ABSTRACT
Promoting a pedagogy that allows students to become more adept at using spoken and written language, so they can express their thoughts, engage with others in joint intellectual activity and advance their individual capacity for productive, rational and reflective thinking, is seen as a major goal of education (Hardman & Hardman, 2017a). Within classrooms, students can develop their proficiency in the use of spoken language through teacher–student and student–student interactions. The first involves teachers’ use of spoken interaction with students as a means for promoting guided participation and the development of student 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.
