ABSTRACT
The place of language as a cultural tool for learning is central to sociocultural perspectives on social and cognitive development (Vygotsky, 1962, 1980), and a clear trajectory in academic discourse has been to consider dialogue as a particularly important tool for learning within classrooms (Barnes, 1976; Alexander, 2008; Howe & Abedin, 2013; Mercer & Dawes, 2014; Schwarz & Baker, 2016). As this Handbook makes evident, classroom dialogue is ‘more than just talk’; rather, there is a specific focus on sharing and evaluating ideas, building ideas collectively, reasoning, providing justifications and elaborations, and using evidence to support arguments.
