After decades of enthusiasm in some quarters but ambivalence or even neglect elsewhere, oracy seems at last to be entering the educational mainstream. Among discerning teachers and researchers the educational importance of talk has always been understood, but this is now being reflected in official initiatives too.
Dialogic teaching harnesses the power of talk to stimulate and extend children’s thinking, and to advance their learning and understanding. It also enables the teacher more precisely to diagnose and assess. Dialogic teaching is distinct from the question-answer and listen-tell routines of mainstream teaching, aiming to be more consistently searching, reciprocal and extended. And it is generic to all patterns of interaction, not just whole class teaching. The approach is buttressed by three kinds of research evidence: on the relationship between talking, thinking and learning; on the historic problems of talk in British and American classrooms; and on the place of oracy and the effectiveness of oral pedagogy in many other countries.
Alexander, R.J. (2006). Towards Dialogic Thinking: Rethinking classroom talk (3rd edition). York: Dialogos.
This booklet may be ordered direct from the publisher at considerably less than the price charged by retailers. For an order form, and further information about this and related publications, please go to www.robinalexander.org.uk/dialogos.htm
New research from Purdue University shows that even when people who
stutter are not speaking, their brains process language differently.
Stuttering, which interrupts the flow of speech, affects 5% of people
in the United States at some time in their lives. Stuttering usually
begins in the pre-school years, and there is a higher incidence in males.
Characteristics of the disorder can range from repetition of sounds,
prolongation of syllables, elongated pauses between words and speech
that occurs in spurts. "Traditionally, stuttering is thought of
as a problem with how someone speaks, and little attention has been
given to the complex interactions between neurological systems that
underlie speaking," says Christine Weber-Fox, an assistant professor
of speech sciences who is interested in the brain's involvement in language
processing. "We have found differences in adults who stutter, compared
to those who don't, in how the brain processes information when people
are thinking about language but not speaking. For example, there was
a significant delay in response time when subjects were given a complex
language task. We also found that in people who stutter, certain areas
of the brain are more active when processing some language tasks.
Weber-Fox, a cognitive neuroscientist, teamed with Anne
Smith, a professor of speech science who studies the neurophysiological
bases of speech production, to study language and speech production
systems. A series of studies were conducted to measure semantic (word
meaning in sentence processing), grammatical and phonological (sounds
of the language, such as rhyming) aspects of the language. In each study,
the brain activity of adults who stutter and don't stutter were measured
when they responded silently, by pressing a button, to questions regarding
sentence meaning, grammar or sentence structure, and rhyming. This is
believed to be the first time brain electrical activity has been studied
in a series of language tasks in people who stutter to determine whether
their brains function differently even when there are no overt speaking
demands.
The researchers' findings were presented at the American
Speech-Language Hearing Association's conference on Fluency and Fluency
Disorders. Their study "Phonological Processing in Adults Who Stutter:
Electrophysiologic and Behavioural Evidence" appears in the August
2004 edition of the Journal of Speech, Language and Hearing Research.
(www.innovations-report.com,
July 2004
In 2001, QCA hosted a seminar on the nature and purpose
of spoken language. This report collates papers by eminent researchers
that tackle questions about spoken language in the classroom from diverse
perspectives: (1) Teaching about talk - what do pupils need to know
about spoken language and the important ways in which talk differs from
writing, (2) Is there a case for considering talk as part of the oral
heritage and as a performance skill, (3) Extending the repertoire of
talk - what are some of the ways in which talk impacts on children's
learning, (4) How can planning for different kinds of spoken interaction
in the classroom take account of the ways interpersonal relations change
the form and content of talk, (5) In what ways can a classroom rich
in spoken language enhance or hinder EAL pupils' grasps of subject content,
and (6) Could the English curriculum more fully reflect the aesthetic
and rhetorical functions of spoken language, and the role of talk in
critical thinking.
QCA (2003). New perspectives on spoken English in the
classroom: Discussion papers. London: QCA
Download the report from http://www.qca.org.uk/qca_5746.aspx
80px.gif)
