The Seeds of Time: Why Classroom Dialogue Needs a Temporal Analysis
Language and the Joint Creation of Knowledge, 2008
153 citations recorded by the source corpus.
The process of teaching and learning in school has a natural long-term trajectory and cannot be understood only as a series of discrete educational events. Classroom talk plays an important role in mediating this long-term process, and in this article I argue that more attention should be given to the temporal dimension of classroom dialogue, both empirically and theoretically, if we are to appreciate how children gain an education from their classroom experience. I explore this topic using data from recent applied, interventional research in United Kingdom primary schools and examine how classroom talk is used to represent past shared experience, carry ideas forward from one occasion to another, approach future activities, and achieve learning outcomes. The article ends with a discussion of the theoretical, methodological, and educational implications of making this kind of temporal analysis. The data examples used in this article are from the project Language, Thinking and ICT in the Primary Curriculum, which was financed by Grant EDU/00169/G from the Nuffield Foundation. The research was carried out by Lyn Dawes, Steve Higgins, Claire Sams, Rupert Wegerif, and myself. The participation in this research of teachers and children in Milton Keynes schools, and the support of Milton Keyne Borough Council and the Nuffield Foundation, are acknowledged with thanks. I am extremely grateful for the constructive comments on earlier drafts of this article provided by Lyn Dawes, Judith Kleine Staarman, Karen Littleton, and Ingvill Rasmussen; and many thanks to Caroline Coffin, Janet Maybin, Karen Littleton, and Ian Wilkinson for providing valuable bibliographic resources and references for exploring the topic of temporality. The reviewers for the Journal of the Learning Sciences also helped the development of this article by providing very clear and useful comments.
Subfields: Developmental and Educational Psychology, Education
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6a0a872594dc7976390e20c96421f27388ab707b
Citations in the corpus
- The effect of productive classroom talk and metacommunication on young children's oral communicative competence and subject matter knowledge: An intervention study in early childhood education (2017, unknown): “According to Mercer (2008), “learning is mediated through dialogue” (p. 35).”
- The study of talk between teachers and students, from the 1970s until the 2010s (2014, unknown): “Edwards & Mercer, 1987/2012; Green & Wallat, 1981; Hargreaves, 1984; Mercer & Edwards, 1981; Spindler, 1982). The research had promoted a growing awareness amongst policy makers (at least in some countries) of the educational importance of the study of classroom talk. This had first been apparent in”
- Scaffolding Student Understanding in Small-Group Work: Students’ Uptake of Teacher Support in Subsequent Small-Group Interaction (2018, unknown): “However, it might well be, especially given that the five lessons were interconnected, that students applied support later in the same lesson or even in subsequent lessons (cf. Mercer, 2008).”