Cold-calling has been proposed as an effective engagement strategy to enhance student participation in whole-class discussions. However, calling on students who did not volunteer can also be understood as a face-threat. The ways in which teachers accomplish cold-calling could prove critical as to how cold-calling is received. The linguistic,…

Dialogic pedagogy aims to promote deliberative democratic skills, virtues and practices within an equitable and empowering classroom environment. This article problematizes the practice of setting classroom ground rules in light of dialogic pedagogy's democratic aspirations. Specifically, we explore the space for dissenting voices within the…

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

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

Educators have long been advocating for the appropriation of students' interests into the classroom as a means of promoting participation and learning. However, little attention has been paid to the possible issues that interest-driven pedagogy might engender for both teachers and students through its blend of the personal and academic. This…

Within the context of teacher/whole-class instruction sequences, researchers have associated teacher evaluation of pupils' answers to forms of traditional pedagogic discourse, also referred to as "triadic dialogue", "monologic discourse", "recitation" and "Initiation-Response-Evaluation (IRE) sequences".…

Classroom discourse is structured by socially accepted ways in which knowledge is presented and by established procedures for carrying out educational activities. However, the underlying linguistic and social ground rules are usually implicit, for students as well as for teachers. The implicitness of these ground rules has been attributed to…

CD-ROM affordances are explored in this article through participation in classroom interaction. CD-ROMs for shared reading of animated stories and language work were introduced to all Malaysian primary schools in 2003 for the Year 1 English Literacy Hour. We present classroom interaction extracts that show how the same CD-ROMs offer different…

Recently, classroom talk has re-emerged within educational policy as instrumental in delivering standards-based reform in several counties. In England, both the National Numeracy and Literacy Strategies and the National Strategy for Key Stage 3 emphasised the importance of "interactive whole class teaching" (IWT) where "pupils are…

This paper explores the discourse of whole class teaching in Kenyan and Nigerian primary school English lessons. Twenty lessons were analysed using a system of discourse analysis focusing on the teacher-led three-part exchange sequence of Initiation-Response-Feedback (IRF). The focus of the analysis was on the first and third part of the IRF…

Focuses on subteaching, a phenomenon that regularly appears in pupil-run group work. Junior high pupils positioned themselves as subteachers and exploited a series of teacher-like strategies. (Author/VWL)

Examines Language development in mainstream education through analysis of the language demands made on bilingual pupils by tasks and interactions in subject classrooms and the responses pupils make to these demands. Argues that the samples analyzed demonstrate the potentially crucial role of contextual factors in the English language development…