Conference Agenda

Can dialogic classroom talk help to make classroom communication more democratic and enable students to deal with uncertainty and insecurity? Under what conditions can classroom communication contribute to strengthening the classroom community and promoting democratic dialogue?

These questions are at the heart of the symposium and will be examined using three empirical examples from social constructivist interaction research on dialogic action in classroom discussions.

Even though numerous empirical studies show that international interest in dialogic forms of conversation in the classroom has a long research tradition (i.e. The Routledge International Handbook of Research on Dialogic Education (Mercer et al., 2019)), studies on communication in the classroom continue to show that “classrooms are arenas of rapid-fire and complicated patterns of talk consisting of systems of direction and compliance, usually in some form of routine question- and answer sequences” (Edwards-Groves & Davidson, 2019, p. 126).

On the one hand, traditional classroom discussions still follow a typical sequence pattern in which teachers initiate a topic in conversation (initiation) and the students' response (reply) is usually followed by an immediate evaluation by the teacher (evaluation) (Mehan 1979). On the other hand, there is consensus in classroom research that high-quality dialogic classroom discussions offer particular learning potential for subject-specific and cross-curricular educational goals because they generate increased conversation among students, elaborate statements, co-constructions, collective arguments, and participation (Mercer et al., 2019; Howe et al., 2019).

For example, recent empirical studies discuss the particular benefits of exploratory talk for democratic learning (as reviewed by Twiner, 2025). In a reanalysis of 49 studies on different dialogic forms of classroom talk, T'Sas and Daems (2024, p. 27) found recurring terms such as “together,” “understanding,” and “respect,” but also “openness” and “trust” (T'Sas & Daems 2024, p. 27), suggesting these relational and interactional features are prominent concerns in research about exploratory classroom talk. There is also discussion of how dialogic-collective conversation can contribute to strengthening community in the classroom, social cohesion, and students' identification with their own school class (de Boer 2025, pp. 27-28.).

This symposium presents three different approaches to dialogic classroom communication, demonstrating that dialogic teaching requires certain prerequisites and is linked to various dimensions of quality.

The first presentation Building up and building on foundations for equitable participation through dialogic pedagogy shows how ground rules are central to establishing a trusting conversational context that helps a class to learn and create dialogue rules together, learn how to apply them, and collectively develop dialogue and learning through exploratory talk as a shared, collective practice.

The second presentation Doing Dialogue – the Meaning of Pauses and Revoicing for Dialogic and Democratic Talk examines the connection between dialogic and democratic conversation practices and explains this using the example of the interaction-analytically reconstructed conversation pattern of revoicing (O'Connor & Michaels, 2019). It shows how revoicing becomes a participatory practice and can also help to balance uncertainties.

The third presentation Doing metatalk as promoting a shared dialogic sensibility for productive classroom discussions demonstrates how regular metatalk, as explicit discussion of past shared conversations, promotes participation in the classroom. It highlights how doing metatalk, as a mutually-produced reflection on sequences of actions, helps students learn to consciously steer and support dialogic conversation.

In summary, the symposium unites three contributions that place an intentional focus on educational dialogue, from teacher and learner perspective. They facilitate explicit connection between thinking and learning, both of which can be optimised when seen as supported, social activities.

Individually and socially, we talk and communicate a lot. We frequently do this without consciously considering why communication is smooth sometimes, and difficult or misunderstood on other occasions. Sometimes we feel ‘part of’ a conversation; at other times we might feel on the periphery, or even excluded. By focusing on dialogue – and how we use talk and other communicative modes to support teaching and learning – we can start to understand some of these patterns, and initiate practices and pedagogies known through research to support participation, inclusion, understanding and learning (Howe et al., 2019). One practice known through research to support learning is ‘exploratory talk’ (drawing on Barnes, 2008; Mercer & Dawes, 2008). In exploratory talk, learners try out their forming ideas together, are open to and invite others’ views, and are willing to change their minds if they hear evidence which contrasts an earlier view. In exploratory talk the learning is shared, built together, as learners think together out loud. Those participating leave the conversation with a more-informed understanding than they started, or than they would likely have reached had they worked independently. It therefore requires participation, which requires learners to feel comfortable to participate and that they will be listened to. To engage in exploratory talk, therefore, and to disrupt dominant patterns such as IRF/IRE noted earlier, some conditions are needed. These conditions can be supported by setting ‘ground rules’ with learners (drawing on Mercer et al., 1999). Examples of ground rules, perhaps unsurprisingly therefore, tend to reflect the principles of exploratory talk: for instance, underscoring the importance of listening, asking what others think, giving reasons for answers, asking questions if we disagree or misunderstand, and being open to changing our mind (Twiner, 2025). Critically, such rules should be set with learners, not imposed, so that all feel ownership in applying them. Through such ground rules, where learners do not fear a personal risk of ridicule in participating, therefore, they can take intellectual risks by voicing their developing thinking for other learners’ reflection – not just teacher evaluation (Twiner 2011; 2025). In this presentation I will review literature and share examples from a range of projects from primary age to adult professional learning groups, evidencing exploratory talk and how explicitly setting ‘ground rules’ with learners can create foundations for using talk and other communicative modes to work and learn together – in the classroom and beyond.

Barnes, D. (2008). Exploratory talk for learning. In N. Mercer & S. Hodgkinson (Eds.) Exploring talk in schools (pp. 1–15). Sage. Howe, C., Hennessy, S., Mercer, N., et al. (2019). Teacher–student dialogue during classroom teaching: Does it really impact on student outcomes? Journal of the Learning Sciences, 28(4-5), 462–512. Mercer, N., & Dawes, L. (2008). The value of exploratory talk. In N. Mercer & S. Hodgkinson (Eds.) Exploring talk in schools (pp. 55–71). Sage. Mercer, N., Wegerif, R., & Dawes, L. (1999). Children's talk and the development of reasoning in the classroom. British Educational Research Journal 25(1), 95–111. Twiner, A. (2011). Sociocultural understandings of technology-mediated educational practices: Improvable objects and meaning-making trajectories in the ICT-literate classroom. PhD thesis, the Open University, UK. Twiner, A. (2025). Exploratory talk and conversational ground rules. In H. de Boer & D. Merklinger (Eds.) Dialog als interaktive Praxis: Grundschüler*innen im kollektiven Fachgespräch (pp. 53–68). VS-Springer.

Even though teachers and students are jointly involved in creating dialogic classroom talk, it is the teachers' conversational behavior that determines whether a dialogic culture of conversation can develop in a class. Teachers can support the process of doing dialogue in many ways, but at the same time they are challenged to break with familiar teaching routines and patterns. One major challenge is to refrain from giving immediate feedback. The three-step core structure of classroom communication, consisting of initiation, student response, and feedback (evaluation) (Mehan, 1979), ends with feedback from the teacher, which often contains an evaluation (e.g., good, correct, accurate, not wrong, etc.). The third step in the sequential order of teaching often involves evaluations in which virtually every student comment is assessed as a performance (de Boer, 2025, pp. 20-21). Against this background, the following questions are at the center of this presentation: 1. How can the sequential order of classroom talk be broken down and how can the emergence of dialogic and collective discourse be facilitated? 2. How can dialogic classroom discussions support democratic coexistence in the classroom? The questions are answered on the basis of a sequence-analytical reconstruction of a case study that was developed as part of intervention research. A cooperative teaching-research project at two German univesities investigated how students can interactively generate dialogic classroom discourse by deliberately changing their actions. Data comprises a corpus of 60 conversations. The conversations were cataloged (Deppermann, 2008), interactively-dense sequences were transcribed and examined using interaction analysis. In this presentation we offer a case study from this project illustrating how the classic IRE-sequence-pattern of classroom talk is broken down. The reconstruction of the two conversation patterns revoicing (O'Connor & Michaels, 1996) and conversational pauses (Maroni, 2011) shows how the sequential order of classroom conversations can be broken, resulting not only in more students speaking, but also in them engaging in conversation with each other, balancing uncertainties, and creating a democratic atmosphere.

de Boer, H. (2025). Dialog als interaktive und kollektive Praxis – doing dialogue. In H. de Boer, H. & D. Merklinger (Eds.), Dialog als interaktive Praxis (pp. 17–36). Springer VS. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-48376-0_2 Deppermann, A. (2008). Gespräche analysieren. Eine Einführung (4th ed.). VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-531-91973-7 Maroni, B. (2011). Pauses, gaps and wait time in classroom interaction in primary schools. Journal of Pragmatics, 43(7), 2081–2093. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2010.12.006 Mehan, Hugh (1979): Learning Lessons. Social Organisation in the Classroom. Harvard UP. https://doi.org/10.4159/harvard.9780674420106 O’Connor, C. & Michaels, S. (1996): Shifting participant frameworks: orchestrating thinking practices in group discussion. In D. A. Hicks (Ed.), Discourse, learning, and schooling. (pp. 6 –103). Cambridge University Press.

Classroom talk is central to pedagogical practice and a powerful determinant for students’ learning. Research consistently demonstrates that what students come to understand and value is inseparable from the talk through which teaching and learning happens (Baker & Freebody, 1989). This recognition has contributed to a dialogic turn in educational practice (Edwards-Groves et al., 2014), shifting attention from meaning-making as a product of social interaction to meaning as constituted in and through dialogue (Alexander, 2020; Vygotsky, 1978). From this perspective, meanings are actively produced within the interactional exchanges that organise classroom activity (Edwards-Groves & Davidson, 2017; Mercer, 1996). This paper contributes to this field by examining metatalk - talk about talk - as a generative pedagogical resource in classroom discussions. Adopting an ethnomethodological/conversation-analytic approach, the study treats talk as mutually produced courses-of-action, made visible through the ways teachers and students display their understandings of what they are doing in the here-and-now. How talk for learning is organised, sustained, and oriented to is treated as an empirical question rather than a presupposed instructional feature. The presentation draws on video-recorded data from primary classrooms in an Australian study investigating the development of dialogic pedagogies. Conversation analysis is employed to examine interactions in and around moments where teachers and students explicitly talk about talk - its purposes, norms, and participatory expectations. Findings demonstrate ways metatalk plays a critical role in supporting student engagement, participation, and understanding. Through metatalk, teachers and students develop a shared language for discussing talk-in-interaction, make visible the epistemic and interpersonal work of dialogue, and explicate the shared responsibility for sustaining productive discussion. Explicit attention to metatalk is shown to enable students to consciously steer, support, and evaluate dialogic exchanges, strengthening their agency and collective meaning-making. Metatalk is reconceptualised as more than managerial or procedural regulation of classroom interactions; instead, analysis shows how it operates as a deliberate reflexive pedagogical practice through which participants jointly construct a locally understood dialogic sensibility. Importantly, metatalk emerges not as optional in dialogic pedagogies, but as a primordial condition for it. By foregrounding the epistemological, linguistic, and relational dimensions of metatalk, this presentation addresses a notable gap in research on dialogic practices in primary classrooms. Results advance understandings of metatalk as a high-leverage pedagogical resource for learning and participation, and argues for its deliberate cultivation as central to the design and enactment of classroom dialogues with implications for teacher education and pedagogical design.

Alexander, R. (2020). A dialogic teaching companion. Routledge. Baker, C., & Freebody, P. (1989). Talk around text: constructions of texual and teacher authority in classroom discourse. In S. de Castell, A. Luke & C. Luke (Eds.), Language, Authority and Criticism: Readings on the School Textbook (pp. 263–283). Falmer Press. Edwards-Groves, C., Anstey, M., & Bull, G. (2014). Classroom talk: Understanding dialogue, pedagogy and practice. Primary English Teaching Association Australia. Edwards-Groves, C., & Davidson, C. (2017). Becoming a meaning maker: Talk and interaction in the dialogic classroom. Primary English Teaching Association Australia. Mercer, N. (1996). The quality of talk in children’s collaborative activity in the classroom. Learning and Instruction, 6(4), 359–377. Skidmore, D., & Murakami, K. (2016). Dialogic pedagogy: The importance of dialogue in teaching and learning. Multilingual Matters. Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes. Harvard University Press.