ABSTRACT
This chapter will review a selection of the key concepts involved in dialogism as a social theory of language and discuss the ramifications of these ideas for education in general and pedagogy in particular. Dialogism is a philosophy of language which places central importance on the reality of socio-verbal interaction in understanding the kind of phenomenon that language is. It is most associated with the work of Mikhail Bakhtin (1895–1975), a Russian literary scholar, though important aspects of the theoretical perspective find their most fully developed statements in the writings of other members of the Bakhtin Circle (Brandist, 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.
