaching, and their capacity for engaging in conceptually mediated activity is enhanced through the deliberate process of education

to somewhat different aspects of language use and its significance for tional practice

educa-Bakhtin first introduces and expounds the concept of heteroglossia in his long essay written in 1934-1935, Discourse in the Novel (Bakhtin, 1981 [1934-1935]) The essay is principally concerned with the history of the novel as a literary genre, but along the way Bakhtin offers many reflections on the social nature of language and the process of psychological development which are suggestive for our thinking about pedagogy in general and lan-guage education in particular He glosses the term as referring to 'the social diversity of speech types', providing the following fuller definition:

The internal stratification of any single national language into social lects, characteristic group behaviour, professional jargons, generic

dia-languages, languages of generations and age groups, tendentious guages, languages of the authorities, of various circles and of passing fash-ions - this internal stratification present in every language at any given moment of its historical existence is the indispensable prerequisite for the novel as a genre (Bakhtin, 1981 [1934-1935]: 262-263)

lan-This clearly echoes Voloshinov's account of the 'multiaccentuality' of course, noted above It also anticipates later work in sociolinguistics and points to the concept of sociolect (a variety of language associated with a social group, e.g variation in usage according to class (Trudgill, 2000)), although it is noteworthy that the Bakhtinian concept posits linguistic diversity as intrinsic to the condition of a living language, rather than in terms of a departure from some underlying linguistic norm As Bakhtin puts it: '[a] unitary language is not something given but is always in essence posited- and at every moment of its linguistic life it is opposed to the reali-ties of heteroglossia' (Bakhtin, 1981 [1934-1935]: 270) Again, we can see this insight as anticipating much later work in the West on the ideological nature of the concept of a standard language (e.g 'standard English') and the fundamentally political nature of the drive towards linguistic stan-dardisation in formal education and schooling A comparable analysis is made in the work of Bourdieu on language and symbolic power, where he points out how the French school system was used by the state to inculcate

dis-a pdis-articuldis-ar imdis-age of correct usdis-age of the French ldis-angudis-age dis-and to stigmdis-atise regional and social variation as 'patois' (Bourdieu, 1991) We can also find

parallel lines of thinking in critical sociolinguistics, e.g the critique of guistic prescription and the 'complaint tradition' which upholds the sup-posed superiority of 'standard English' (Milroy & Milroy, 1991), and in the theoretical perspectives of social semiotics and critical discourse analysis, with their emphasis on the hegemonic function of normative genres of text-construction in constricting the range of ideological standpoints that can be acceptably expressed in public discourse (Fairclough, 1989; Hodge & Kress, 1988)

lin-If we take this perception to heart, it has considerable ramifications for language education policies that privilege a specific stylistic norm, such as the idea of 'standard English', and insist that this is taught as the only accept-able way of communicating in educational settings and activities Recognising that communicative practices within a given speech community are highly diverse, and that different forms of normative usage act as signifiers of the identity of different subgroups within that community, we are forced to concede that the patterns of language usage which receive approval and endorsement in most education systems are very selective, and do not repre-sent the multifaceted reality of the world outside the classroom At the very least, this suggests the importance of recognising a broad range of styles and registers of language use in the language education curriculum, rather than

focusing on a notional 'standard' version of English (or other target language)

to the exclusion of other varieties

Important to Bakhtin's definition is the recognition that linguistic diversity is associated not only with regional and geographical variation, i.e dialects in the usual sense, such as those of south-west versus north-east England, or British versus American English, but also with variation that is socio-ideological in nature For example, there are certain ways of speaking that are 'part of the job' in particular professions and occupa-tional groups This is most visible in areas like law and medicine, where specialist technical vocabularies are in use, and where linguistic exchanges may be governed by rules which diverge significantly from other settings (e.g the elaborate etiquette of courtroom proceedings) It is also true of most formal education settings, as we know from the tradition of class-room discourse research, which has highlighted the way in which lessons

in school introduce students not only to subject-specific concepts and vocabulary (e.g the language of mathematics or history), but also to a given interaction order (Mehan, 1979), in which the teacher typically controls the choice of topic and selection of student speakers, and often asks known-answer questions, then evaluates the correctness of a student's response - a very different pattern of talk from that of informal conversation between peers, or adult-child talk in other social settings The language of formal education, then, can be seen as a socio-ideological language in Bakhtin's sense, part of the internal stratification of the national language that forms the medium of instruction (such as English), a subtype of usage that is employed in this branch of the social division of labour and which differs systematically from modes of communication found in other spheres of activity

Furthermore, Bakhtin's definition highlights the link between linguistic variation and social stratification In connection with education, this aspect

of the concept of heteroglossia helps us to be conscious that there is not simply a single undifferentiated language of the classroom, but that within this usage-type, different speakers must come to 'know their place' within the exchange-structure of the school lesson The type of speech that is expected of the student is not the same as that which the teacher is entitled

to use; most obviously, it is the teacher who has the right to ask questions

of the students, for instance, not the other way round The register of room discourse allots asymmetrical speaking rights to participants, and this asymmetry is bound up with the authority and status of their respective positions; from this perspective, the practice of recitation, in which the teacher asks a sequence of test questions on a topic which s/he sets, and evaluates each student's answer in turn, locates the teacher as the sole 'arbi-ter of valid knowledge' in the conditions of the classroom, and constrains the function of students' speech to the recall and display of knowledge selected and approved by the teacher (Edwards & Mercer, 1987: 47)

class-This aspect of the heteroglossia of the language of schooling, its fication according to the differing social status of teacher and students, is overlaid by generational differences in ways of speaking, for example, the constantly changing vocabulary and style of youth slang, which often func-tions as a deliberate marker of distinction, a way in which young people signal the 'Us' that they affiliate to as against the official, approved lan-guage of 'Them' In multicultural societies, such as contemporary Britain or the United States, there is the further consideration that, while there may

strati-be one official medium of instruction (in this case, English), students may speak dozens of different tongues as their first language or as the language

of the home; cf the analysis of home-school communication in Chapter 4 The concept of heteroglossia can thus give us a powerful aperture on the rich diversity and internal differentiation of language as it is encountered in the national education systems of contemporary capitalist society, reinforc-ing Bakhtin's judgement that 'at any given moment of its historical exis-tence, language is heteroglot from top to bottom' (Bakhtin, 1981 [1934-1935]: 291) This emphasis on the primacy of linguistic diversity also leads Bakhtin to stress that living languages are in a state of continuous change; it is not simply that many different styles of speaking go together

to make up the entity that we call a national language, but that the ble of varieties of the language is also dynamic, in a condition of perpetual flux that reflects the constantly changing nature of the society in which the language is spoken From this point of view, Saussure's strict dichotomy between synchronic linguistics, the study of language as a static system, and diachronic linguistics, the study of the historical development of lan-guage over time, cannot be sustained (de Saussure, 1974: 81)

ensem-The reality of heteroglossia is readily apparent in the internationalised world of higher education in the Anglophone countries, where English may

be the medium of instruction - this, indeed, being the attraction for many international students - but where dozens of different first languages may

be spoken and heard on the campus of many institutions If this were simply

an empirical observation, the concept of heteroglossia would not add much

to the more familiar term 'linguistic diversity' However, it is a common experience in teaching mixed groups of speakers of English as a first and as

an additional language to find that language diversity intersects with ent social and cultural understandings of what it is to be a student It is pos-sible, for instance, for students with an excellent formal command of academic English to come with quite different expectations of what is required in written coursework or examinations from those that prevail in universities in the UK, United States and other countries where the majority language is English Likewise, some students can find it challenging at first

differ-to participate in group activities which require them differ-to collaborate with their peers in informal discussion unsupervised by the tutor or lecturer, not neces-sarily because they lack competence in spoken English, but because this kind

of group work is alien to their prior educational experience Many porary universities, with their heteroglot community of academics and stu-dents, might indeed be called a microcosm of the multicultural society in which we live

contem-This cultural and linguistic pluralism should not be seen as an tional disadvantage On the contrary, an awareness of the existence of differ-ent language groups and the 'worlds of meaning' which they inhabit can help

educa-to relativise our own sense of linguistic identity and open our minds educa-to the possibility of alternative ways of seeing the world Seen in this way, partici-pating in a heteroglot environment is a resource for enlarging and enriching our understanding of ourselves and our relation to others, and our place in the world we share Bakhtin expresses this thought in a vivid extended metaphor:

Languages of heteroglossia, like mirrors that face each other, each ing in its own way a piece, a tiny corner of the world, force us to guess

reflect-at and grasp for a world behind their mutually reflecting aspects threflect-at is broader, more multi-levelled, containing more and varied horizons than would be available to a single language or a single mirror (Bakhtin, 1981 [1934-1935]: 414-415)

Bakhtin's image may bring to mind the analogy used by Vygotsky when

he compares word meaning to a drop of water that refracts different possible interpretations:

Consciousness is reflected in the word like the sun is reflected in a let of water The word is a microcosm of consciousness, related to con-sciousness like a living cell is related to an organism, like an atom is related to the cosmos The meaningful word is a microcosm of human consciousness (Vygotsky, 2004: 110)

drop-Vygotsky at this point is discussing the relationship between discursive meaning and consciousness, whereas Bakhtin is discussing the relationship between different languages (or language subtypes) Nevertheless, both thinkers are striving to articulate the subtle and elusive sense in which expressing our thoughts in words forces us to go beyond the limits of the single, self-contained ideological consciousness (if such a thing were possi-ble) Speaking is a social act; to speak is to take part in the life of society, and necessarily involves an encounter with standpoints other than our own It is

in dialogue with others that our ideological consciousness is formed; as Bakhtin remarks, 'consciousness awakens to independent ideological life pre-cisely in a world of alien discourses surrounding it' (Bakhtin, 1981 [1934-1935]: 345) This is consequential for the practice of education, since it implies the need for teachers to furnish opportunities for students to engage

actively with the conceptual material of the curriculum if they are to take over this knowledge and become capable of making use of it in due course in independent creative ideological activity without the guidance of the teacher

It also indicates that encouraging the practice of collective activity with others (including other students) lies at the heart of a dialogic approach to pedagogy, since through this the learner will engage in the kind of intermen-tal border crossing that enables her/him to transcend the limits of their own current consciousness

There is a further aspect to the concept of heteroglossia which carries implications for the practice of education and our understanding of the process of psychological development Given the primacy of social diversi-fication in our experience of language use, it follows that we form our own subjectivities in the midst of a struggle between divergent, and sometimes contradictory, ways of speaking and thinking about the world This means that, in the effort to communicate our point of view, we are obliged to take over concepts and formulations whose meanings are contested and which come 'with strings attached', in the sense that they have a history of social usage which brands them as belonging to one or another of the sub-groups referred to by Bakhtin in his account of the internal stratification of lan-guages cited above When we speak, we perforce use words and styles of verbal interaction associated with the young or old, women or men, work-ing-class or bourgeois subcultures, and many other such group identities There is no such thing as an ideologically neutral form of language and, for the purposes of education, this implies that learners must take over con-cepts that they do not invent from scratch, but which trail a freight of prior signification in their wake This is not in itself a problem; indeed, it could hardly be otherwise If each generation had to rediscover all knowl-edge from first principles, it is unlikely that human society would show much technological or cultural advancement The educational question is whether learners are encouraged to accept the concepts, knowledge and values presented by their elders uncritically and adopt their view of the world on trust, or whether pedagogy invites them to question, explore and test new ideas against their own experience and understanding of the world, in such a way that they develop increased capabilities for informed praxis The ultimate test of the success of teaching is whether learners are able to make creative use of the knowledge it equips them with for their own purposes

The concept of heteroglossia chimes with Bakhtin's emphasis on the damental importance of actively responsive understanding in shaping dis-course Speech is not seen as the putting-forth of a set of linguistic tokens with a predetermined value of their own, independent of the interactional goals of the participants in a given exchange; rather, dialogue is a process of continuously shifting negotiation of positions, in which the local meaning

fun-of a particular term or phrase is always at stake As Bakhtin puts it: