GUIDED CO-CONSTRUCTION IN CLASSROOM TALK

What is it about?

Enabling students to become more adept at using language is seen as one of the major goals of education: firstly, so they can express their thoughts and engage with others in joint intellectual activity to develop their communication skills; secondly, so as to advance their individual capacity for productive, rational and reflective thinking. Within classrooms, students can develop their proficiency in the use spoken of language though teacher-student and student-to-student interactions. As will be argued, the first involves teacher use of spoken interaction with students as a means for promoting guided participation and the development of their knowledge and understanding by providing the intellectual support of a relative ‘expert’ engaging with a ‘novice’ in a given learning task. The second involves peer group interaction and dialogue as a means of promoting learning by providing a more symmetrical environment for the co-construction of knowledge in which the power and status differentials between expert and novice are less likely to apply. The current chapter focuses on the first of these educational approaches with regard to classroom talk: teacher-student interaction in the guided co-construction of knowledge.

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